This morning bought Agamben’s State of Exception.
On the ‘military order’ issued by Bush on November 13, 2001:
“What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees”, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from juridical oversight.”
That British citizens were held for years on end without trial by a foreign government would, you’d think, be a cause célèbre for the tabloid press. Well no, not really. Reading the papers the other day in X café, The Sun is outraged that British Guantanamo Bay detainees had been returned to the U.K ‘at tax payers expense’ and were now ‘free to walk the streets’.
Many were highly critical of objections to Israel’s ‘defence wall,’ especially the ‘absurd suggestion’ that it would be used to annex or confiscate land. Well, this is from Haaretz.
(Noteworthy: how Haaretz seems to report many developments bypassed by the British press, and which, were they reported here would doubtless have Melanie Phillips gibbering and squeaking in the streets with rage. )
n.b. Quote of the day goes to this astute analogy at Harry's Place:
"one can't be against 'capitalism' per se - it's like being against humidity or escalators." Priceless. Personally, I'm all for air-conditioning and lifts.