Shouts from Liberal Street Fighter
Jeralyn Merritt blogs a chilling quote from this piece in the Denver Post, written by civil rights lawyers John Holland and Anna Cayton-Holland:
Four years later, many just want to die. They starve themselves for long periods of time and attempt bloody suicides. The government responds by forcing tubes down their throats. People are trying to kill themselves to get out of custody, because they have no legal recourse. “They won’t let us live, but they won’t let us die,” one of our clients explained.
It’s increasingly unnerving how many aspects of dystopic stories and novels of decades past are coming true, and this passage reminded me immediately of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It opens:
Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw. There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that, once again, AM had duped us, had had its fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.
Gorrister went white. It was almost as though he had seen a voodoo icon, and was afraid of the future. “Oh, God,” he mumbled, and walked away. The three of us followed him after a time, and found him sitting with his back to one of the smaller chittering banks, his head in his hands. Ellen knelt down beside him and stroked his hair. He didn’t move, but his voice came out of his covered face quite clearly. “Why doesn’t it just do us in and get it over with? Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”
America has gone mad, like the sentient computer AM in the story, driven mad by fear or greed or racism or self-loathing or most likely by some ugly witches brew of all those. Insane and acting out these terrible pathologies born from the fears of the Cold War, the techniques developed by the SERE program to survive torture under Communist captivity back-engineered to teach us to DO torture. Digby points out the problem with this sick and scary development:
Can you believe it? It’s not just that torture doesn’t work generally, which it doesn’t. And it’s not just that torture is morally repugnant and stains all who are involved with it. It does. The most amazingly thing about this (Commie) torture regime is that it’s specifically designed to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes. Dear gawd, can they really be so incompetent that they didn’t understand the difference between creating propaganda and gaining intelligence?
Who speaks for these souls? This isn’t a question of whether the detainees are criminals or terrorists or any of that, this is a question of what WE are. As we rush to toss aside the right to habeas corpus, as we shred a legal framework that this nation spent centuries helping build, it is left to the oft-maligned Bar to shout for these human beings. Back to the Denver Post piece:
In representing these prisoners, we have joined a growing volunteer force of outraged attorneys who come from small and large firms across America. The group includes death penalty and amnesty lawyers, plaintiff and defense lawyers, bankruptcy and corporate lawyers. It even includes advocates for retired generals and admirals, all working for free.
Coordinating this effort is the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The goal of all involved is to preserve the most basic components of our Constitution, including the right to be charged with a crime as a condition of being held; the right to have those charges speedily determined; the right to hearings before impartial judges; the right to counsel; the right to confront one’s accusers; the right to have access to all case evidence; the right not to have evidence extracted under torture used against you; and the right to be free from torture under the Geneva Conventions..
This isn’t just a question of what kind of civilization we will be, but rather we will be anything remotely deserving to be called a “civilization”.
They have no mouths, so WE must all scream. For ALL of those held without hope, without justice, trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare without hope of freedom, redemption or rehabilitation. This isn’t true just of these foreign detainees, but increasingly those held in our growing and increasingly brutal Prison/Industrial complex here in America. We have merely made more brutal what we were already practicing here.
Raise your voice.
