The Torture Debate: The Simple Truth of the Imperial Matter
the current torture debate led by liberals like keith olbermann on msnbc is currently
missing the critical political and legal point: the usa has been engaged in a global project
of imperialism for many decades now.
we have been promoting torture through the cia and the pentagon throughout this time
of global expansion, as has been thoroughly documented in declassified government
documents, as well as by human rights organizations from amnesty international to
human rights watch. we created, funded, trained, and advised death squads in el salvador
and guatemala during the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
the "el salvador solution" was rummy's plan for iraq after the so called liberation of its
people failed to be received in such terms by the iraqis themselves.
not surprisingly, this Rummy moment of imperial honesty in all its brutal bluntness was
a rarity soon buried as another one of those terribly inconvenient facts of truth telling
about the real strategy of the americans inside iraq. such is the nature of conventional
wisdom: all inconvenient facts must by rigorously ignored to preserve and protect the
preferred official narrative.
the only difference between the dirty wars before 9-11 and the dirty wars after 9-11 was
the american government's efforts to make these dirty wars completely open and legal.
prior to 9-11 pentagon intellectuals and their civilian neoconservative allies openly wrote
published papers and gave talks at conferences bemoaning the difficulty of carrying out
such dirty wars where torture was a part of the overall strategy of "counter-terrorism"
because the american people and the "liberal media" were not willing to accept such
fascist militarism.
but after 9-11, well, fascism was liberty, and democracy became empire. or so they
dreamed.
those who defend empire--and therefore one or another form of neocolonialism-- cannot
claim to promote the cause of democracy because democracy begins with local and not foreign rule. an empire's primary export is state terrorism and authoritarianism, grounded in
the foreign policy elite consensus and will to dominate, or as the Pentagon intellectuals conceptualize it: "full spectrum dominance."
an empire is about imposing one's civilizational project on other peoples and nations, and the inevitable reliance of the imperial power on political violence (global security) as a strategy and the militarization of the target country (authoritarian governance) as a core tactic is always rationalized through racist appeals, direct or indirect, to the civilizational progress of the imperial world order and the liberation of the occupied nations.
conservative realism, which is the dominant tendency in american foreign policy since the
founding of the republic, is based upon the principle that the usa is an expansionist nation,
an empire in essence.
not surprisingly, president obama has embraced conservative realism. therefore, as part of the imperial presidency which promotes and defends american empire, he must, at the end of the
day, defend one or another form of torture as a fundamental tactic of american foreign
policy strategy.
june 2009
