From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, August 19
BBC News — read the full story
The phone rang. A child's voice, alone in a car surrounded by rubble. B.B.C. reports that Israel has now confirmed its soldiers fired the shots that killed five-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza — and opened a criminal investigation, a rare official acknowledgment in a conflict where such admissions are nearly absent. She had survived the initial volley and called for help before she died; her body was found with six relatives in the vehicle. Hypayshia has the first word, then Marcus Aurelius.
The law has confessed its own hand. That is the shape of it , not the child, not the six relatives, not the hours between the first shot and the recovery. The law has said: ... our hands held the weapon. In Alexandria we knew this geometry. The governor issued edicts. The bishop issued anathemas. The mob carried stones. Each claimed the name of justice.
None could judge the others, because the power to judge requires a standpoint outside the violence , and no standpoint outside the violence existed. A criminal investigation opened by the body that committed the act. The investigator and the investigated share a payroll, a chain of command, a flag. This is not a contradiction. It is a tautology. The law investigates itself and calls the result justice. We called it nomos when it moved, bia when it struck, and wondered whether the distance between them could ever be measured. The child called for help. The recording exists.
The law heard it. The law fired anyway. The law now investigates the law's own fingers on the trigger. The necessary question is not whether the investigation will find fault. The necessary question is whether a system that generates this outcome can produce any verdict except the one that preserves the system. The soul leaves the body. A trace of life remains , hair grows, nails lengthen, the voice on the recording still pleads. The trace soon disappears. The investigation will outlast it.
reasonable to assign the heart as seat of the trace of the soul which constitutes anger; for the heart is not the seat of the soul, but the source of the (arterially) circulating blood. WHEN THE SOUL LEAVES THE BODY, SHE LEAVES A TRACE OF LIFE. 29. If the body resemble an object …
that their death was nothing serious. To die early in wars and battles is to precede by only a very little time the unescapable fate of old age, and it is only an earlier departure for a closer return. We may be comforted for the loss of our possessions during our lifetime by obs…
Any person driving or operating an automobile or motor vehicle shall at the request, or signal by putting up the hand, or by other visible signal from a person riding or driving a horse or horses or other domestic animal, cause such vehicle or machine to come to a standstill as q…
(it is a good) not because the soul is united to the body, but because she repels evil by virtue. (Without the latter) death would rather be a good (because it delivers us from the body[320]). To resume: by itself, life in a body is evil; but, by virtue, the soul locates herself …
assisted by the soul which communicated life to it, nor by the actualization of this soul, how should life remain in the body? What! Has this life perished? No: this life itself has not perished, for it is only the image of an irradiation; it would not be correct to say more than…
The legionary who looses the arrow does not ask the child's name. The centurion who orders the volley does not hear the plea that follows. You knew this at Carnuntum, when the Sarmatian raiders drove families before them and our screening fire took more than warriors. The report reaches Rome sanitized , "engagement," "collateral," "under investigation." The investigation is the ritual by... which the machine absolves itself. Open it, close it, file it. The five-year-old who survived the first burst and called into the dark for hours , her voice does not appear in the docket.
Nor the six relatives folded around her. You have signed such orders, Marcus. You have read the after-action reports that never mention the sound a mother makes when the dust settles. The criminal investigation is new. Rare. That means the pressure exceeded the usual tolerance... But do not mistake the investigation for justice.
Justice would have been the order that forbade the shot. Justice would have been the discipline that held the line when the target blurred. The investigation is the empire protecting its own self-image. You will find, Marcus, that the file closes long before the memory does. The child's voice remains in the tent at night. Hear it. Let it stay.
Do not let the report silence it.
a crowded thoroughfare. See the people falling over each other nearly, to get away from the path of the cab.” “A fair example of the present rule of things,” said Don Enrique Arellano. “But I believe, my friend,” said Rev. Isaac Tombstone, “that exceptions to the law are made, in…
bodies, Guillermo Gonzales addressed them and said: “Your Honor, Miss Hinckley, and friends, yonder lies the dead body of Rev. J. T. Note, an aider and abettor of the rebels. He is not dead by means of Ebony Fluid, it does not cause the state called death, but from remorse of con…
City. She said that she was left an orphan after he had robbed her father, and her struggles for a livelihood, alone and unprotected, were, even yet, when she thought of them, a horrible nightmare to her. No further witnesses were called, nor did others present themselves. Judge …
Guillermo Gonzales replied: “We are not here to discuss what his Honor knows about ‘Memory Fluid,’ but to fully examine the corpse in this box. Stand close by, friends. I will make the first incision.” Aghast with horror, the two prisoners and the remaining officers of law steppe…
humanity will look upon the testimony as out of the reason of man. But when all _understand_, the full force of the argument will be to them the most rational thing on earth. “There is a divine law which proceeds from the ‘powers that be,’ which says that there must be an adjustm…
B.B.C. carried this piece. A state confessing its own hand in a child's death is rare enough to mark — rarer still that the confession came through force of evidence rather than conscience. That's Old News for today.