*Ø* Torturing Mr. Bush
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Should George W. Bush lose his bid for re-election this November, historians will find a major cause in the flood of pornographic photographs that show American soldiers torturing and sexually humiliating naked Iraqis. How will publishers of sanitized schoolbooks ever tell the story to future generations?

Nor will serious historians stop there. How will they deal with those of us who knew, or should have known, the way American forces have used — and taught other nations to use — the same degrading torture techniques at least as far back as President John F. Kennedy? Will our grandchildren and theirs see us as we see "the Good Germans" who callously turned their eyes away from what Hitler did to the Jews?

As bad as the torture was and continues to be in America's global gulag, it is not the Holocaust. But it is bad enough, and the moral dilemma it poses feels painfully similar.

Consider the role — no, the criminal complicity — of President Bush. For a Harvard MBA who usually delegates details, he played a remarkably hands-on role pushing his torture package through Washington's bureaucratic maze. Not only did he know what his underlings planned to do, he told them to do it. His fingerprints show up all over the smoking documents. [Emphasis added. -v]

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