Closing
The Gap Between
Torturer And Victim
By
John Pilger
16
March, 2007
Johnpilger.com
In
Andrew Cockburn’s new
book, Rumsfeld, the gap between rampant power and its faraway
victims is closed. Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence until last
year and a designer of the Iraq bloodbath, is revealed as personally
directing from his office in the Pentagon the torture of fellow human
beings, exploiting “individual phobias, such as fear of dogs,
to induce stress” and use of “a wet towel and dripping water
to induce the misperception of suffocation”. Cockburn’s
documented evidence shows that other Bush mafiosi, such as Paul Wolfowitz,
now president of the World Bank, “had already agreed that Rumsfeld
should approve all but
the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction”.
In Washington, I asked Ray
McGovern, formerly a senior CIA officer, what he made of Norman Mailer’s
remark that America had entered a pre-fascist state. “I hope he’s
right,” he replied, “because there are others saying we
are already in a fascist mode. When you see who is controlling the means
of production here, when you see who is controlling the newspapers and
periodicals, and the TV stations, from which most Americans take their
news, and when you see how the so-called war on terror is being conducted,
you begin to understand where we are headed ... It’s quite something
that the nuclear threat today should be seen first and foremost as coming
from the United States of America and Great Britain.”
McGovern was the author of
the president’s daily CIA intelligence brief. I interviewed him
more than three years ago, and his prescient words are as striking today
as Cockburn’s revelation of Rumsfeld’s secret life is illuminating.
His description of fascism within a nominally free society recalls George
Orwell’s warning that totalitarianism does not require a totalitarian
state.
The lies that have caused
this extremely dangerous time are understood and rejected by the majority
of humanity. This was illustrated vividly on 15-16 February 2003 when
some 30 million people took to the streets of cities around the world,
including the greatest demonstration in British history. It was illustrated
again the other day in Latin America, which George W Bush on tour sought
to reclaim for America’s lost “backyard”. “The
distinguished visitor,” noted one commentator in Caracas, “was
received with fear and loathing.”
There are many connections
in Latin America to the suffering in the Middle East. The crushing of
popular, reformist governments by the US and the setting up of torture
regimes, from Guatemala to Chile, have echoes from Iran to Afghanistan.
The current attacks on the Chávez government in Venezuela by
the media, which Ray McGovern describes as being “domesticated
by their wish to serve”, are essential in disclaiming the right
of the poor to find another way.
Elected last December with
a record landslide of votes cast by three-quarters of the eligible population
– his 11th major election victory – Hugo Chávez expresses
the kind of genuine exuberant democracy long ago abandoned in Britain,
where the political class offers instead the arthritic pirouetting of
Tony Blair, a criminal, and treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of
imperial adventures fought by 18-year-old soldiers who, on their return
home, are so ill treated that there is no one to change their colostomy
bag.
Chávez, having all
but got rid of the deadly IMF from Latin America, dares to use the wealth
from Venezuela’s oil to unite the Latin peoples and to expel a
foreign economic system that calls itself liberal and is the source
of historic suffering. He is supported by governments and by millions
across South America from whom he derives his mandate.
You would not know this on
either side of the Atlantic unless you studied carefully. The propaganda
that converts a lively, open democracy to an “authoritarian”
dictatorship is written on the rusted crosses of Salvador Allende’s
comrades, of whom the same was said. It is disseminated by the embittered
effete whose liberal hero was Blair, until he made an embarrassing mess,
and who now claim the respectability of “the left” in order
to disguise their mentoring by the likes of Wolfowitz, their promotion
of Dick Cheney’s ludicrous “world Islamic empire”
and, above all, their passion for wars whose spilt blood is never theirs.
“Rumsfeld:
his rise, fall and catastrophic legacy ” by Andrew
Cockburn is published in the United States by Scribner
This article was first published
in the New Statesman