Friday, April 4, 2008

Torture, Again

and again a caution, Scott Horton's discussion of the torture memo released this week includes another bloody picture of a murdered victim.
That said, this — about the unwarranted classification of the 2003 memo — is striking:
The abusive use of classifications is a matter that cries for Congressional oversight and action. At the close of World War I, Franz Kafka wrote the parable “Before the Law” (“Vor dem Gesetz”) later incorporated into the novel The Trial. This parable operates at several levels, but one of them, signaled by the choice of the word Gesetz, is quite literally anxiety about secret laws. Kafka was concern about a tendency that Max Weber had just warned against, namely that an increasingly authoritarian and secretive state would begin to make even the law itself a secret. The practices of the Bush Administration are increasingly a realization of this nightmare.

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