wotiwrote

A lot has been written about the blatant lies told by Bush and his shrubbery to connect Iraq to the attack on the Twin Towers. Obviously, those promulgating the lies did not believe them and used them to fool a shell-shocked electorate. What is most odious, perhaps, is that those lies were also fed to the military sent into Iraq, where men and women would die and kill for an exceedingly unholy untruth. The power of this instilled ignorance is brought home by an episode in Moazzem Begg's Enemy Combatant that serves to illustrate the absurd reality in which the US military is forced to exist. The authorities in Guantanamo make a special exception to their general news blackout by making sure that the prisoners learn of the capture of Sadam Hussein. This is done as an exercise in gloating, of course, but to the prisoners the news has no emotional impact at all: devout Muslims believed Hussein an apostate and so greeted the news with equanimity at the very least.

Imagine if you will, however, what effect this would have on the morale of a prisoner once he came to understand that his captors actually thought he would be adversely affected by this news. Until then, he might have expected that there was a hope that reason could prevail, that his protestations of innocence might come to be believed. Faced with the fact that his captors had a knowledge of the world that many reclusive hill tribes might have found shameful, he would have known immediately that he was beyond the reach of truth and what most of us consider reality. Torture, indeed.