Chateau d'If Revisited

I was rewatching the miniseries of The Count of Monte Cristo (the version with Gerard Depardieu) the other night, and about five minutes in I came to the jarring realization that I hadn't seen it since...oh, just to pick a date at random...September, 2001.

(It's an excellent adaptation, faithful to the spirit of the original (with the exception of one indefensible alteration) even when it takes liberties with the details. Check it out. Better yet, read the book. Don't bother with the Hollywood version with James Caviezel and Guy Pearce, which my girlfriend refers to as The Count of Monte Crap.)

The miniseries monkeys around with the chronology, and opens with Edmond Dantes already imprisoned in the Chateau d'If. The Chateau d'If was, in historical fact as in the novel, where political prisoners were sent to rot and die--to disappear. It operated without public oversight, without the restrictions of due process. It was the sort of place where a prosecutor like Villefort could put away a nobody like Dantes with nobody to ask any questions; where Dantes could be held indefinitely based on the unsupported claim (by Villefort, covering his tracks) that he was a 'fanatical Bonapartist'; where, in the face of frantic inquiries from family and friends, nobody would confirm or deny his presence there.

So it was just a few minutes into the thing that I realized: the last time I watched this, we didn't have our own Chateau d'If.

For all my outrage and horror at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at the whole off-the-books prison system they've cooked up, it took The Count of Monte Cristo to show me in a visceral way what a tremendous leap backward they represent. The system is a throwback to the days of a state that operated unchecked, in which political power was its own justification. This is the Bush administration's legacy.

The apologists will quibble with my characterization of Guantanamo (or Abu Ghraib) as the equivalent of Chateau d'If; they will argue, for example, that conditions are better now than they were at Chateau d'If. (Based on the e-mails attached to the Taguba report, that's a dubious claim.) The point remains: we now have prisons where people can be--are--held indefinitely as suspects. Without being charged. Without lawyers. Without (in some cases) anybody even knowing they're there.

Yes, the Supreme Court has ruled against the administration (stung, perhaps, by the knowledge that when the Justice Department attorney said we don't torture prisoners he was lying through his ass). In theory, prisoners now have recourse to the civil justice system--introducing, in theory, a level of oversight. Yes, the Pentagon released a bunch of prisoners to make a show of good faith (but how long have they known these guys were innocent?). I'll take good news where I can get it these days. But damn...if the only good news is that the horrible news may be ever so slightly mitigated, things are really pretty bad. This should never have happened in the first place.

When I read the novel, when I first watched the miniseries, I was able to think (without even being aware I was thinking it): we don't do that; we're better than that. Now I can't. Now none of us can.