Hannah’s Blog

Intentions are feelings from which the emotional content has been removed.

How can we tell that trying to drown someone by pouring water down his nostrils is not torture? There are four conditions that have to be met:

a) The perpetrators do not derive sadistic pleasure from this stupid trick. And it is a trick, you see, because the victim isn’t actually going to be drowned; it’s all just make-believe and pretend. Not at all like the tricks of max and Moritz who trick the barnyard fowl into swallowing treats on strings so they can no longer fly to escape their tormentors and end up strangled in the clothes line.

b) The perpetrators are following a directive. There are instructions not unlike an old time recipe book might state that “to bake a chicken, first catch the bird, then wring it’s neck until it stops squawking.” Except, in this case, the ostensible of the near drowning was to get the victims, who’d already been incommunicado for several months, to talk. I say “ostensible” because I never have been able to understand how near drowning doesn’t just scramble someone’s brains so nothing they say could ever make much sense.

c) There’s an emergency situation which precludes a quiet chat. I suppose the new Attorney General of the United States needs this rationale, regardless of the fact that it makes no sense, because every lawyer knows that information that’s coerced, regardless of how self-incriminating it might be, is worthless and will never lead to a conviction. But, it might just be enough to justify permanent detention and obviate the legal process–a good thing since, absent hard evidence of a conspiracy to commit a crime, the focus of the legal process would be on acts. Of which there are none to be had. If the new standard is to be suspicion of bad intent, then there’s got to be a new response. It’s not just the legal standards ennunciated in the Geneva Conventions that are quaint. Given the growing importance of suspicion instead of acts, it’s only logical that all supsects be detained. Not to mention that any sign of dis-obedience is prima facie evidence of bad intent.

d) The person subjected to this near-drowning needs to be a “high value” target or suspect. While this condition would seem to be a consequence of a basic confusion between the strength or “value” or someone’s suspicion, presumably derived from recent and technologically validated information, and the social status of any detainee, which is obviously low, along the lines of “what I suspect is important and so the person I suspect it of must be important, too,” it might ought to raise a warning that any American, being obviously of a higher value than any foreign detainee, might qualify for such trickery.

It all seems irrational doesn’t it? But, it is actually rather easy to explain. You see, what we’ve arrived at is a new definition of reality. It’s no longer what happens that defines events; it’s what’s intended that defines the results. And it’s not just a matter of the road to hell being paved with good intentions; of justifying bad events in retrospect. No, when intentions are defining, there are no good or bad events or acts. Indeed, there are no acts; just responses to directives–i.e. obedience–and obedience makes all behavior right and good.

Now, you may think this is contrary to the judgment at the Nuremberg trials where it was decided that bad behavior could not be excused on the grounds of obedience to bad orders. Not so. What we have here is something that’s gone beyond that. Under the new regime, there are no bad orders. All orders are ipso facto moral and obedience to them is ipso facto good.

After all, that’s the pay-off to obedience–a guarantee of right behavior and the impossibility of being wrong. To put it in theological terms, the only sin is to disobey.

It’s an ideology that Republicans have bought into for some time. That in acceding to the injunction, “just do what we tell you and you’ll be just fine,” they were giving up liberty for the proverbial bowl of porridge is only just now beginning to sink in, perhaps because the porridge is about gone. But the real agenda, the pacification of a great nation, is only just coming over the horizon. Can we intercept it? Yes we can.

If we don’t, we’ll have to rely on someone else doing it for us.

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Taxi to the Dark Side