George Orwell... meet Franz Kafka

[struggle4progress]

<snip>
Add it all up -- only what's been revealed so far -- and you have a global system of injustice and torture, purposely mounted in the moral and legal darkness, beyond the reach or oversight of anyone but the President, vice-president, secretary of defense and associated officials, meant to extract information (and take revenge), meant as in Kafka's fictional penal colony to write the sentence these men had passed on the bodies of America's captives.

And talk about paper trails! If you need any evidence of the combination of arrogance, incompetence, and plain stupidity of the Bush administration, it now sits unavoidably before our eyes. Didn't they know anything about deniability? Didn't they know that you can get so much done without committing anything to paper? Didn't they know that you can signal what you want from the top without issuing orders, making direct demands, or demanding supporting opinions on paper?

Note two things here: That almost all of the above, this whole little global shop of horrors, is already documented -- quite literally in papers pouring out of the bowels of this administration. These documents are leaking daily from an administration that seems to have split open along many angry rift lines. The British Telegraph this week (6/8/04), writing of the leaking of a legal document on torture to the Wall Street Journal commented, for example:

"The leak appears to be part of an extraordinary civil war in the Pentagon between civilian officials and uniformed officers appalled by what they have described as moves by political appointees to shroud the war on terrorism in an 'environment of legal ambiguity'."
<snip>

It might seem apparent that, having declared yourself at war, the people you thereafter captured might indeed be prisoners of war. But this presented a problem since the rights of POWs were so clearly defined internationally in treaties signed by the U.S. government. So the administration simply redefined those captured in this redefined war as "unlawful combatants" or "illegal combatants." This and other terms used for them came out of a new Devil's dictionary; for once we had defined them thusly, they could then enter our offshore world of imprisonment -- at least in the minds of Bush administration officials – as the sorts of captives to whom a whole new series of definitions could be applied.
<snip>

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5706

[donhakman]

1. The same dilemma regarding prisoner of war status

faced The 3rd Reich when they declared British paratroopers to be terrorists without the rights of a prisoner of war.

As Kafkaesque and Orwellian as this fascist inquisition tainted oil war seems there is a greater genocide far worse than torture and death.
It is so heinous that focusing on torture, rape and murder is a diversion that helps cloak the greater crime.

It is the crime of killing Iraqi children for the next thousands of years. The amount of radioactive waste and depleted uranium that has been spread throughout the country is staggering. One may hear from technocrats that "depleted" uranium is no hazard although they would not want it in their backyard. Nothing is further from the truth. The killing power is spread over centuries and millenia. In a sandy dusty environment the toxins will be uncovered time and again.

Scientists from India calculated that the amount of radiation released in Iraq is about a quarter million times that which was released at Nagasaki. One can measure it in many different ways such as expressing the total weight of the radioactive waste in a number of Chrysler minivans. Between 2,300 and 3,000 at several tons each adds up. IT is clear to see how one fissile bomb is puny in radioactivity compared to all the American Uranium artillery shells and bullets that were used in Iraq.

Even the healthy Iraq children have some genetic damage. When that is passed on and multiplied one will see by the seventh generation an explosion of mutation and death.

Seven generations from now , as W likes to say, we will all be dead, yet all the evil we put in the mud will hatch out and spawn a hideous mutilation of the DNA of a once proud strong people.

Of course the same holds true for us and the radioactive waste neearby that is too expensive to contain and too insidious to handle safely without an eventual accident.

Our toturers earn about $10,000 a month. The Iraq war has burned through 3-5 Billion dollars a month. With this kind of money, we could have cleaned up our nuclear mess and blessed the next seven generations instead of condemning them to masses of torured flesh for hundreds of years to come.

So my friends, torture murder and rape is the least of the crimes against humanity and the world. The bush administration use of DU in Iraq as well as the Clinton military use of DU in Bosnia are slow motion crimes in which everyone concerned (except the soldiers and victims) knew exactly what they were unleashing.

If enough radiation is spread throughout the Muslim world, a Draconian solution to religious and econonomic clashes will be achieved. They will be extinct.


...of course I could be wrong
maybe mutation is a good thing.

Don Hakman
Washington DC.

[tom_paine]

2. Excellent article!