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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

How mind-bogglingly fucked-up do you have to be to believe this?
Posted by Jill | 7:16 AM

I've long believed that conservatives spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about and fantasizing about the kind of strange sex practices most of us never even consider. Sex and violence are inextricably intertwined in the eyes of these people, which is how an atrocity like Abu Ghraib happens. (Whatever happened to those ghastly additional photos that were supposed to be released, anyway?) From this cellpool comes Rick Santorum's obsession with gay sex and his parallels with bestiality. From this cesspool comes Scooter Libby's fiction involving young girls being raped by bears. And from this cesspool comes the advocacy of "anything goes" torture -- including the crushing of the testicles of children, if deemed necessary:

John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.

It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, "Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the 'war on terror’ than John Yoo."

This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

The audio of this exchange is available online at revcom.us

Yoo argues presidential powers on Constitutional grounds, but where in the Constitution does it say the President can order the torture of children ? As David Cole puts it, "Yoo reasoned that because the Constitution makes the President the 'Commander-in-Chief,’ no law can restrict the actions he may take in pursuit of war. On this reasoning, the President would be entitled by the Constitution to resort to genocide if he wished."

What is the position of the Bush Administration on the torture of children, since one of its most influential legal architects is advocating the President’s right to order the crushing of a child’s testicles?

This fascist logic has nothing to do with "getting information" as Yoo has argued. The legal theory developed by Yoo and a few others and adopted by the Administration has resulted in thousands being abducted from their homes in Afghanistan, Iraq or other parts of the world, mostly at random. People have been raped, electrocuted, nearly drowned and tortured literally to death in U.S.-run torture centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay. And there is much still to come out. What about the secret centers in Europe or the many still-suppressed photos from Abu Ghraib? What can explain this sadistic, indiscriminate, barbaric brutality except a need to instill widespread fear among people all over the world?

It is ironic that just prior to arguing the President's legal right to torture children, John Yoo was defensive about the Bush administration policies, based on his legal memo’s, being equated to those during Nazi Germany.

Yoo said, "If you are trying to draw a moral equivalence between the Nazis and what the United States is trying to do in defending themselves against Al Qauueda and the 9/11 attacks, I fully reject that. Second, if you’re trying to equate the Bush Administration to Nazi officials who committed atrocities in the holocaust, I completely reject that too…I think to equate Nazi Germany to the Bush Administration is irresponsible."


Is it really irresponsible, or is it just a question of degree? The Third Reich is still such a hot button for having elevated authoritarian government, corruption, playing on fear and xenophobia, and of course organized genocide, to a new level. But it is not irresponsible to point out the danger signs when an American Administration seems to be taking its cues from the Nazi playbook.

A torture policy that includes sexual torture of children is by its very definition dehumanizing. And as soon as a society starts to dehumanize, particularly by demonization of "the other" -- in this case, the "other" being Muslims -- it's a very short step from naming the children of insurgents as enemy combatants and torturing them in gulags to mass genocide.

Drawing these parallels isn't an accusation, it's a warning; a tap on the shoulder -- a tap the Administration would do well to heed -- unless they believe the Nazis were right.
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