Propaganda agents don't have to worry about this type of treatment; only truth-tellers do!
"A Valentine from the Ministry of Love
Scott Horton
Harper’s Magazine
February 14, 2008
Nicholas Kristof, writing today in the New York Times, delivers us a Valentine straight from the Bush Administration’s Ministry of Love. Of course, you remember that ministry. It’s not filled with boxes of chocolates wrapped in fancy papers and decorated with pudgy cherubs. No, I mean the Ministry of Love that Orwell crafted in Nineteen Eighty-Four and which President Bush has done his damnedest to fashion today, spread across a great archipelago that starts at Guantánamo and ends—heavens knows where. Orwell’s Ministry of Love is where criminals are tortured, rehabilitated, then set free or killed, but it’s particularly set aside for the political criminals, those who threaten the regime. As soon as Winston is captured he knows he is going to the Ministry of Love. The Ministry of Love had no windows; before his arrest Winston, though a member of the party, had never been inside. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons. The Ministry of Love was a temple to a great idol, John Donne might have said, and the name of that idol was Torture.
And today Kristof gives us the story of a journalist who was seized and locked away in Gitmo, and who is being tortured, twice a day. What’s his offense? None has been charged. It seems evident that his prime offense is simple: he is a journalist who worked for a broadcaster that the Bush regime despises: al Jazeera. That was plenty of reason to seize and torture him.
