Fwd: [news] kafka, orwell, gonzales

Begin forwarded message:

> Ugly Truths About Guantanamo
>
> By Richard Cohen
> Tuesday, January 4, 2005; Page A15
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45936-2005Jan3?
> language=printer
>
> Somewhere in the U.S. government is the person who came up with the
> idea of
> fusing the wail of an infant with an incessant meow from a cat food
> commercial to torment detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Detainees
> were also
> subjected to popular songs by the likes of Eminem and Rage Against the
> Machine. What Liberace would have done to an observant Muslim, I can
> only
> imagine, but it is a mad genius who realized that ordinary American
> culture
> can, with repeated exposure, be nearly lethal. God help us all.
>
> In George Orwell's novel "1984," it was rats, as I recall, that were
> used
> to torture Winston Smith. It was not that the rats could do real
> physical
> damage; rather it was that Smith was phobic about them – "his greatest
> fear, his worst nightmare" – and so he succumbed, denounced his
> beliefs and
> even his girlfriend, and went back to his pub where he wasted his days
> drinking gin. This was Orwell's future, our present.
>
> The term "Orwellian" is much abused, and back in the actual year 1984 I
> thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th
> century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more
> efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called "the
> lunatic logic of the bureaucracy."
>
> Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction,
> he
> would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush
> administration
> – calling suicidal terrorists "cowards," naming a constriction of
> civil
> liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from
> the word
> "torture." Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was
> amended, it applied only to the pain like that of "organ failure,
> impairment
> of body function, or even death." Anything less, such as, say,
> shackling
> detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner
> pulled out
> tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is –
> or
> was until recently – considered perfectly legal.
>
> The administration's original interpretation of torture was
> promulgated by
> the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House,
> under its
> counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the
> United
> States. Among other things, it produced the abuses of Abu Ghraib
> prison in
> Iraq, which we were assured were an unaccountable exception. My God,
> if only
> higher authorities had known.
>
> Now we all know. The International Committee of the Red Cross has
> complained that some of what has been done at Guantanamo –
> Guantanamo, not
> Abu Ghraib – was "tantamount to torture." The American Civil Liberties
> Union has complained, but that you would expect. So, though, have the
> FBI
> and military lawyers, former and current. Just about across the board,
> the
> Bush administration has raised itself above the law. It pronounced
> itself
> virtuous, but facing a threat so dire, so unique, that Gonzales found
> the
> Geneva Conventions themselves "obsolete." Such legal brilliance does
> not
> long go unrewarded. He has been nominated to become attorney general.
>
> The elevation of Gonzales is supposed to be a singular American
> success
> story. This son of Mexican immigrants bootstrapped his way to Harvard
> Law
> School and from there to Bush's inner circle, first in Austin, then in
> Washington. There he came up with a brilliant definition of torture,
> one so
> legally clever that only the dead could complain and they, of course,
> could
> not. Everyone was off the hook. Is it any wonder the Senate will
> probably
> soon confirm him? By next year, he will undoubtedly receive a cherished
> Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to those who successfully serve
> the
> president but dismally fail the nation. In the audience, unseen but
> nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.
>
> The revelations coming out of Guantanamo are hideous. The ordinary
> abuse of
> prisoners, the madness instilled by gruesome incarcerations, the
> incessant
> lying of the authorities, plus the mock interrogations staged for the
> media,
> in which detainees and their interrogators share milkshakes – all this
> soils us as a nation. It's as if the government is ahistorical,
> unaware of
> how communists and fascists also strained language and ushered the
> world
> into torture chambers made pretty for the occasion. We now keep some
> pretty
> bad company.
>
> The Bush administration has fused Orwell with Kafka in the same way
> someone
> fused the cry of an infant with that of a cat from the Meow Mix
> television
> commercial. The upshot is Gonzales, ticketed maybe for the Supreme
> Court
> because he winked at torture and yessed the president. He's Kafka's
> man,
> Orwell's boy and Bush's pussycat. Know him for his roar.
>
> Meow.
>