Bye Bye Bybee
Marty Kaplan
HuffPost
It will be the playwrights and screenwriters, not the journalists and historians, who will some day get the torture story right. It will be the poets and novelists, not the philosophers and clergy, who will take us to the heart of that darkness. It will be the artists and satirists, not the law and the lawyers, who will eventually haul this decade to the bar of justice.
It is tempting to read the legalistic redefinition of torture in the top secret memos by Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo as a case study of the banality of evil. In this account, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld tasked the Bush Justice Department to reverse-engineer a rationale for doing whatever the White House asked the CIA to do to terrorist suspects, and his supine clerks obligingly generated a preemptive update of the "only following orders" defense.
Alternatively, it is possible to read those memos as shocking evidence of the criminality of their authors and the moral monstrousness of those who commissioned them. The White House, the CIA and the Justice Department knew full well that the law defined waterboarding as torture; that the Geneva Convention outlawed torture; that the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation warned that torture produces only phony confessions and wild goose chases. Seeing the "depths of human misery and degradation" being unnecessarily inflicted on prisoners had -- in the words of a senior American intelligence official quoted in The New York Times -- "a traumatic effect" on their American captors. And yet the Bush administration persisted with these "enhanced interrogation techniques," arguably because the intrinsic satisfactions of vengeance were warrant enough for sadism.
(More here.)
HuffPost
It will be the playwrights and screenwriters, not the journalists and historians, who will some day get the torture story right. It will be the poets and novelists, not the philosophers and clergy, who will take us to the heart of that darkness. It will be the artists and satirists, not the law and the lawyers, who will eventually haul this decade to the bar of justice.
It is tempting to read the legalistic redefinition of torture in the top secret memos by Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo as a case study of the banality of evil. In this account, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld tasked the Bush Justice Department to reverse-engineer a rationale for doing whatever the White House asked the CIA to do to terrorist suspects, and his supine clerks obligingly generated a preemptive update of the "only following orders" defense.
Alternatively, it is possible to read those memos as shocking evidence of the criminality of their authors and the moral monstrousness of those who commissioned them. The White House, the CIA and the Justice Department knew full well that the law defined waterboarding as torture; that the Geneva Convention outlawed torture; that the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation warned that torture produces only phony confessions and wild goose chases. Seeing the "depths of human misery and degradation" being unnecessarily inflicted on prisoners had -- in the words of a senior American intelligence official quoted in The New York Times -- "a traumatic effect" on their American captors. And yet the Bush administration persisted with these "enhanced interrogation techniques," arguably because the intrinsic satisfactions of vengeance were warrant enough for sadism.
(More here.)
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