http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/062404A.shtmlTorture: Bush Reaps What Kennedy Sowed
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 24 June 2004
New photos of American soldiers raping and killing Iraqis will likely emerge in the coming days, as Secretary Rumsfeld obliquely warned us weeks ago. Far more graphic then any images we have yet seen, they will again drag Team Bush through the mud, further mocking their claims to uphold human rights and mucking up their celebration of "Iraqi sovereignty."
Taking the scandal beyond coercive interrogation, the new horror show will make real the brutality that war brings out, especially against men and women who look, dress, talk, eat, and worship in ways that seem so foreign. In young soldiers from Kansas and West Virginia, we will see the same contempt that European conquerors showed in their colonial flings, even as they preached the Word of God or the Values of Western Civilization. In jargon of an electronic age, we will hear the blood-curdling echoes of earlier American heroes wresting control of an entire continent from those who lived there before, not to mention those pumped-up imperial forays across the Pacific and into Latin America.
Remember Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden, the high-minded phrases that hid the old down-and-dirty? War on Terror, Democracy (of an export kind), and the New American Century follow in the same tradition, celebrated or despised depending on which side of the boot one sees and who ends up with the oil. Only now, most of the world - and growing numbers of Americans - want to shed the whole bloody business.
Which brings us back to those coercive interrogation techniques. Call them stress and duress, torture-lite, or just plain torture, they remain central to America's colonial adventures from Vietnam to Iraq.
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