In My View

USA would not change

For the past fortnight or so, a debate is raging in the USA. It has been dubbed ceremoniously by the American media as the debate about “who we (the Americans) are.” This is a long pending process of exculpation for the “crimes committed against humanity” by the George W Bush administration in the name of ‘war on terror.’

On 16 April the new Barack Obama administration decided to make public the American Justice department memoranda that created the whole, supposedly, legal architecture for the practices indulged in places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Apparently, President Obama took the decision to release those memos after a heartrending meeting at the White House.

It can be argued that more than constitutionalism or heightened moral resolves, Obama’s decision was guided by the memory of the leak of the Pentagon Papers in the late 1960s that opened up the whole can of worms of the US’s military actions in Vietnam. In other words, if Obama would not have made public those memos, they could have come back to bite him if leaked at a later date.

Anyway, the release of the memos have highlighted in the blighted consciousness of the American public how much inhuman and immoral their rulers can be. And all this was in the garb of legality

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But curiously Obama has also assured the American elite in the same breath that there would not be any investigation because he would not like to be diverted from his ‘agenda.’ American media has interpreted that as a belief that the examination of the actions of the previous government would rent the bodipolitik of the USA with such divisiveness that it would be back to the days of post-Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the point is that the US did not learn a lesson even after the Vietnam War. It repeated the same mistakes over and over again, while the world had to bear the brunt of its actions. So it can be safely argued that the US would not change and does not want to change.

Read about some of the actions that were ‘legally’ abetted by the Bush administration’s Justice department team. Washington Post quoted from one of the memos, “"A detainee may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question."

“Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for cooperation,” prescribed another memo. The list goes on.

These are the techniques that the US, indeed the West had been crowing against for decades. They have stood on judgment on other countries, as the self-appointed moral guardians of the world, and have sought to isolate one country or the other on account of human rights violations. And this is their real face, now exposed.

After apartheid was ended in South Africa and a black-led government came to power, the pro-West South African elite alongwith the progressive elements of the Western elite had prescribed as a process of healing from the painful years of white supremacy, a Truth Commission. The formula was later tried in Cambodia and East Timor.

Now is the time when the world should demand a Truth Commission from the Americans to let heal the wounds of US bestiality. Obama has abdicated his responsibility to the global opinion. The international community – if it is not another name of that group of people who owe their allegiance to the US elite in the garb of global citizenship – should rise up as one and demand that ‘let truth prevail.’

Or otherwise, some concerned citizen of the world should stand up and go to the courts of north Europe and file a case against Bush and Co with the same alacrity that is shown in hauling up second or third world dictators.

Of course, there too Obama has created a caveat. He has reassured the CIA officials who could be thus indicted that they would be provided full legal assistance, in the eventuality of such a fate. Not only that, Obama has told them that were they to lose money in the process, the US government would indemnify. No word there, by the way, of any way to compensate the victims or their families, of the treatment of those CIA officers.

Imagine George W Bush with a number pasted on his chest facing a photographer’s camera. Or even a disshevelled George W Bush, fresh out of bed, being examined in his orifices for any hidden cyanide pill, being photographed at that instant like Saddam Hussein had to undergo. That would not happen either. For, Obama has ensured that the people who play the game of global dominance should be immune from the impact of their actions. And he has ensured that the US would not change.