The Invisible library

Looking upwards I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it, (for its position was immediately over my own,) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterwards the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. I watched it for some minutes, somewhat in fear, but more in wonder.

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It might have been half an hour, perhaps even an hour, (for I could take but imperfect note of time,) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that it had perceptibly descended. I now observed with what horror it is needless to say that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.

I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture. My cognizance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial agents the pit, whose horrors had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself the pit, typical of hell, and regarded by rumor as the Ultima Thule of all their punishments.

-Edgar Allen Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum

***

In Afghanistan, the CIA’s secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as “The Pit,” named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

“The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands,” said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.

The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al Qaeda and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services some with documented records of torture to which the U.S. government delivers or “renders” mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.

All told, more than 9,000 people are held by U.S. authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing; and, at least in the case of prisoners held in cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, no apparent guarantee of humane treatment accorded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or civilians in U.S. jails.

Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA’s detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army’s report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The CIA’s “ghost detainees,” as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib “without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention,” the report says. These phantom captives were “moved around within the facility to hide them” from Red Cross teams, a tactic that was “deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law.”

-WaPo

At the end of The Pit and the Pendulum, the Prisoner (whose name we never learn) is freed (by the French Army, no less, who have broken into the Inquisition’s fortress in Toledo). There is a florish of trumpets, a cacophony of voices and an arm reaching out from the darkness to catch the Prisoner at the last moment before he falls into the Pit.

I hope, for all our sake, that there is an arm reaching out of the darkness to catch us, soon.

The Guardian has an interesting article in which Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Schell, Howard Zinn and William Polk offer their suggestions on how the US can get out of Iraq. They all boil down to handing control over the UN.

Now, I’ve noticed there seems to be a huge amount of distrust among Americans in regards to the UN. I’m not sure exactly why this is. Some of the arguments I’ve heard are that they drag their feet on most issues, requiring reams of bureaucratic red tape to be unwound before they do anything. Usually i hear this argument from the Gung Ho types who follow the old John Wayne style of International politics: shoot first, ask questions later.

The fact is, the UN has to make sure they do things in the right order for the expressed purpose of maintaining transparency. Anyone at any time can look at the UN and see what they are doing. if they didn’t do things this way, we’d have an international organization that was secretive, lacks oversight and is prone to manipulation by people of little conscience who desire to exert their power and privilege over others. Sound familiar? Like we need another BushCo. White House, only this one with the sort of global mandate and right to pee on poor people George, Dick and Rummy can only dream about.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the UN paranoids who think black helicopters and blue berets are going to take away our guns and chewing tabacco, and force the Anti-Christ, red horns and all, to be president of the world. This confabulation of Millennialism and ignorance is distressing (because of it�s so prevalence) but mostly just yokels letting their brains go as slack as their jaws.

So, yeah, I agree with Chomsky, Schell, Zinn and Polk: the only way to get out of this mess in a way that won�t incite an Iraqi civil war and just might salvage our reputation with our former allies is to let the UN steward iraq. But since that�s capitulating to the One World Government Beurocracy, which upsets all those Nascar Dads, who might, unfortunately vote to keep their favorite Bubba in office 9just to spite us terrorist loving liberals) it�s unlikely to happen any time soon. So, get used to more beatings, beheadings and body bags. That�s what this war is all about, now: sadism for the sake of national honor.