Just back from a very pleasant few days in Dorset. We stayed close to Corfe Castle, a rather Tolkienesque ruin.
![corfe_castle](http://web.archive.org./web/20111010005455im_/http://www.chickyog.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/corfe_castle1.jpg)
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Back in the day, when the castle was a going concern with a king and serfs and whatnot, it was host to an oubliette, a dungeon into which those who were cast had no hope or means of escape.
![corfe_castle_oubliette](http://web.archive.org./web/20111010005455im_/http://www.chickyog.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/corfe_castle_oubliette1.jpg)
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And reading that, I thought it’s easy to believe that we haven’t really come very far in the last thousand years. Disappear into Bagram and the ‘blunt force trauma‘ means you aren’t coming out. Disappear into custody in Iraq and the fists and boots of your liberators ensure you’re there forever. Disappear into Guantanamo and no amount of heartfelt bleating from a Nobel Peace Prize winner can save you. Due process goes out the window on a whim.
As grim coincidence would have it, my holiday reading was the brilliant The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod (Lenin has a good, spoiler-free review – ‘fucking terrifying’ is right). Set in an alternative near future where the atrocities of The War Against Terror have come home to the UK, one of the characters visits a US black prison on British soil:
Paulson flinched back. The stench became almost overpowering: shit, piss, vomit, unwashed bodies, the iron whiff of blood. He had expected the noise to be as bad as the smell, but it wasn’t: quiet voices, moans, weeping, the growling of dogs. He took a grip on himself and walked forward. The floor and walls were bare concrete that seeped condensation. There was one row of ten cages, of which eight were occupied. There was plenty of room to pass the outstretched arms.
I remember reading a quote by Philip K Dick about him pondering a sequel to his own masterpiece of alternate history The Man In The High Castle. The novel is set in a 1962 where the Axis powers have won the Second World War:
I did 7 years of research for Man In The High Castle. [...] I had prime source material at the Berkeley Cal Library from the Gestapo that they had seized after WW II. It was marked, for the eyes of the higher police only. The higher police is their term for – I was forced to read Gestapo diaries, the Gestapo men in Warsaw, Gestapo agents. I had to read that stuff. I had to sit there because you couldn’t take it out of the library. You had to read it in the stacks. I had to read what those guys wrote in their private journals to write Man In The High Castle. And that’s why I’ve never written a sequel to it. Because it’s too horrible. It’s too awful.
It sounds very much like MacLeod forced his mind to visit other such awful places. I wonder if Blair, Bush, Obama, David Miliband and other grim fellow enablers ever did or do. Now you can. Read about all what’s been done in our names to keep us ‘safe’. And did you hear the one about Binyam Mohamed’s genitals?