Hedges: No. Not with the Saudis.
Torrance: Were there any other journalists of which you were aware who [were] reporting outside of the pool system?
Hedges: Yes.
Torrance: Were they also detained, to your knowledge?
Hedges: Yes.
The politeness of the exchanges, the small courtesies extended when we needed a break, the idle asides that took place during the brief recesses, masked the deadly seriousness of the proceeding. If there is no rolling back of the NDAA law we cease to be a constitutional democracy.
Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law. They make legal what was once illegal. Crimes become patriotic acts. The defense of freedom and truth becomes a crime. Foreign and domestic subjugation merges into the same brutal mechanism. Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of national security. We obey the new laws as we obeyed the old laws, as if there was no difference. And we spend our energy and our lives appealing to a dead system.
Franz Kafka understood the totalitarian misuse of law, the ability by
the state to make law serve injustice and yet be held up as the
impartial arbiter of good and evil. In his stories "The Trial" and "The
Castle" Kafka presents pathetic supplicants before the law who are
passed from one doorkeeper, administrator or clerk to the next in an
endless and futile quest for justice. In the parable "Before the Law"
the supplicant dies before even being permitted to enter the halls of
justice.
In Kafka's dystopian vision, the law is the mechanism by which injustice and tyranny are perpetuated. A bureaucratic legal system uses the language of justice to defend injustice. The cowed populations in tyrannies become for Kafka so broken, desperate and passive that they are finally complicit in their own enslavement. The central character in "The Trial," known as Josef K, offers little resistance at the end of the story when two men arrive to oversee his execution. Josef K. leads them to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself. He cannot. The men do it for him. His last words are: "Like a dog!"
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