Bush Blames Britain For His Torture Lust

Posted on February 15, 2008
Filed Under Politics |

First there was the Old Testament and then came the New Testament. The first was about smiting with swords and being exceeding wroth and killing everyone in sight. The second one was about peace and forgiveness and salvation through faith.

George Bush and Tony Blair were each pretty hot on the Bible, or so it appeared, perhaps to the degree that they thought that God was whispering in their ears when they committed their nations to what many, if not most, of the people of Britain and America regarded as illegal wars and military atrocities.

The problem is, to which Testament do they viscerally attach themselves?

Here is a clue from The Telegraph, referring to Bush’s inability to speak intelligently or use the English language to communicate anything resembling a coherent idea:

What has tended to fascinate comics as much as the man in the street is the degree to which Bush’s remarks are intentionally dumb - whether the master-plan is one of deliberate obfuscation. “George Bush can speak perfectly well,” says US comic Patton Oswalt, “just not when he’s being compassionate or concerned about human beings. That’s when he stutters and says stuff like, ‘Hey, it’s hard to put food on your family.’ But you know when he gets really downright poetic and articulate and focused is when he’s talking about war and death and murder and retribution. All of a sudden he’s Dylan Thomas.”

So, it would seem that Bush is one of the Old Testament style psychopaths, hell-bent on plagues and retribution, charred flesh, genocide, mayhem, hellfire and brimstone. Tony Blair may have looked like the trainee vicar, but he was not just going along for the ride. He may be stupid, but not that stupid.

In a BBC interview with Matt Frei, George Bush claims that British people will be grateful that America has become the world’s Torturer in Chief:

Frei: But, given Guantanamo Bay, given also Abu Ghraib, given renditions, does this not send the wrong signal to the world?

Mr Bush: It should send a signal that America is going to respect law. But, it’s gonna take actions necessary to protect ourselves and find information that may protect others. Unless, of course, people say, “Well, there’s no threat. They’re just making up the threat. These people aren’t problematic.” But, I don’t see how you can say that in Great Britain after people came and, you know, blew up bombs in subways. I suspect the families of those victims are - understand the nature of killers. And, so, what people gotta understand is that we’ll make decisions based upon law. We’re a nation of law. Take Guantanamo.

Is that the same Guantanamo which contravenes international laws and where prisoners have been tortured?

Frei: The Senate yesterday passed a bill outlawing water-boarding. You, I believe, have said that you will veto that bill.

Mr Bush: That’s not -

Frei: Does that not send the wrong signal…

Mr Bush: No, look… that’s not the reason I’m vetoing the bill. The reason I’m vetoing the bill - first of all, we have said that whatever we do… will be legal. Secondly, they are imposing a set of standards on our intelligence communities in terms of interrogating prisoners that our people will think will be ineffective. And, you know, to the critics, I ask them this: when we, within the law, interrogate and get information that protects ourselves and possibly others in other nations to prevent attacks, which attack would they have hoped that we wouldn’t have prevented? And so, the United States will act within the law. We’ll make sure professionals have the tools necessary to do their job within the law.

The ‘professionals’ to whom America contracted out their torturing had all the tools a torturer could possibly desire. It was, in a way, torturers’ heaven.

As far as the legality of all this goes, Bush may be on shakier ground. Waterboarding may sound like a lot of fun, something like waterskiing or surfboarding, something you would do on a fun, exotic holiday; but it is actually the process of repeatedly almost drowning the torturee, to the point where they can easily be actually killed.

According to The Guardian:

But Bush was undercut by a senior official in his administration who admitted yesterday, for the first time, that waterboarding is illegal. Stephen Bradbury, head of the justice department’s office of legal counsel, giving evidence to a congressional committee, said: “Let me be clear, though: There has been no determination by the justice department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law.”

Still, when you make a pact with the devil, perhaps you cannot later pick and choose which bits you like and dislike.

We went to war with Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction which it could deploy within 45 minutes and because it supported and gave succour to Al-Qaeda.

The fact that neither of these things was true can hardly now be used to say that the war was illegal and wrong. Nothing should be allowed to undermine the War on Terror.

Like torture: if it is a bad thing, why would Britain and America support it?

Note: Where the word torture has been used in this article, it may be used interchangeably with the equivalent American euphemism “enhanced interrogation technique”.

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