Decision Points

The “submarine” (waterboarding) is an old form of torture utilized in the Middle Ages, which consists of tying up the victim and putting his head in a tank of water or urine until he almost drowns — a torture that George W. Bush now admits having authorized against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In his memoirs, Bush has justified the application of this “interrogation technique” on the grounds that it helped to prevent terrorist attacks in London and the United States. This is not the first time that an American president has evoked the “exceptional case” doctrine — or to put it more bluntly, the doctrine of the double standard, to justify acts that if carried out by other governments would be considered crimes against humanity. During World War II, for example, “special measures” were decreed to remove the population of residents of Japanese origin in the western United States and confine them in “military exclusion zones” — or concentration camps, if we avoid resorting to euphemisms. The law was signed by President Roosevelt on March 21, 1942, following which date tens of thousands of innocent civilians were deported, in the manner of the SS, to concentration camps in Washington, Idaho and California.

And when between standing ovations and applause Bush declared that, “The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because they’re equally as guilty of murder,” he was obviously not referring to terrorists who benefit from the sympathy and unconditional protection of his government, such as the Cuban Luis Posada Carriles, a former agent of the CIA now living in Miami who is accused of having blown up a Cuban airplane with 73 passengers on board and who also admits to having been responsible for bomb attacks against various hotels in Havana in 1997.

Bush’s confessions won’t surprise anyone, coming as they do from a cynic who thought he could evade the Geneva Convention by using the semantic artifice “enemy combatants” to categorize prisoners held for an indefinite period of time, without right of trial, in “beautiful, sunny Guantanamo Bay,” as Donald Rumsfeld once referred to this fearful prison. There can be no doubt that the former president will be remembered, not only for his theological defense of torture and for having destroyed a country under fabricated pretenses, but also for his contributions to Human Rights law, such as his innovation of “torture light” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” that, albeit “robust,” don’t leave any permanent damage. Neither will the world forget his example with respect to life, as exemplified by his signature while governor of Texas on more than one-third of the execution orders in the history of the state.

There is only a remote probability that someday Bush, along with Rumsfeld and his henchmen, will be put on trial for war crimes. Perhaps it may then serve as some consolation to reflect that at least in Britain, seven former detainees of that “idyllic” prison (Guantanamo) and other prisons in Pakistan will receive millions in compensation from the British government after having won their case, claiming complicity of British secret services in the tortures to which they were subjected. One of them will receive a million pounds — an amount, however, which appears derisory in comparison with the likely profits to be generated by the 1.8 million copies of “Decision Points,” the autobiography of this former president, the scourge of democracy.

It would be worthwhile to remind this champion of “family values” that many of the hygienic interrogation techniques employed in his crusade against terrorism — such as the practice of bathing prisoners in human excrement, used in Abu Ghraib — were also routinely employed by the Nazis with the aim of psychologically and morally destroying their prisoners in the extermination camps. In both the Iraqi and Guantanamo prisons, psychological and moral annihilation was carried out in the same manner as in the German concentration camps: by means of terror, deprivation and humiliation.

In Buchenwald, for example, psychological destruction began when the new arrival discovered that there was no toilet paper to be found anywhere. Sooner or later all of them began to suffer from digestive problems and dysentery; urine and feces poured down the prisoners’ legs, and during the night involuntary discharges filtered through the planks of the upper bunks and fell on the faces of those sleeping underneath and, mixed with pus and urine, formed a pestilent and slippery slime on the barracks’ floor. Within weeks, the condemned had become “putrefying corpses moving on two legs,” and “stinking repulsive skeletons who died in their own excrement.”

It’s difficult to know whether Bush’s candid confessions are the product of his limited intelligence or of the unbounded cynicism of an individual who knows that he is above the law. “Decision Points” will no doubt occupy a distinguished place in the annals of infamy, a book to which pictures of the Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib smeared from head to foot with human excrement will have to be attached, followed by photos of those who premeditated this barbarity in their luxurious offices in Washington.

In a civilized society it is intolerable that respect for laws should coexist along with a total impunity for terrorists and torturers. Bush’s memoirs confirm once again the prophetic maxim of George Orwell that the language of politics consists “largely [in] the defense of the indefensible … [in] euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”