stop taking the names of the dead in vain.

They're stomping on graves to stop us from asking questions.

Of course. Just as members of Congress are finally beginning to wake up about Guantanamo, from  the Senate Judiciary Committee to Patrick Leahy to Chuck Hagel, of all people, startled by news of children at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Pentagon admissions that yes,interrogators there do practice religious humiliation.  Just when John McCain, the only ex-P.O.W. in the batch, says clearly: “We are signatories to numerous treaties concerning basic human rights. One of them is that someone can not be held in detention indefinitely without some kind of adjudication of their case."

Right on schedule, the usual suspects come chanting their mantras, and dishonoring the dead 

I'm not really talking about Cheney, our true president and personal Sith Lord, filling TV screens all weekend.  I've come to almost laugh when I see that characteristic grimace and small-mouthed hiss, the snake whispering over the radio and the Internet that  "the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people."  I'll let Jesurgislac brilliantly refute that lie  (just a taste here):

 

Here’s some of the “hard core” detainees who were “captured in the battlefield of Afghanistan or rounded up as part of the al-Qaida network”.

 

Bisher al-Rawi was the youngest son of an Iraqi family who fled to the UK as refugees from Saddam Hussein back in the 1970s. He’s a legal British resident, but he didn’t take British nationality because his family wanted one son to have the right to reclaim their confiscated property in Baghdad if it ever became safe for them to go home. His brother, who is a British citizen, was arrested at the same time (they were on a business trip to the Gambia) but his brother was released after pressure from the British Foreign Office. (interview here). There are four other British residents who have vanished into the American gulag.).......

And then there’s Omar Khadr. He was also 15 when he was arrested. “When the Americans began bombing Afghanistan, he went to Logar, East Afghanistan. After the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, Omar, now separated from his brother (In Kabul) and his family (who had fled to Pakistan) ended up at a suspected al-Qaeda base near Khost, Afghanistan, which was raided by American and Afghan troops in July 27, 2002. He allegedly killed an American medic with a hand grenade but was shot three times, captured and taken to Guantanamo. He lost one eye. He was 15 at the time of his arrest and has since been detained in Guantanamo Bay. There he has been denied medical treatment, due to his non-co-operation with his interrogators. He had an operation whilst in Afghanistan but remains in constant pain, without being treated with painkillers.” Perhaps Dick Cheney feels that a teenage boy who behaves like this is a “hard core bad man”: I’d say that he’s… a teenage boy.

Read the rest of the post for more of the same. But I'm right now more frosted by the military men who decided to ignore all the laws of war they've been taught, and defend the gulag. And I'm most worked up by the above-mentioned dancing on graves. Speaking to Specter, McCain, and other senators trying to shake the Pentagon pixie dust from their eyes, the nuclear button was pressed once again.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway told the panel, ''America is at war. It is not a metaphorical war. It is as tangible as the blood, the rubble that littered the streets of Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.''

General Hemingway, of course, never saw or smelled any of that rubble. His official biography makes clear that since college in Oregon, where he enrolled in ROTC and went to law school, he's lived his life on a string of military bases far from Manhattan. The crimes committed on 11 September resonated in that context, but that blood was abstract to him -- a "Pearl Harbor-type" event, as PNAC so famously  dreamt of, but responded to without regard for either the international or military laws he has sworn to uphold, when became "legal adviser" tp the kangaroo "military commissions" process, a process designed to be secret.

No wonder he pushes the September 11 panic button when called to testify. It worked so well in the 2004 election; it works in megachurches which use those sad images of the crumbling towers as a new crucifix  - like this one in his frequent home of  Colorado Springs. None of those who use these images are entitled to do so. Especially in order to commit more crimes. Update

We know already that the interrogators who killed Dilawar at Bagram, in Afghanistan,  the police who beat detainees in the post-9/11 roundups, used that mantra: words like these will only exacerbatr the problem. Hemingway (!) uses the tools of art - vivid imagery, metaphor - to keep us in helpless fear and rage.

In an editorial in today's Times, Stacy Schiff speaks of how Americans are "happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance religious conspiracy theory [cf. The Da Vinci Code] than to examine the historical fiction we're living (and dying for) today." 

We have a fresh taste for documentaries. Any novelist will tell you that readers hunger for nonfiction, which may explain the number of historical figures who have crowded into our novels. Facts seem important. Facts have gravitas. But the illusion of facts will suffice. One in three Americans still believes there were W.M.D.'s in Iraq.

And that one-third will, when asked to further justify the war,  cite the towers they never saw. Update, 23 June: Karl Rove just invoked September 11 as shorthand for his political-pseudo-analyses,  again, while Duke Cunningham did so yesterday to justify another freaking flag-burning amendment:

"Ask the men and women who stood on top of the (World) Trade Center," said Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, R-Calif. "Ask them and they will tell you: pass this amendment."

The September 11 dead aren't real to any of them, certainly not to Rep. Cunningham in his overpriced Southern California mansions, or to General Hemingway, the way they are to us. To those of us who breathed remains for three months after, to my dear friends who lost dozens of colleagues on that day, to my brother-in-law the Philly firefighter who can't shake his memories of what he saw. (I just deleted an image  from him that haunts me, lest I repeat the offense.

I want to issue a plea to not just the general, not just the president - but to all the preachers and politicians, even to all my relatives who send endless emails running images of smoky stone. Disconnect that easy trigger. Stop turning my neighbors' deaths into kitsch for your political ends.

The ghosts are watching.

 

Comments

[Dianne]

The use of the WTC attacks as a justification for attacking more innocent people--thereby doing just the same thing that the terrorists did-- is not just an insult to the dead. Worse, it's an insult to the living.