Apparently,
if you’re under 25 years of age, you rarely if ever buy newspapers, preferring
either to read them online or just watch the TV news.
What a
world you are missing out on! Yes, you can click random links as you surf the
web, but that in no way compares to the experience of physically holding a
paper in your hands, and turning to pages far away from the front page
headlines.
Buried
in any newspaper’s hinterland, from page 6 onwards, there lurk two kinds of
news: important stories that remain under-reported for reasons that keep
conspiracists awake at night, and the bizarre little stories that make my
eyebrows rise and my head spin.
Tearing
both types of story from the newspaper, I build them into little piles on the
bed in my office (it doubles as a guest room) alongside other more dishevelled
piles of scrawled often illegible notes.
Loopy
I may be, but thankfully, I’m not as bonkers as these stories. How could I be?
Yes, there have been insane moments in my life (the time I awoke unexpectedly
in New Zealand springs to mind) but in comparison to the bad craziness hidden
in my little piles (behave!) I’m as sane as a lump of granite.
Trouble
is, these clippings betray in their lunacy snapshots of how far we have lost
our way. They act as micro-metaphors for our condition as a supposed
civilization.
On top
of the pile to my right at the moment is a tiny torn story about Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the self-confessed planner of the attack on the Trade Centre Towers.
According
to The Guardian’s Washington Staff and Agencies, while at a CIA prison
in Poland, Mohammed was forced to stay awake for 180 hours and endured 183
instances of water-boarding. Popular with international intelligence forces
these days, water-boarding is a form of torture that replicates in your mind
the feeling that you are drowning.
Ever
precise with their very few words, the CIA describe this process as one
“…
designed to psychologically dislocate people.”
The
CIA use torture because it works a treat, but sadly their - what do you call
people being tortured? ‘Subjects’? ‘Prisoners’? I’m tempted to say ‘victims’
but Mohammed is a self-confessed mass murderer, so I’ll settle for that
disgusting 21st century euphemism - ‘clients’ often end up schizophrenic and
post-traumatic. The CIA’s own medical records suggest nobody makes it out with
all their noodles intact.
When
the Polish prison was closed in September 2003, Mohammed was moved to another
CIA prison in Romania, where his captivity was less aggressive. A request
arrived at CIA Headquarters from that secret facility in Bucharest. Mohammed,
who had been reading the Harry Potter novels, was asking for permission to
design a vacuum cleaner.
My
tiny brain can only imagine the conversation which then took place at CIA
headquarters, but a short time later a CIA manager called their prison in
Romania, approving Mohammed’s request:
“… in
the hope that it would help preserve Mohammed’s sanity.” according to an ex-CIA
official.
Stables,
doors, bolts and a little bit late for compassion, you might think.
For
the next three years Mohammed worked on his vacuum cleaner design, but nobody
will ever know how it looked, if it worked, or indeed if it really was a vacuum
cleaner rather than perchance a craftily-disguised jet pack, which he was
planning to strap onto his back before flying away.
Sorry,
had to pause there for a moment. I just saw a white-robed bearded devout Muslim
climbing high into the Romanian sky, clutching a rocket-powered ‘vacuum
cleaner’ like a 21st century Dr. Strangelove, while down below be-suited
be-shaded CIA agents wave their fists in the air and shout:
“Damn
you, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed! You may have outwitted us this time, you dastardly
devil, but look out, we’ll not be so dumb again. We’ll be ready for you next
time!”
Sadly,
life is neither a comic book nor a movie, and in 2006 the Romanian CIA prison
was also closed down, which resulted in Mohammed being transferred to that
testament to moral low ground, which every anti-American terrorist in the world
exploits as justification to attack: Guantanamo Bay. He is still there to this
day, being held along with many others who are doubtless far less guilty of
such heinous crimes as his.
The
reason these obscure newspaper stories mean so much to me is not because they
entertain me, on a facile level, but because there’s inevitably something
within them that gives me a chill. Somebody is always saying something that
makes me fear for our collective sanity and safety.
In
this instance, that role is fulfilled by Mohammed’s military lawyer, Jason
Wright, who is quoted in this tiny hidden-away newspaper story, trying to
explain why he was not allowed to discuss his client's interest in vacuum
cleaners.
“It
sounds ridiculous,” he said, “but answering this question, or confirming or
denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, would apparently expose
the US government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger.”
From
mass murder to the absolutely absurd, via Poland and Harry Potter, one tiny
supposedly insignificant corner of a newspaper page has taken us to vacuum
cleaner design, through CIA torture and Guantanamo Bay, ending up, tragically
yet inevitably, with a global superpower so entirely wrapped up in the fetid
blankets of its own paranoia that it can see neither the inanity nor the
insanity of its own methods.
Newspapers
are great. I’d much rather have the torn corner of that page from The
Guardian than an ignorant troll ranting at me online.
©Charlie
Adley
13.09.13.
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