British Conservative says Bush, stay out of Europe

This video from the USA is called Bush: Torture is Good for the USA.

From a prominent British Conservative politician, in a Conservative daily paper:

Boris Johnson tells George Bush stay away from Britain

Not only would George Bush face anti-war riots if he comes to Europe, says Mayor of London Boris Johnson, he could be arrested for torture policies when he was president.

By Boris Johnson

Daily Telegraph

25 November 2010

It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution.

As book tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every European capital would be brought to a standstill, as book-signings turned into anti-war riots.

The real trouble — from the Bush point of view — is that he might never see Texas again.

One moment he might be holding forth to a great perspiring tent at Hay-on-Wye. The next moment, click, some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary could walk on stage, place some handcuffs on the former leader of the Free World, and take him away to be charged.

Of course, we are told this scenario is unlikely. Dubya is the former leader of a friendly power, with whom this country is determined to have good relations.

But that is what torture-authorising Augusto Pinochet thought. And unlike Pinochet, Mr Bush is making no bones about what he has done.

“Damn right”

Unless the 43rd president of the United States has been grievously misrepresented, he has admitted to authorising and sponsoring the use of torture. Asked whether he approved of “waterboarding” in three specific cases, he told his interviewer that “damn right” he did, and that this practice had saved lives in America and Britain.

It is hard to overstate the enormity of this admission. “Waterboarding” is a disgusting practice by which the victim is deliberately made to think that he is drowning.

It is not some cunning new psych-ops technique conceived by the CIA. It has been used in the dungeons of dictators for centuries. It is not compatible either with the US constitution or the UN convention against torture.

It is deemed to be torture in this country, and above all there is no evidence whatever that it has ever succeeded in doing what Mr Bush claimed. It does not work. It does not produce much valuable information — and therefore it does not save lives.

Of course we are all tempted, from time to time, by the utilitarian argument. We might become reluctant supporters of “extreme interrogation techniques” if we could really persuade ourselves that half an hour of waterboarding could really save a hundred lives — or indeed a single life.

In reality, no such calculus is possible. When people are tortured, they will generally say anything to bring the agony to an end — which is why any such evidence is inadmissible in court. In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication.

It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”. The lawyers in question were Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his deputy, John Yoo, and after a good deal of political cattle-prodding from Rumsfeld et al, they produced a totally barmy attempt to redefine torture so as to allow waterboarding.

Pain was only torture, they determined, when it was “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death”. If that is right, it would seem that most of the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition would be acceptable to the American government.

You could beat the soles of someone’s feet; you could pour molten candle wax on their extremities; you could even pull their finger nails out without infringing those conditions. How is some tired and frightened American officer supposed to make head or tail of this sophistry, late at night in some bleak Iraqi jail? How is he supposed to calibrate the pain that comes from an organ failure or death?

It is no wonder, with orders like that coming from the top, that the troopers misbehaved so tragically in Abu Ghraib. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding their suspects and putting hoods over their heads. They failed to see any moral difference between waterboarding them and terrifying them with alsatian dogs or attaching electrodes to their genitals.

They failed to see any moral difference, that is, because there isn’t any moral difference. That is the real disaster of the waterboarding policy — that we are left with the impression that the entire US military are skidding their heels on the slippery slope towards barbarism. …

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way.

Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty“. Damn right.

Boris Johnson: ‘eel-like’ Tony Blair will avoid being imprisoned over Iraq war. London mayor expresses sympathy with those who want former PM locked up and says Chilcot report should be published now: here.

Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes – not just judged by history. Boris Johnson is right, Blair is ‘eel-like’ – but if the Chilcot inquiry is published soon, he might not wriggle off the hook: here.

A classified document obtained by SPIEGEL shows notes from a meeting between a top German diplomat and Condoleezza Rice just weeks before the Iraq invasion. It indicates steps by the German government to prevent the war and undermines claims in George W. Bush’s memoir that Gerhard Schröder indicated he would support the president should the US go to war: here.

Appeals Court backs immunity for Bush administration torture policy: here.

All Guantanamo Prisoners Were Subjected to “Pharmacological Waterboarding”: here.

Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout: “Military officials were instructed not to publicly discuss a decision made in January 2002 to presumptively treat all Guantanamo detainees with a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug that has been directly linked to suicide, hallucinations, seizures and other severe neuropsychological side effects, according to a retired Navy captain who signed the policy directive”: here.

Ten years since Bush v. Gore: The stolen election of 2000: here.

Eric Lipton, The New York Times News Service: “The Bush White House, particularly before the 2006 midterm elections, routinely violated a federal law that prohibits use of federal tax dollars to pay for political activities by creating a ‘political boiler room’ that coordinated Republican campaign activities nationwide, a report issued Monday by an independent federal agency concludes”: here.

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• Damn right, George Bush should face criminal proceedings for waterboarding | Katherine Gallagher (guardian.co.uk)
• Complaint Filed With U.N. Against Canada For Failing To Prosecute George W. Bush For Torture (eurasiareview.com)
• | Torture Survivors Ask UN: What’s the Point of Having Laws Against Torture if They Don’t Apply to the Powerful? (truthaholics.wordpress.com)