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Orwellian dystropia comes late
By Emile Hallez
ehallez@mscd.edu

In Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, Winston Smith lost track of time. Between torture sessions, he lived among men in more advanced states of decay, foreshadowing his inevitable deterioration. As his captor, O’Brien, said to him, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

George Orwell may have been a few years off in his predictions, but his warning reverberates with ominous precision.

If you need proof, take a look at the Military Commissions Act, which President Bush signed into law last week. The White House website provides a “fact sheet” that states the act will preserve tools needed to help save American lives, allow prosecution of captured terrorists through full and fair trials, and will permit the CIA to continue its program for questioning terrorists.

What the website fails to convey is that the act revokes the writ of habeas corpus – a person’s right to challenge their detention before a judge. Furthermore, the protected CIA program for questioning terrorists, a practice known as extraordinary rendition, involves deporting suspects to countries in which they are tortured.

The website does, however, admit the use of hearsay evidence in military trials for terror suspects. Just to clarify, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines hearsay evidence as “testimony based on what a witness has heard from another person rather than on direct personal knowledge or experience.” In other words, “fair trials” consider rumors valid evidence.

Conceivably, the president can lock up just about anybody, if he can put the right spin on it. The key is labeling a suspect as an “enemy combatant,” a purposefully vague term that allows for some indulgent subjectivity. Since hearsay is the new evidential gold standard, initiating some juicy gossip about so-and-so is as legitimate as collecting DNA samples at a crime scene.

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was imprisoned in Syria under U.S.
authority, might attest to this. According to Democracy Now, Arar arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport from a family vacation in Tunisia in 2002. At the airport, he was questioned before being sent to a New York immigration facility. Later, he was sent to Syria, where he says he was held in a cell the size of a grave for more than 10 months and forced to make confessions while being beaten with a cable.

After his eventual return home, the Canadian government began a federal inquiry into his case. On Sept. 18, 2006, Canada openly acknowledged Arar’s innocence. Though he was honored at the 30th Annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards, Arar could not attend the Washington, D.C., event because he remains on the United States’ no-fly list.

Sickeningly, President Bush, on the day he signed the Military Commissions Act, said, “This nation is patient and decent and fair, and we will never back down from the threats to our freedom.”

As long as the government keeps finding ways to take freedom away in the name of freedom, allowing unauthorized spying on its citizens and holding trials with meritless evidence, most of us may be too dumbfounded to form an opinion, much less take action. Regardless, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength,” and 1984 is arriving a couple decades late.