A Chance To Plot Torture
Laila Lalami at Moorishgirl alerts us to a Washington Post op-ed on torture by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat. The Bush administration has beaten down the Congressional opposition and there’s very little hope for the detainees in the CIA’s “black” prisons. It is in that pressing context that Danticat’s piece against torture makes particular sense, although what brought me up short was a passage that made of the torturer a specific kind of a writer:
Rare is the opportunity, as we seem to have now, for the torturer to plot out methods in advance and in public. Should a person be strapped to a board and have water poured down his nose? Should she be forced to stand for long periods of time in the cold without being allowed to sleep? Should he be slapped in the chest, face or belly? These are almost novelistic questions with no more rational answers than some haywire plot or dark verse.
P.S. Also, please read the questions that Ariel Dorfman asks in the same paper on the same day.
‘The agreement clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do: to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists and then to try them.’ So says the jubilant American President. The discourse is the same, his is the voice of the people -’Us’against ‘Them’ the terrorists, the detainees, suspects. So he, the people of America have the legal tool now to engineer justice in the manner that they define and decide fit.
Comment by Uma Gowrishankar — September 26, 2006 @ 1:05 am