It is our indignation, not that of the Arab world, that torturers fear. We are the bad guys too

ROBERT FISK
Wednesday 10 December 2014

The Muslim world has been enraged about these crimes for years

Up to the end, they wanted to keep it secret.

And the vicious psychopaths and sadists that ran the CIA’s torture centres “on our behalf” must be protected, even praised by the Bushies for keeping our civilisation safe. Their lies – to us as well as their victims – were all in the cause of freedom, so let’s have no more talk of Muslims standing on broken feet, bubbling through the mouth after 82 rounds of waterboarding or being fed hummus through the rectum.

And the Republicans and Bushies, sniffing how badly they come out of all this – of course the release of these vile tortures is “ideologically motivated”, just as they claim – now respond with an excuse that almost parallels the weapons-of-mass-destruction-al-Qaeda-links-to-Saddam-Niger-tubes tosh we were fed before we embarked on our slaughter in Iraq 11 years ago. In fact, it’s the same old rubbish they churned out before the obscene Abu Ghraib photos were published. “It will significantly endanger Americans around the world,” the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told us.

So we’ve locked up our embassies and put our people on red alert or purple alert or whatever infantile coding suffices to terrorise Americans and their friends, and we’ve concocted the lie – perhaps as poisonous as all the other CIA lies – that the Arab Muslim world will be really, really angry when they learn about the atrocities our chaps committed in the cause of freedom, liberty and the West. That’s what they said about the Abu Ghraib snapshots – these Arab chappies are going to be awfully upset when they see the snapshots of piled human torsos and the guy in the hood strung up with electric wires. And they might be so angry that they might turn violent. Now, it’s the same again with the CIA report.