THE New York Times is serialising George W. Bush's memoirs and the much hated former president openly confirmed he authorised the use of water boarding to extract information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 9/11 attack.

In the book, Bush writes: "Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States."

So we have George W. Bush justifying his express authorisation for torture on the basis that the torture saved lives and prevented catastrophes, and the evidence to that is his word of course.

The White House recently released torture memos and the declassification elicited shock, indignation and utter surprise across the world.

The testimony in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Cheney-Rumsfeld desperation to find nonexistent links between Iraq and al-Qaeda is particularly disgusting, at least to those who place some value on the lives of those that were subsequently killed by the invasion of Baghdad that followed.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld simply ordered the concocting of these links from thin air so they could have justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Now the world is meant to just laugh it off like that.

Former army psychiatrist, Major Charles Burney was before the committee and he testified that "a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results".

These measures were all about torture, he revealed.

Cheney and Rumsfeld demanded that interrogators use harsh methods on detainees so as to contrive evidence for cooperation between al-Qaeda and the late Iraq strongman, Saddam Hussein's regime.

Said Burney, "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder."

The criminality of the Bush administration is legendary of course, and it did not even need an enquiry to know that Guantanamo was a torture base.

The mere fact that prisoners were sent where they would be beyond the reach of the law is criminal enough to make the story such a clear line.

Guantanamo itself is a place Washington is using in violation of the treaty that was forced on Cuba at gunpoint.

Torture is a well documented tradition of the US and it is a routine practice from the very early days of the conquest over Amerindians, and then beyond, as George Washington seeded what he then called "the infant empire". The Philippines, Haiti, Grenada, Chile and many other places bear testimony to the brutal nature of US torture.

Torture is about the least of the numerous crimes of aggression, subversion, terror and economic strangulation that so badly litter US history.

Bush's malfeasance is deplorable to many, not least among right wing critics who never cease to amaze by their offending rhetoric that says the United States used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and that before George W. Bush, no American leader had ever "so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for". This view is absolutely nonsensical when one looks at US history — a history littered with barbaric brutalities and genocidal tendencies. The United stands on the foundation of many rivers of blood, oceans of the sweat of captured slaves, countless invasions of sovereign states, and in all reality the empire stands for brute force and genocidal conquest over peaceful nationalities.

The CIA's "torture paradigm" in the last decade was budgeted at about US$1 billion each year, according to Alfred McCoy, a renowned historian. "Truth, Torture and the American Way" by Jennifer Harbury is an incisive book showing the reality of US torture internationally.

When such torture is exposed, it is the tradition of US propagandists to say "the war on terror" has lost its way. We may be flawed but our intentions are always noble. That is the rhetoric.

So the US can export terror by simply farming it out to subsidiaries under US supervision, not carried out by the Americans directly in torture bases set up by their own government.

Alan Nairn is an investigative journalist who has done extensive work on torture and he wrote, "What the Obama (ban on torture) ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."

The argument by Nairn is that Obama only "repositioned" the practice of torture, far from stopping it. Essentially Obama has largely restored torture to the norm, by US tradition standards, and as usual the torture of lesser people by US goons is a matter of indifference to the victims.

Nairn notes that Barrack Obama's ban on torture "doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of ‘armed conflict' which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict.....his is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford and Clinton, which, year by year often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush-Cheney years."

Studies carried out by Ed Herman, as well as those that were carried out by Lars Schoultz in the 80s do show a direct correlation between US aid and egregious violation of human rights, especially in Central America; where the US has funded ruthless dictatorship in the past, the same way they created and propped Saddam Hussein in the Middle East. One can measure the proportions of aid extended to Israel in return for the torture of Arabs in the generality of the Middle East, and that of Palestinians in particular.

The Reagan years were quite brazen and too apparent to warrant any studies. The correlations were just too clear. Reagan simply funded atrocities and war crimes in a very apparent manner. The world must forget his excesses and move on.

This is precisely why Barrack Obama's message is to advise the world to look forward, not backward. This is a very convenient doctrine for those who wield the bludgeon. Those that bear the scars of the bludgeon will always see the world differently, and this really annoys Western elites. They want Western crimes obliterated from history books.

Those of us who keep remembering slavery, apartheid, colonisation and the injustice of imperialism are a great annoyance to people like Obama. Even George W. Bush cannot stand those who keep looking at his recent past. After being reminded about how people in England really hate him, Bush had this to say, "It doesn't matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn't matter anymore. And frankly, at times, it didn't matter then."

In the Western tradition past sins are only matters of concern when the targeted perpetrators are the official enemies of the West. This is why Nuremburg was so selective in convicting only the criminals from the losing side of the War, sparing without trial all similar perpetrators from the Allied Forces.

When it comes to past sins of the West, we are always reminded to look forward and never backward. This is why the recourse for the 1976 Soweto massacres in South Africa is the sensationalised glorification of Nelson Mandela's extraordinary qualities of "looking forward", totally forgetting the brutal torture of his people in an exceptionally civilised way of "forgetting the past" and "forgiving" the apartheid brutes. Mandela is highly honoured for looking forward and never backward to the death of more than 500 South African blacks caused by this brutal event.

If those kids massacred in Soweto were white victims, or victims of Nazis or Idi Amin's forces, then looking forward was not going to be an option.

Zimbabwe has a national healing organ that has been preaching "looking forward" after the effects of the 2008 political violence that preceded the second round of elections held then, disturbances that do not stand within shouting distance of the atrocities that happen each day in Afghanistan today. Western governments have openly opposed the call for looking forward in Zimbabwe's case, pressing so hard that all perpetrators of the alleged crimes committed during this era "be punished accordingly," and constantly suggesting The Hague as the rightful place to bring down these people. Of course The Hague was made for blacks as the current trend clearly shows.

We have to look forward when we are reminded of the sins of the holy ones, the righteous Westerners, and we always look backward when we are dealing with the sins of the uninitiated and uncivilised peoples of this world – the lesser people with no genealogical links to Western Europe. This is the doctrine of those that hold the imperial bludgeon.

We are told by Western interpreters of international law that the CIA torture paradigm can be defended at law. The defence is that CIA torture keeps primarily to mental torture, not crude physical torture, and the argument is that mental torture is a little more civilised and less effective in turning its victims into pliant vegetables.

So the US elites believe they are not in violation of the 1984 UN Torture Convention, not least because of the four detailed "reservations", on whose strength Bill Clinton managed to get the Convention ratified by Congress. All the "reservations" focused on the word "mental" and it is on this basis that the Abu Ghraib scandal occurred.

Obama has cosmetically changed the Bush approach to matters of international law, reaffirming the US' commitment, but largely reinstating most of Bush's wanton excesses, including the military commissions at Guantanamo.

The argument is that the accused terrorists must be tried in military courts because the US law grants defendants too many rights, and this has become a regular topic on talk radio stations. This intolerant stance of utter contempt for the values that officially define American tradition has been elevated to the level of patriotism.

This is why it must make sense to listen to debates on whether torture has been effective in eliciting information. The assumption is that if it is effective, it is justifiable.

By this very logic, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986, after shooting down his plane that was delivering aid to Reagan's Contra forces; they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the United States, as what happened.

Rather, as Noam Chomsky sarcastically remarked; they should have done it the US way, they should have used the CIA torture paradigm so they could force information out of Hasenfuss about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, and this would have made perfect sense for a small country that was under immense terrorist attacks from a global monstrous super power.

Nicaragua should have ruthlessly tortured all captured terrorists from the US, and if such capturing could be achieved, this would include John Negroponte, then the chief terrorism coordinator for Washington; by that time masquerading as the US ambassador to Honduras, and later appointed "counterterrorism czar", as Chomsky puts it.

If Cuba had been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers and their successors in the terrorism racket, they too would be completely justified for torturing these people ruthlessly, and equally justified would be similar actions by victims of the untold terror activities carried out by Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and of course George W. Bush.

The US terrorist commanders' exploits dwarf those of al-Qaeda like a pea would be dwarfed by a mountain, and it would be perfectly in order for the victims to abduct these US people and torture them endlessly in selected places far away from the reach of the law. That is the logic we get from George W. Bush's memoirs on torture, and from the White House recent release of torture memos.

But terrorism emanating from the Holy City on the Hill is supposed to be benign, even acceptable. Michael Kinsley, once regarded by the imperial system as a spokesperson for "the left", eloquently reprimanded those critics who furiously protested US attacks on the so-called soft targets, in reality civilian targets.

Kinsley explained that US terrorist attacks on civilian targets are justified if they satisfy pragmatic criteria: saying, "sensible policy (has to) meet the test of cost-benefit analysis," and this is an analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end". Of course this is "democracy" as defined and determined by the ever righteous West.

In good faith, the US, the EU and all their Western allies can illegally and ruthlessly strangulate Zimbabwe's economy and by the Kinsley logic; they stand clean and are not culpable for the ruinous and deadly consequences of their actions — not even after collapsing an entire health system and killing thousands of hapless poverty stricken people in the process. What is important is that the West will pour in all this suffering so that at the other end there may be a Tsvangirai led democratic society — the only true democracy Zimbabwe can ever have.

Culpability for the US is only an issue if it is discovered that the torture in question has a cost on American lives. So the torture at Abu Ghraib is blamed by the US interrogator in Iraq, Matthew Alexander (pseudonym) for being "so counterproductive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11."

This was after Alexander's discovery that foreign fighters were coming to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and that these foreign fighters and their local allies were turning to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts in retaliation to US acts of terror.

A former Guantanamo detainee, Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was tortured for four years at the hands of US interrogators before he was discharged to Kuwait; carried out a revenge attack by driving a bomb laden truck into an Iraq military compound, killing himself and 13 soldiers. His lawyer argued that the tragedy was "the direct result of his abusive imprisonment".

The standard pretext for torture is always "war on terror", a doctrine introduced by Ronald Reagan before it was revived and widely promoted by George W. Bush – always supported and reiterated through commentary and analysis.

Staffers at Guantanamo (ex and current) must in reality be blacklisted under the terrorist groups if the word "terrorism" carries any meaning at all. George W. Bush must be featuring on that list alongside his British sidekick, Tony Blair; and this makes perfect sense when one considers that terrorism was a term good enough to defend Apartheid South Africa brutes from "one of the world's more notorious terrorist groups", as determined of Nelson Mandela's ANC by Washington in 1988.

If Botha and his brutal racist cronies were good enough to be considered victims of "terror attacks", surely the brutalised and murdered people of Iraq and Afghanistan deserve a lot better, and their tormentors in chief, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, cannot be allowed the luxury of missing on the numerous lists of terrorists flagged in all travel databases in the West's security systems; unless of course, Westerners are by nature and definition incapable of being terrorists.

We cannot have a situation where we are forced to look backward and punish those who forcibly reclaimed their land in Zimbabwe for what a British judge recently described as "crimes against humanity". If we are meant to forget Vietnam, Grenada, Laos, Chile, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Nicaragua and countless other places where Western terrorism has wrecked havoc, why should we be forced to look back with a view to persecute those who carried out acts of freeing themselves from the legacy of colonial oppression?

We can surely look forward and forget about the white former commercial farmers who used to farm at the expense of blacks in Zimbabwe, the very way Bush thinks the British people who hate him must just move forward and read his memoirs with absolute enjoyment.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome.

It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafawa rova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

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