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Revealing the Secrets in Room 101

Scott Horton, a lawyer, who writes for Harper's Magazine, analyses those Memos about torture by the CIA released this past week and how they ought to be properly dealt with, including by President Obama. Horton takes us back to George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four [including a video clip of the movie] and how it is relevant to what has happened in the US.......

"On Thursday the spirit of George Orwell visited America, three times.

The first visit can be found in four memoranda prepared by Bush Administration lawyers which gave the actual go-ahead for the use of specific torture techniques on specific individuals, thus demolishing forever the absurd contention that the torture lawyers were ever only engaged in some abstract exercise without any direct application to incidents of torture. Here, we discover that Room 101 of the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) has been faithfully recreated by the Bush Team. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Room 101 contained whatever a prisoner feared most, which would be let loose against him in an act calculated to inspire pure terror in the victim, to break him as an individual and to produce human material suitable for reconditioning."

Continue reading this important piece here.

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