Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Disappearing up our own ass

There are, seriously, there are times when I fucking despair for my country:
"We have so contorted ourselves that earlier this month a military judge ruled that the man whose real-life torture is described in the movie, Mohammed's nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, will not be allowed to describe his torture at trial. The methods used to extract information from captives is a state secret, the judge said, as are the victim's recollections of it."
So not only are these despicable acts so critical to the very survival of our Republic that they may not be revealed to We, the People, the putative sovereigns of that Republic but the very memory of being tortured by those acts is no longer the property of the victim of our crimes but of the state, our state, which tortured him.

I cannot fathom how to describe the Kafka-like quality of this nonsense. But if there is any sort of justice other than vae victus we will surely see this come back upon us in ways that we cannot but rue.

1 comment:

Lisa said...

Yes -- Kafkaesque. We are living in times fulfilling literary dystopian prophesy, no?