Here we are, because time has some of the qualities of a tsunami, deposited in 2005, whether we like it or not. As the year changed, nature trumped the Bush administration in an appropriately, if horrifyingly Biblical way, with a preemptive strike against shorelines jammed with rich tourists and poor peasants alike. And even in the midst of the collective horror, much of what the Bush administration is, much of whom we now are becoming, showed through unbecomingly.

Only one small spot in the vast Indian Ocean basin “seems to have received full advanced warning of the waves to come — the ostensibly British island of Diego Garcia, which is actually a sizeable U.S. military base, a stationary “aircraft carrier” for the war in Iraq. It also houses “Camp Justice,” one of the secret little hideaway resorts the administration has set up, or contracted out for, on prime global real estate to hold “high value” prisoners in the war on terror. The camp, named by someone who must have had a yen for the Orwellian, is part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by the Bush administration — two interlinked prison systems, in fact; one run by the Pentagon and the other by the CIA, both meant to keep prisoners and practices far from the prying eyes of the American public and its court system; both, as it now turns out, anchored in that jewel-in-the-crown, Guantanamo (or Gitmo to devotees) — a grim prison camp set up on territory in Cuba that is close at hand, U.S.-controlled, and yet — or so Bush officials hoped until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year — beyond the reach of our courts.

On military bases like Diego Garcia and in special military- or CIA-controlled prisons like Guantanamo, the “war on terrorism” was to be carried to its informational climax by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might “break” whatever prisoners we had. Whether in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, on Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, on U.S. Navy ships at sea, or outsourced to the friendly jails of allied nations whose interrogators practice torture, this varied and ever developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of criminal imprisonment — hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for “World War IV,” the war after the Cold War and expected by neocon devotees to last at least as long. Now, according to the latest report from Dana Priest of the Washington Post (1/2/05), the administration is considering exactly how to turn forever into a series of post-penal establishments c

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