The Banality Of Evil

[ProSense]

16 Apr 2009

The Banality Of Evil

Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I've only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any "ticking time bomb" scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect. I say "almost" because even Jay Bybee, in this unprofessional travesty of lawyering, stipulates that these techniques might be combined successively in any ways that could cumulatively become torture even in his absurd redefinition of the term. And yet the ICRC report shows, as one might imagine, that outside these specious legalisms, such distinctions never hold in practice. And they didn't. Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.

Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes. And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day since Cheney decided to turn the US into a torturing country until now.

Stay tuned as I try to unpack and make sense of these documents. There is some feeling of relief that we now have the incontrovertible evidence in front of us. But there is also a feeling of great nausea as well. Look what they did to these suspects. And look what they did to America.

[lunatica]

1. I hope time ends up being on the right side

Everyone fears that Americans have the attention span of a flea, but I disagree with that. It only appears that way in the short term. Time tells a lot about human memory and it shows that in one ear doesn't signify out the other. Some stuff sticks between the ears as memory which is stored out of sight till it's needed.

More of us remember Bush's selection now than we did two or three years after it happened.

[Spazito]

2. Very powerful...

Thanks for posting this, it is much appreciated.

Recommended.

[ProSense]

3. The Banality Of Evil, Ctd

17 Apr 2009

The Banality Of Evil, Ctd

"I don't see it as a dark chapter in our history at all," - Charles Krauthammer, yesterday.

"The pictures are shocking and the practices appalling," - Charles Krauthammer, on Abu Ghraib, May 14, 2004.

As we now know, Bush and Cheney authorized torture techniques much worse than what we saw at Abu Ghraib, and as we now know, the techniques revealed at Abu Ghraib were garbled copies of practices already endorsed and authorized by the Bush White House. So what can possibly account for Krauthammer's shock at Abu Ghraib and pride in the torture program? That one was poorly organized and leaked? Or that Krauthammer's friends are now to be held responsible rather than reservists thrown into the deep end of the Rumsfeld gulag?

Or put it another way: imagine if an American operative out of uniform were captured by the Iranians tomorrow. Imagine he were put into a coffin for hours with no light and barely enough air to breathe, imagine if he were then removed and smashed against a plywood wall by a towel tied around his neck thirty times, imagine if he were then kept awake for eleven days in a row, then kept in a cell frozen to hypothermia levels, and then waterboarded multiple times, after which he confessed to being a spy trying to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. Would you believe that intelligence? Would Krauthammer? Would you believe both that he wasn't tortured and that the information he gave was reliable? That is what an otherwise intelligent human being is asking us to do not just in one case but in hundreds, in many of which the prisoner actually died under interrogation.

Would he also insist that what was done to the prisoner, however awful, could not be called torture under American law and the Geneva Conventions? Now imagine that the International Red Cross eventually got access to the prisoner and judged his treatment unequivocally torture; and that the Iranians claimed that since they merely applied "an alternative set of procedures" in order to gain critical intelligence that might have prevented a nuclear accident or sabotage, and remain in compliance with international treaties.

Can you imagine Krauthammer agreeing with Iran? And siding against the Red Cross? These are, of course, rhetorical questions. On every point, Krauthammer's moral and ethical standards are entirely dependent on who is torturing whom. If we do it, it's moral and it works. If they do it, it's evil and misleading.

It is important to note that this is underlying moral position of the leading conservative intellectual in Washington. And they say power doesn't corrupt.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. The Evil of Banality

:evilgrin:

[annabanana]

5. There IS no "making sense" of this.

It is unconscionable under any circumstances. All reasonable people can see this.

I believe that there will be prosecutions, because there can't NOT be.

[depakid]

6. Those were my thoughts almost exactly as I perused the documents

As disturbing as the memos were- more disturbing still is that Bybee's on the federal bench (with lifetime tenure?).

Might be a good time for Americans to read (or review) Arendt's classic work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem