The Torture Memos, Obama and the Banality of Evil

[laststeamtrain]

The Torture Memos, Obama and the Banality of Evil
posted by Richard Kim on 04/17/2009 @ 2:01pm

Even as President Obama acted in the name of transparency and accountabilty in releasing the Bush administration's OLC's torture memos, he made assurances that the CIA agents who used the "enhanced interrogation techniques" meticulously detailed within would not be subject to criminal prosecution. Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Jeremy Scahill on his blog, David Bromwich at Huffington Post and Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic all have good takes on why Obama's decision is wrong. I concur. However politically expedient, Obama's nearly carte blanche absolution of torture was morally wrong, and his justification of it, from a professor of constitutional law, is intellectually dishonest.

Obama's rationalizations were artfully made to the point of being obfuscatory, but they can be boiled down to three points:

1) The strategic issue of national security. "The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world...We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs."

2) The legal-ethical issue of obedience. The CIA agents were only carrying out "their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice."

3) The political issue of national unity and progress. "This is a time for reflection, not retribution...at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

<snip>

Because in the final analysis, it is highly likely that the CIA agents were just doing their jobs. And that those jobs were, in fact, criminal in nature. This brings me to Obama's last argument, that in essence we need to forget the past and move forward for the good of the country. The substitution here of the political necessity of unity for the constitutional and moral imperative of justice is Bushian to say the least. But perhaps what is most troubling is that our new President would calculatedly deploy his public goodwill to effect a kind of national amnesia in which actions he himself and his attorney general have called illegal and wrong are forgotten in the name of progress. Of course, I can see why he would do so, as a matter of political expediency. But political expediency is not justice.

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http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/427979/the_torture_memos_obama_and_the_banality_of_evil

[burrowowl]

1. I highly recommend

reading the reading of Hanna Arendt "The Banality of Evil"

I had friend who have since died who were in the French Resistance and they were shocked under the RayGun Era, Bu$hCo would have REALLY scared the shit out of them.

[Luminous Animal]

2. Seconded. (n/t)