| Friday, April 27, 2007 11:48AM | | | | Dirty Wars | Posted By: Timothy Liu
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| Tags: torture, rendition, habeas corpus, guantanamo, abu ghraib, aclu | | The evening’s unintended lesson seemed to be this: when you’ve got the hard facts about torture, secret detention, extraordinary rendition and the assault on habeas corpus, writing a fiction about such events can be a self-indulgent bust. I felt both annoyed with and embarrassed for Dorothea Dieckmann who read an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Guantánomo, informing the audience that she wanted “to imagine what it was like inside the prison,” exploiting our current moment with banal on-demand prose to be published in the U.S. later this year, perhaps to the chagrin of Antoine Audouard who can’t get the memoir he co-wrote with Mourad Benchellali, A Journey to Hell, published in our country (it appeared last year in France), a book which deals with a French citizen who was detained at Guantanmo for two and a half years following his arrest, a “lost child of the Muslim world lured to Afghanistan.” Instead of finding a vacation in paradise when he arrived, he landed in an Al Quaeda camp only to be subsequently “captured” by U.S. forces while fleeing the country, then shipped off to Gitmo where the screaming, hunger strikes, and suicide attempts are routinely dismissed as a kind of “asymmetrical warfare,” a theme Arnon Grunberg also picked up on in his article written for the Dutch press, ‘”At Guantanamo There Is No Why,” the complaints of prisoners and their hunger strikes merely seen as “tactics utilized by the enemy.” To be labeled “an enemy combatant” and to be held without evidence was another recurring theme of the evening. When an interviewed captain said of the prison, “everyone who misbehaves loses his privileges,” Grunberg saw an irony in “that rule upon which society is built.” Francine Prose saw other ironies in the FBI emails that were obtained by the ACLU (the evening’s co-sponsor) through the Freedom of Information Act, messages that bordered on something “right out of a Graham Greene novel”: a protocol for torture followed by a list of what to do after getting off work (watch The Matrix Reloaded or Bruce Almighty, attend a bonfire beach party or go sailing); emails that document loud music—flashes of light—an Israeli flag draped around a detainee; a detainee chained hand and foot in fetal position—urinated and defecated on self after being held for 18-24 hours—shaking with cold; or the AC off—an unventilated 100-degree room—a pile of hair beside a detainee who pulled it out himself; military personnel impersonating FBI agents so the torture they inflict can be pawned off onto the FBI. Our attention then shifted to another prison. Mark Danner, in his preface to reading an excerpt from “declaration of Detainee# ______, Abu Ghraib Prison”,” remarked that Americans have come to live with torture since 9-11 where euphemisms prevail: George W.’s “alternate set of procedures”; Rumsfeld’s “adjustment of temperature,” “adjustment of clothing,” “adjustment of meal times” as code commands for torture protocol, Rumsfeld who wrote at the bottom of his memo, “I stand for 8-12 hours per day [at my desk]—why limit them to 4 hours?,” here referring to the technique of “floor standing,” a holdover from the USSR era where prisoners are made to stand for up to 40 hours, their ankles and legs swelling to twice their normal size, the edema rising up to mid-thigh, the ensuing blisters and impairment of circulation leading to collapse. Danner then uttered the following litany from the declaration of the unnamed Detainee who was only given a number: “was beaten—put in a stress position—naked—crawled on the floor—spit upon—handcuffed till my shoulders popped—a bag placed overhead—didn’t know when or where the blows were coming from—ear pulled off—sewn back on—red women’s panties placed over my head—pissed on by police—their feet on my head—loudsepakers blasting—voices on a microphone—a stick up my ass while U.S. girls played with my dick.” Danner was joined by Daoud Heidami and Daniel Oresekes who staged a scene from “Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing of Mustafa Ait Idr.” The hopes of a detainee finally getting freed were crushed before our very eyes. Rose Styron prefaced her reading from “The General” by Isabel Hilton” (an account of the dirty war conducted in Paraguay two decades back) by remarking “I’m appalled to report that I recognize every torture method mentioned tonight,” an observation later amplified by Breyten Breytenbach who said, “What we’ve heard tonight goes back decades . . . even centuries.” There seems to be little that is original about the dirty wars that are being fought. Our imperative as American citizens is to bring an end to the torture, arbitrary detention and extra rendition perpetrated by our government. To learn how to get involved and help put a stop to these unlawful practices, visit aclu.org. | | |
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3 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 4-30-11 9:43AM: Daniela Gioseffi, Peace & Social Justice Author said...
I congratulate Timothy Liu for writing this piece even if Ms. Dieckman's GUANTANAMO was written in 2003, & even if it's NOT totally banal. I was shocked that the PEN Poetry night, A Second Skin, at the 92nd St. Y Fri. eve., seemed to censor out of free speech, Ernesto Cardenal's vital poem, CELL PHONE ,about the mining of a mineral for cell phone production by major multinational corps. is killing many child slave laborers in the African Congo. Cardenal writes VITAL HUMANIST POETRY, head & shoulders above most of the poets' offerings that eve. He'd been asked to submit 4 poems for the event, only to arrive to have them cut down to 2, leaving out the most sociopolitical, vital poem, CELL PHONE. In it, he wasn't afraid to name the global corps. that don't want us to know about the dirty mining biz in the Congo from which they buy the mineral needed for cell phone & android production, Sony & NY Times corp. etc. among them! Thanks Tim, for being a stand-up writer. Corragio!
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| 4-29-07 11:03AM: Christina said...
Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo was written in 2003 and published in Germany in 2004, at a time when Guantanamo was barely known to the German public.
I hope you may have attended the Mixing Art and Politics panel on Saturday, in which Dorothea Dieckmann and others had a lively discussion about the relationship between fiction and politics. As for Guantanamo, which I have read, I can say it's a challenging, successful work of literature and is not banal.
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| 4-27-07 9:34PM: Aaron Hamburger said...
Distortion of language and the trampling of human rights are intimately connected, which is why writers are on the front lines of the fight to preserve our freedom. We need to insist ever more insistently on exactness of meaning in the use of language, whatever the context, in classrooms, in the media, in our work and the works of others. This is one of the most important ways we can fight this current trend of horrific abuses. Of course, it doesn't always feel very nice when someone points out when we have been less than exact in our language, but that's the difficulty of being a writer, I guess.
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