And Another Bit

Forgot to mention yesterday that the New York Review of Books early April edition has been supplementing my visits to he worlds of Marquez and Ackrroyd. It's a particularly juicy issue, worth buying just for the review of Margaret Atwood's Payback. Her ferocious intelligence has been letting rip on the whole business of debt and the great novelist has some intriguing things to say. Must get this when it becomes available in paperback.

However, much as I've enjoyed dipping into this particular edition at least two of the essays left me feeling rather down in the dumps regarding the insanity of our species. Richard Bernstein's At Last, Justice for Monsters focusing on the Closing Order Indicting Kaing Guek Eav alias Duch lifted the lid a little on the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. A little in this case felt more than enough. Whilst Mark Danner's US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites pretty much takes the lid off the whole rotten system of 'renditions'. The details of exactly what was done to particular individuals to extract information seen as somehow necessary to winning the 'War on Terror' is monotonously compelling. Danner argues cogently that the information gained wasn't worth much, if anything at all, and that the 'gloves coming off' was a disaster in legal, moral and political terms for the U.S. I've just discovered that there's a follow-up essay from the later April edition posted online which can be read here. I'm preparing to feel even more depressed. Oh, and the original Danner article itself is here.