In the time of no time, there is no place either.

'..He'd had a dream that a submarine came to Guantanamo to rescue the detainees. That night, he said, Guantanamo Bay was filled with helicopters and ships with their searchlights on, looking for the dream submarine.' 

--Laurie Anderson (from a remarkable article in The New Yorker).

'One of the saddest parts of the project was hearing from several groups of kids who told me in different ways, somewhat slyly, that they were afraid to talk about Guantanamo because they might get "on some kind of list".' 

'What does your own story sound like to you after so many repetitions, denials, revisions?'

Among the first interrogators was a woman who began the session by saying, "Think of me as your mother." 

'The French pronoun on, as in "one knows" or "one thinks"-our royal we"-becomes more and more mysterious..In the transcripts there are also chilling pauses "No response from the detainee".'

~

I was wondering to myself the other day, thinking about all the fences that are going up in Europe (incidentally, it never ceases to make you laugh that the Israeli's call their wall a "fence"!) And you've never really understood this but it seems that in recent times a lot of white people have been keen on setting up fences, camps and border controls. Think about the Reservations on which native peoples have been kept, allowed to (and probably encouraged to) drown; think of the Camps and the Gulags; think about apartheid; think about the caging of America (which, actually, should be: the caging of black people, not America); and think of that other camp that goes by the name of Gaza. 

People must be processed, she says, without batting an eye. One has to stop, literally stop in one's tracks, and remember that human beings have made soap out of other human beings. 

Of course, all this reminds you of a line that Ubo used to tell you (probably from Orwell): When someone says "a few enemy lines have been obliterated" they really mean: thousands of people have been killed and maimed.

Processed! Thoba! In the old days, when people could write and speak English, one might have heard the phrase, 'one has to go through the process' or, 'your application has been processed'. Cheese is processed, people are not. Really is quite simple when you think about it.

There are no more words. "Up" means "down", and we're all free (Tracy Chapman). Fort-da, Da-da. No response, no response from Zero Eighteen. Zero Eighteen.