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The Ordinary
Posted by Kevin

Imagine a man on vacation, riding an ordinary bus on his way to the ordinary airport where and ordinary airplane is waiting to take him back to his ordinary life. Imagine that the bus tops, short of the ordinary airport, and this man is taken off the bus by an ordinary police officer. But the ordinary police officer has an extra-ordinary reason for taking the man: a cash bonus for every “terrorist” he turns in. Imagine the ordinary man riding, in chains, on a quite extraordinary airplane to a prison where he is kept outside, in the freezing cold and asked daily about things no ordinary man knows of. Where are the terrorists? What are their plans? Who do you know and what are you training to do?

Imagine that our ordinary friend is tortured on a regular basis, so that the torture becomes ordinary. Hung from his arms for days at a time. Beaten with his head underwater so that he is forced to inhale water. Electrocuted so that his body went numb. All to find out the extraordinary things our ordinary man does not and could never have known.

Imagine being sent to another prison, where the ordinary rules of justice and decency don’t apply. Imagine the very extraordinary notion of not being allowed to talk to a lawyer, of never being charged with a crime, of being beaten and deprived of sleep and human company on a regular basis. Imagine police forces — three of them — outside the walls of the prison doing the very ordinary investigations and coming to the unanimous conclusion that our ordinary man is, indeed, an ordinary man with no connection to terrorism at all. Imagine our ordinary man kept in that extraordinary prison, where they beat and freeze and mistreat him to find the answers to questions the police already know he cannot answer, for three and one half years after the police have made that determination. Imagine being let go only after the head of the man’s government personally asked for his release. Imagine the ordinary man being asked to sign a confession stating that he is, indeed, a terrorist as he is being escorted home.

When Kafka wrote about a man caught in a court system that would not tell him what he was imprisoned for an did not give him an opportunity to defend himself against the charges, they called him a surrealist and turned his name into an adjective to describe the peculiar horror he wrote about. Today, that horror is an every day part of the official policy of the government of the United States of America. The government, egged on by people who, in their fear or their racism or their innate viciousness, apologized for torture and threw away concepts like innocent until proven guilty and habeas corpus and independent oversight, abused its power. Imagine that.

March 31st, 2008 Politics, Legal Issues, Torture | 4 comments