For the United States, the End Justifies the Torture

The argument has been rehashed over and over again, and Dick Cheney — former vice president of the United States, the sinister brain behind the throne of George W. Bush, one of the main instigators of the wars that have consumed the world without any trace of ethics, morals or reason — brings it back to the arena. He bathes in holy water to redeem his sins Machiavellian style: The end justifies the means. Whether it has been said or not, he is the character who separated politics from morality.

“It was a good program. It was a legal program. It was not torture. I would strongly recommend we continue it.” Dick Cheney is talking about the methods employed in the Guantanamo Naval Base detention camp, the territory usurped from Cuba; Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; Bagram prison in Afghanistan; and the CIA’s secret prisons in who-knows-how-many black holes of the civilized world.

Just like that, he utters words of self-forgiveness for the waterboarding, the electric shocks — real or simulated — long hours in extreme positions, beatings, intimidation by vicious dogs, sleep deprivation, isolation and ignorance of the prisoners’ own fates, religious and sexual humiliation…

Why did he make such a claim of responsibility on the Fox News television channel that has served so well in disseminating lies or manipulating extreme conservatism and the Bush regime? Well, because President Barack Obama gave him credit for the confessions obtained through these interrogation techniques in his decision to order a U.S. Navy SEAL team to undertake the special operation that stormed the residence of Osama bin Laden, and killed the head of al-Qaida and other members of his guard and family.

In hopes of seeking public consent for ignominy and barbarism, Mr. Cheney cited other conspirators in the fascist proceedings established in the Bush era, which have obviously made their way into the new administration, because the operation that violated Pakistani sovereignty also carried out an extrajudicial killing, with the added difficulty of having destroyed the main evidence, the corpse of the assassinated.

The former vice president mentioned conversations that he had with José Rodriguez, a senior CIA intelligence officer; Michael Mukasey, attorney general during George W. Bush’s second term in the White House; and Leon Panetta, current director of the CIA, who has not denied the role of enhanced interrogation in the search for Osama bin Laden, the monstrosity, creation and soldier of the Central Intelligence Agency and the opportune figure to create the fears that back the wars for oil and other resources, or for blame and revenge.

Of course, Cheney was not the only one to seek approval. Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, another of the legs of the table on which Bushism was established, acted with the same intentions: “I think it’s clear that those techniques that the CIA used worked. And to have taken them away and ruled them out I think may be a mistake.”

On the CBS program Face the Nation, Rumsfeld also mentioned other members of the gang that were considered at the time to have obtained “a major fraction of all our knowledge about al-Qaida” with these interrogations. He was referring to three former CIA directors: George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden.

Thus, he endorsed his partner in government misdeeds, Cheney, when he specified the ordinariness of the criminal procedure and insisted on its supposed harmlessness: “This is stuff that we’ve done for years with our own military personnel, and to suggest that it’s torture is just wrong … I certainly would advocate it.”

Just as it happens in the final room of death row in U.S. prisons, Obama and his ministerial entourage witnessed the execution, but also violated the proclaimed law. The photos were left behind for history and not the corpus delicti, even if it were guilty of criminal acts.

Vultures still roam the snowy mansion of the imperial capital, and the nest’s warp appears continuous and unbroken.