NP? re Twilight America

[Doug Millison]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

March 15, 2002

Those Secret Snatches

Render Unto Caesar

By Chris Floyd

[...] Even as a fiction, a dream of human betterment -- of "civilization,"
to use that word we hear so often on the lips of warlords and terrorists
these days -- the idea of law has been discarded, trashed: Just so much
excess baggage thrown aside in the relentless, mindless pursuit of raw
power.

And perhaps the most remarkable thing about this regression, this throwback
to our most primitive and brutal instincts, is that it's being carried out
in plain sight, openly, proudly. The defenders of "civilization" no longer
even pretend to be bound by law, by moral codes designed to quell the
raging beast inside us all and draw us on toward higher notions of justice,
liberty, and the integrity of the individual. Instead, they exult in their
desecration of these ideals -- and are exalted for it.

This week, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush admitted it
was snatching suspected terrorists in secret operations around the world
and "rendering" them without due process or any legal hearing at all to
repressive regimes where they can be beaten and tortured to extract
information -- then killed when their usefulness is over. Their families
too can be threatened with imprisonment or death: another useful extraction
tool for the CIA and its proxies.

"After Sept. 11, these sorts of movements have been occurring all the
time," a U.S. diplomat told the Washington Post. "It allows us to get
information from terrorists in a way we can't do on U.S. soil." [...]

That's the world the "defenders of civilization" have given us. They strut
out in their thousand-dollar suits and preach to us about "civilized
values" and "enduring freedom" while they pay their murderers and wave
their cattle prods and "expand their nuclear attack options," plotting the
death of millions. They're teaching every budding terrorist, every aspiring
dictator, every mafia goon that violence, death and dominance are the
truest human values, the way to wealth and glory.

So forget law. Law is dead. There is no law. There is only the reality of
power. They can take you tonight, anywhere in the world, beat you and drug
you and ship you to a dungeon in Jakarta if they want to. They can ram
their cattle prods up your rectum and slap their electrodes on your
genitals and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. No one will hear
you scream; no one will even know where you are. You don't exist anymore.
You're not a person, you have no standing under the law. There is no law.