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TAKE YOUR TORTURE AND GO, GEORGE
originally published in The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Friday, Sept. 22,
2006
republished by permission of the author
George Bush
43, Commander-in-Chief, Decider, Your Royal Highness, however you’d like
to be addressed….
For God’s sake, take your torture program and go. Take your secret
prisons, your attack dogs, your electrodes, your water boards, your
feeding tubes, your ceiling restraints, your whipping wires, your
excruciating music, your sleep deprivation, your hobbles and cuffs. Take
all such instruments and go. They’re making things much worse, as I will
show.
I saw you on CNN, Sept. 15, and you said that unless Congress
“clarifies” Article 3 of the Geneva Accords, “the program is not going
forward.” You sounded like a spoilt child threatening to take his ball
and go home. But you weren’t talking about a little ball, you were
talking about torture, though you wouldn’t call it that.
So, if you’re that oblivious to how the majority of us feel about
torture and the Geneva Accords, then please, maybe it’s time you took
your “program” and went home to Texas. Heaven curse the day you ever
decided to leave there.
As Colin Powell suggested in his recent letter to John McCain, your
undermining of the Geneva Accords threatens to take away whatever moral
high ground our nation has attained. It’s demoralizing our troops and
further dividing the country.
Worse yet, it’s ineffective. Tell me what your “program” has done for
us? You claim it shut down another attack on the homeland. Can you
provide a shred of hard evidence? I can name a dozen things you got
precisely wrong—and in a very loud and petulant voice—leading up to the
war in Iraq.
One of them is especially pertinent, because it was based on torture.
Over and over you suggested Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in
cahoots, and in February of 2003, you sent Powell over to the UN to make
that claim to the world. Turns out the information he cited was based on
lies told by a man undergoing torture.
I can show you where Newsweek, the New York Times, the New Yorker and
others have documented that Powell unwittingly based his claim on lies
told by one Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.
Al-Libi, a man with serious mental problems, told his interrogators in
Egypt—where he’d been sent by the CIA for torture--that Saddam Hussein
was teaching al-Qaeda how to make chemical and biological weapons.
Powell didn’t refer to al-Libi by name, rather he called him “a senior
terrorist operative,” according to the New Yorker. Later, al-Libi
recanted and said he’d made such false statements in order to end the
torture. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. It’s likely that more
than 100,000 people have died as a result of that bad information.
That’s how torture works. Bad information begets bad action. Ask Maher
Arar, an innocent Canadian engineer who was mistakenly put on a watch
list in Canada. Snagged at a U.S. airport in 2002, our government flew
Arar to Syria, in secrecy, and against his protests. There he was beaten
with cables and forced to live in a tiny underground grave, as he called
it, unable to communicate with the family he’d left behind. He was
released without charges one year later thanks to pressure from the
Canadian government.
So yes, George, Your Highness, please, take your torture and go. It
isn’t working. While you’re at it, take your signing statements and all
the cute titles for programs that mean the opposite of what you name
them, and give us back our Constitution and our country.
Try not to nuke anybody on your way out, as Seymour Hersh and several
other reporters believe you’re itching to do. Just take your
phosphorous, your depleted uranium, your cluster bombs, your secret labs
and everything else you’ve unleashed contrary to international law, and
go away. If not now, then soon. At least say you’ll go quietly come 2009
and not try slipping back into power, as some suggest you’ll do, heaven
help us, through one of the loopholes you’ve blasted in the
Constitution.
Try to understand that, while some of us who loudly complain against you
don’t hate you, as our critics charge, we’re heartsick and angry at what
you’re doing to our country, its reputation, its once-generous soul, its
capacity for optimism, joy, empathy and rational debate. We’re heartsick
at what you’re doing to our beautiful blue-green world. So please, take
your talking points, your Karl Rove, your Condoleezza Rice, your hunting
buddy Dick Cheney, your Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and secretary
of offense Donald Rumsfeld. Take all the wolves you placed in charge of
all the henhouses—at Treasury, Interior, FCC, Education, Labor, FDA,
NRC. And then please let someone, anyone—maybe your father—take you by
the hand and lead you away, to a very safe place.
Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist and the founding editor and
publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary
writing. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities
Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm
Law Journalism Prize. He is finishing a novel, “Red State Blues,” set in
his native Tennessee and Iraq. His book of selected journalism, “Heroes,
Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People” by Don Williams, is
now available for ordering. For more information, visit the NMW website
at
www.NewMillenniumWritings.com.
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