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The Yoo Play – Which isn’t about Yoo
”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Without a Doubt, Ron Susking, NYT, Oct. 14, 2004
Emptywheel dissects a Bush statement and finds:
Bush does not say, "torture is illegal, but we do not torture, therefore we are working with the law." He flips the whole question around, as Yoo did. He basically states that anything the executive does to fulfill its obligation to protect the American people is–because it is done in the name of protecting the American people–within the law. The rationale for these activities–protecting the American people–and not the nature of the activities themselves, is what makes them legal, according to Bush.
She is right and one could rewrite the above quote into:
”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own law. And while you’re studying that law — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new laws, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
That’s the situation we are at.
The folks at the judical blog Balkinization are tearing at their hair about Yoo’s tenure status.
As Glenn aptly expresses, that is not the way to go:
As a country, then, our democratic institutions — without much outcry — literally amended the War Crimes Act, retroactively, to declare that those who violated it, those who committed war crimes, would be free from investigation or prosecution. The Abu Ghraib scandal was disclosed in early 2004 and George Bush was re-elected. Accounts of systematic abuse at Guantanamo and elsewhere were known before then as well.
Directing moral outrage uniquely at John Yoo and demanding that he be removed from Berkeley, while highly understandable in one sense, poses the danger that this broader responsibility will be obscured and that real accountability need not take place.
Unfortunately, it is very unlikely that any real accountability will happen. Additionally to the congressional WCA, Bush will give a presidential amnesty to all his aids before he leaves and will not be touched himself by his successor. The people who voted for him will – what?
Bush admitted that he approved the meetings of his principals, chaired by Condi Rice, during which the CIA demonstrated torture techniques and the principals decided on individual combination of these to be administered to this or that Afghan goatherder who was sold for cash by rivaling neighbors or tribes to the U.S. occupiers in Afghanistan.
Nothing will be done about that.
But there are other ways to work with collective guilt.
I am thinking of a play here.
On the stage you see actors in four rooms on two floors.
The lower floor is a ghastly basement, the upper one a quite noble business area.
On the lower floor to the left, a bigger room with prison cells and with prisoners in orange jump suits in various positions and guards in camouflage uniforms – to the right a smaller, sober military office, with a high ranking military officer with lots of decorations sitting behind his desk. There is door between those rooms and constantly soldiers pass back and forth to ask for and report on fulfilled orders. Prisoners under hoods also pass back and forth under guard to receive their judgement by this officer.
On the upper floor to the left there is a smaller presidential office with a President doing daily business – greeting victorious football teams, subaltern congress members and self-serving foreign dignitaries with lot of laughs, silly jokes and smalltalk. To the right the serious principal’s conference room. There is door between those too.
There is also a hatch between the lower left dungeon and the upper right conference room.
Additonal to this stage setting of these four rooms there are big TV screen on the left and on the right side of the stage. These constantly play Fox News segments on various missing white, young women.
During the play you will see continuous action in all four rooms. Various kinds of torture in the lower left, sustained military diligence in the lower right, greetings and laughter in the upper left and somber evaluations in the upper right.
But the only sound you will hear is from that upper right conference room. Acting in all other rooms is expressive, but without sound. In the conference room there is serious talk about goatkeeper 451:
CONDI: We need to decide this right now.
RUMMY: Let’s just fuck him in the ass ’til he bleads.
TENET: No way! If that is combined with electrocution it really would be dangerous for our own guys. How about screwing his children instead?
The discussion stops and Condi leaves to the left to ask her husband boss. She comes back.
CONDI: Fine with him.
POWELL: Fine with me too – less hair around, more fun.
ASHCROFT: Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.
POWELL: Fuck yourself then.
The hatch opens and a cloaked person comes up the ladder from the lower level.
AGENT: Do we really have approval to rip nails and kidneys simultaneously?
TENET: I’m not sure how that will eventually play on TV.
Agent pulls out a tape
AGENT: May I show you?
RICE: The boss thinks it’s a fine combination and he already said so last week. Why do you bother us again on this. Just get it done.
AGENT: Okay.
RICE: Leave that tape here. Dick really enjoys these.
Cloaked person goes down, steps into the military office and passes the order to the officer. On the lower floor things get done – in silence.
…
You’ll get my drift – someone please write this play – 90 minutes of principals discussing torture – Billmon? r’giap? – I can’t.
The barman just opened another bottle for me … where is Brecht when you need him …
I’m sitting here listening to a radio announcer reading the specific details,
quoted by a diarist, of the autopsy of an Iraqi cleric, or goat herder, some
father out late, looking for his missing son, shop keepers getting together
at dusk to play dominos or sip tea in the evening breeze … some poor zek
who was beaten to death while being hung upside down from a broken doorway,
mouth gagged, every single rib broken, his lungs punctured, small and large
bowel filled with blood, rectum prolapsed, a purple sack pushed out his anus,
when he finally went … “pulse less”. What an allegory for America’s Dream.
Pulse less.
To which Grandpa “DoLittle” McCain jumps in, bellowing, “Bibles, bullets and
bitterness isn’t the kind of America I believe in!”, and Hillary is boasting
about how she, “gunned down a duck out hunting with my father … then had to
run for cover under a hail of sniper fire”, and Obama is wringing his hands,
“People, people! There are more important issues here! … Have you seen the
price of organic arugala at the grocery!?” What kind of play is this anyway?!
Tonight hundreds of millions of people are starving from higher speculative
food prices. “Not famished”, the radio announcer is quick to assure us, but
“feeling hungry” as they face another day, on from what is probably a bowl
of rice soaked all day in the hot sun and eaten raw, flies, fleas and all.
When I visited an Islamic country, my driver brought me to his house and
introduced me to his family, and offered me rice, chicken satay, and the
only bottle of soda in the house. For nothing! Just hosting the stranger!
And King George’s urgent response is to “call up” $250,000,000 more deficits,
like the $167,000,000,000 deficits he called up, repackaged as a “tax rebate”
and loaned back to us against our future income, loaning our own future taxes
back to us, at interest, with a 50% origination charge skimmed off the top!
No, annie, there’s no “play” left. And no players, and no audience. Susking
is right, an orgy of theft has begun, theft of an entire generation, theft
of an entire epoch, and the true shock and awe isn’t these vampiroyals at the
gate, the smell of hot gurgling blood and sound of their lapping pink tongues.
No, the shock and awe is American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and the utter,
complete inability to speak the truth in America, at least anywhere in public.
Ask anybody at work. Go ahead, try it. Nose around gently to it. Start with
the weather, yeah, spring is kinda late this year. Then sports, wow, those
Red Sox fans are nuts, aren’t they? So how are you doing today, how was your
weekend? Pause, look in their eyes, say, “Why is torture still being debated?
Silence. Stone face. Scuff up the dirt. “Well, I gotta get back to work now.”
Then you open your e-mail to MoreFishingWithBill, and DeathToIslamFanatics.
A nation which can’t even speak the truth, not once, can never hope to find it.
“Truth is a river, wide as the sky, and an ocean, twice as deep.” Peter Torbay
Posted by: Tante Aime | Apr 15 2008 2:44 utc | 6
It’s beginning to look like the US corporate media will prostitute itself for McCain, bending over backwards and forwards (as needed) to sell the elixir of victory, mixed with a strong tonic of testosterone. Nepal is fortunate to be relatively hard to reach, sheltered from the outside world to some degree, without those particular resources that attract capital obsessions.
Others can’t avoid the fixation of the roving Ahab in the American psyche, in hot pursuit of the morphing Leviathan, Moby Dick. Last seen in the Persian Gulf. The poet, Ferlinghetti, captures the essence of this violent movement in Tyrannus Nix:
Nixon o Nixon I dreamt of myself curled up
upon a big bed in the same position as my dog Head
tucked under tail sleeping and hiding from You I don’t know
why exactly I’m telling you all this except that the
curled-up image of self and dog is perhaps the image
of paranoid America itself The Vietnam albatross
still hanging heavy ’round your neck oh Uncle Ahab
and other overweight albatrosses still caught in the
rigging of your ship still voyaging continually abroad
in search of monsters to destroy…
When Max Van Creveld, the military historian, recently wrote Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did, we are shown, through Moshe Dayan’s eyes, an Israeli general’s tour of the US war machine in Vietnamese waters, and the shadow of the Leviathan, heaving and disappearing on the high seas.
On 28 July he went aboard the largest aircraft carrier then cruising off the Vietnamese coast, USS Constellation. He was a professional military man and had often read and heard about such ships; yet what he now saw made “a breath-taking impression” on him. The vessel constituted five acres of sovereign American territory that could go anywhere without having to worry about troublesome allies”…”The ship was protected “from the air, the sea, the ground, outer space, and under water”; if Dayan was being ironic–after all, the enemy consisted of little men wearing straw hats–he did not say so”…”As always, Dayan was impressed by the Americans’ pride in themselves, their nation, and their mission. He ended the day by noting that they were “not fighting against infiltration to South [Vietnam], or against guerillas, or against North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, but against the entire world. Their real aim was to show everybody–including Britain, France, and the USSR–their power and determination so as to pass this message: wherever Americans go, they are irresistable.”
If that media mafiosi, Berlusconi, can regain power in Italy; what’s the prognosis for a more politically damaged country like my own? John McCain, with access to more power than any person ought to have, will make a player like him seem positively moderate.
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?
–Herman Melville, Moby Dick, p. 534-35
Posted by: Copeland | Apr 16 2008 5:33 utc | 28
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