2009: ORWELL AND THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

It was George Orwell who said in Politics and the English Language that is English is a corrupt language. This is a nice way of saying that English provides us a system for expressing evil intentions and carrying out evil orders. The next step in this assumption is that people who speak English become corrupt by speaking English: we cannot any one of us escape that problem.

We see this principle at work in the Obama Administration. Remember, during the campaign Barack Obama decried torturing as an established federal policy, creating Guantanamo, and holding people without trial forever because they are too dangerous to try in public

--- and because the evidence the government collected against them they gained through torture and is not, strictly speaking, factual.

The Obama Administration recently has become increasingly vague in their definitions of torture and terrorists. It becomes increasingly wishy-washy about when and if it will close Guantanamo, mostly on the assumption that the place is too complicated to close. It now talks about "preventative detention," which means throwing people in jail forever without trial because the leaders speculate they might do something those in power do not want.

The Obama Administration wants for itself some of the power the Bush administration exercised against terrorists, but it fails to understand that once one picks up one end of a rhetorical stick, one has to pick up the entire stick.


THE CALL TO ACTION

The American public must take time out from its frivolous schedule to write protests to its representatives in Congress and to the heads of the Justice Department. Guantanamo must be closed. Our military should not torture our enemies. Our police, for that matter, should not torture its citizens, either. Everyone deserves the due process of trial by jury.