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John Ruskin, the 19th century essayist, called illth. The tragedy—the Tragedy of the Market, one might say—is that it has to create problems and needs, or the gears will grind to a halt...
But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth?

Tragedy & Market Across Frontiers: George Orwell… meet Franz Kafka: Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes
These are, in fact, documents of shame, symbolic of a kind of bureaucratic lawlessness let loose at the heart of our government. They are intent on creating a pseudo-legal basis for replacing the rule of law with the rule of a commander-in-chief. As Robert Kuttner put it in the Boston Globe, For nearly three years, the Bush administration has resorted to the most preposterous fictions to define either locales or categories of people to whom the law does not apply. If you connect the dots, the torture at Abu Ghraib is part of a larger slide toward tyranny as the Bush administration tries to exempt itself from the rule of law.
As justifications for torture, these are the sorts of documents one can imagine finding in the files of some grim third world dictatorship or maybe the former Apartheid regime of South Africa
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