Masters of humanity. posted by Richard Seymour

Fawzi al-Odah weighed just 44.5kg (7st) last week when his lawyer, Thomas Wilner, visited him in Guantánamo. In August 2002 he weighed 63.5kg (10st). The young Kuwaiti is one of the hundred or so men in the US prison camp who have been on sporadic hunger strikes since August. During Wilner's previous visit in September, he tried, on Fawzi's father's instructions, to persuade him to end his hunger strike. But Fawzi told him: "Tell my father I'm trying to be a hero like him, and if he was here he would do the same as I am doing." Khalid al-Odah, Fawzi's father, was a US-trained Kuwaiti fighter pilot who fought in the underground during the Iraqi invasion.

...

Fawzi was a university student in Kuwait who spent two vacations teaching in poor areas of Pakistan, and who went on to help refugees on the Afghan border when they fled US bombing in October 2001. Those who sold them to the Pakistani authorities, who handed them over to the Americans, told both US reporting teams that the soft city boys from Kuwait were clearly nothing to do with any of the Afghan fighters.

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Another of Wilner's clients is Abdullah al-Kandari, who was on the Kuwaiti national volleyball team. Wilner saw him changed by the hunger strike from a happy, outgoing, strongly pro-American young man to a withdrawn, cadaverous, weak figure. Abdullah was one of those who shouted out to the visiting Congressional delegation that they were not being told the truth. He was punished.

Wilner's affidavits on these two prisoners and another, Saad al-Azmi, who was sexually harassed by his female interrogator, reveal that cruel and unusual punishment is still the order of the day in Guantánamo.

There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that.

Our beliefs in equality, etc.. are not shared by them; they are the ruling class, and keenly aware of it. They are, I suspect, exactly like Jane Austen's gentry - sensitive to their standing among their own, but without guilt or compassion at all for the vast majority of the planet's population; everyone not at their level is weather, workhouse, rubbish and landscape. Too often we tend to imagine them, to portray them in our speculations, as psychologically similar to ourselves, as belonging to our culture. They aren't - this is evident - and they don't.

This is of course perfectly normal for ruling classes. It would be very unusual - unprecedented -if the few thousands rulers of our world were not really genuinely as indifferent to the views and pains and needs of most people as we are to those of cockroaches. They are much more powerful vis à vis the public now and much more removed from it than Polish counts were in the 17th century, and their laws - as Simon Schama records in Landscape and Memory - stated that nobles on hunting trips in winter were limited to killing only two peasants to warm their extremities in their blood on the way back home. There is an illusion that because we don't think of them as a superior race of beings, they don't think of us as disposable resources of no account, but of course they do, as every single action of theirs every single day demonstrates unequivocally.