| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
30 May 2006 02:48:24 AM |
| Object: |
OT: Major Idiocy |
Major Idiocy
John Harris
May 28, 2006 12:56 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_harris/2006/05/major_idiocy.html
I thought there were two ways my interview with the sometime Guantanamo
inmate Moazzam Begg at the Hay festival yesterday could go: either a
forensic, blow-by-blow account of the three horrific years he spent in
US Custody - or an attempt to put his experiences in some kind of
political/cultural context, and within that, shine light on the utter
absurdity of what happened to him. His book, Enemy Combatant, does
both, but we only had 40 minutes (plus 20 for questions).
So we went for the latter option, and - I hope, anyway - thereby
pointed out that key weakness of the Bush administration's supposed war
on terror is its almost comical lack of logic, from the policy-makers
at the top to the functionaries at the bottom.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Major Idiocy |
04 Jun 2006 08:54:26 PM |
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On 30 May 2006 00:48:24 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
Major Idiocy
John Harris
May 28, 2006 12:56 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_harris/2006/05/major_idiocy.html
I thought there were two ways my interview with the sometime Guantanamo
inmate Moazzam Begg at the Hay festival yesterday could go: either a
forensic, blow-by-blow account of the three horrific years he spent in
US Custody - or an attempt to put his experiences in some kind of
political/cultural context, and within that, shine light on the utter
absurdity of what happened to him. His book, Enemy Combatant, does
both, but we only had 40 minutes (plus 20 for questions).
So we went for the latter option, and - I hope, anyway - thereby
pointed out that key weakness of the Bush administration's supposed war
on terror is its almost comical lack of logic, from the policy-makers
at the top to the functionaries at the bottom.
Begg's time at Kandahar, Bagram and Guantanamo reflected all this
through the prism of everyday experience. He met FBI agents to whom he
had to explain the difference between Urdu and Arabic. He was regularly
interrogated by people who apparently had no idea that the two Afghan
"camps" that he had visited fell outside the writ of either Osama bin
Laden and the Taliban (indeed, at least one was destroyed by the
latter), and were focused on the conflict in Kashmir. So idiotically
reductive was their view of geopolitics that Begg's chosen role as an
aid worker was always going to fall on deaf ears: he was resident in
Afghanistan to assist with the drilling of wells and set up a
charitably-funded school for girls, but Afghanistan, Taliban and
al-Qaeda were bywords for the same dreaded thing, and his fate was
sealed. (Oh, and before anyone gives it the old "picked up on a
battlefield", bear in mind that he was abducted from his temporary
family home in Pakistan.)
His choicest memories of being grilled by the US military only compound
the sense of surreal incompetence. In the cache on Begg's laptop, they
found an image of the Pope, there because it had appeared on the website
of the BBC World Service, and became briefly convinced that it suggested
a plot to assassinate the pontiff. "If anything happens to the Pope,"
said an officer Begg nicknamed Major Idiot, "and I find out you were
involved, I swear I'll break every finger in your hands. I'm a
Catholic." Later on, the same man became convinced of Begg's sinister
computer expertise because his prisoner was au fait with the word
"Pixilated".
And so the grim comedy went on. On arrival at Guantanamo, he was
presented with a six-page confession, which sounded "uninformed an
adventurous ... more like the ramblings of a 16 year-old college dropout
than what one would expect from the FBI." Months later, there was also
crazily imaginative talk of Begg's alleged involvement in a plot to fly
unmanned military planes loaded with anthrax into the Houses Of
Parliament (a possible centrepiece, perhaps, of the script for an Austin
Powers/Die Hard hybrid). While all this went on, there were sporadic
visits from MI5 agents, who observed Begg's predicament with a passive
detachment, but tried to maintain his spirits via small talk about David
Beckham. When Begg was shackled and hooded, one Brit asked his captors
"Is all this really necessary?" and then handed Begg a Mars bar.
This is not, of course, to make light of any of the experiences that he
suffered. At the core of his book, there is incredible brutality, and
the impossibly moving story of a man whose quiet self-sufficiency just
about got him through. At Hay, all the people I spoke to were impressed
most with his lack of anger, and his refusal to see the world in the
Manichean terms of his captors - when one of his more sympathetic guards
asked him to one day tell his friends that not all American soldiers
were violent hysterics, he replied thus: "I'll them that you're not all
like that, but you must tell your people that we're not all like that,
either."
But still, accompanying the sense of outrage is that underlying
impression of a government and military gone surreally mad - which is
comic, but also chilling. So, before anyone goes for the usual
anti-liberal get your hair cut/wake up/which side are you on stuff,
consider this: the responsibility of governments to see to the security
of their people is beyond argument. There is undoubtedly a menace out
there to which they should be paying the closest attention. But please,
read Enemy Combatant and ask yourself: from the interrogation room to
the upper reaches of government, do the people in charge know what
they're doing?
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
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