This one hit with a lot of force:
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 4 — A detainee at the military detention camp here cut his throat with his own fingernail...
"Suicidal gestures" is the Pentaspeak for this: prisoners are only trying to elicit attention and sympathy. Well, yes. "Sympathize with me; I am locked up and I am mute to the world. How do I speak?"
"Suicidal gestures" is the Pentaspeak for this. It strikes me as something more.
Something like Elaine Scarry's description of the sheer force of human pain, finally, fundamentally, uncommunicable:
"Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language."
--Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985)
I don't really know why this is a diary. I know it's short, and it's not very analytical or substantive. But the mental image of an act like that announced at the top of this just cries out for some sort of acknowledgment.
And this one hit with a lot of force too:
During interviews with reporters today, officials said that nine detainees remain on hunger strikes and are being force fed daily. The longest of those hunger strikers, the officials said, has been force fed for 816 days.