just a reminder.

Torture is a felony, and is sometimes treated as a capital crime. The Convention Against Torture, which America ratified in 1994, requires a government to prosecute all acts of torture; failure to do so is considered a breach of international law.

Jane Mayer writing in The Secret History: Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past? in the most recent issue of the New Yorker Magazine.

but what about the lawyers

Most of you as new lawyers will soon find it easy to make a buck but find it hard to make a difference. Yes, torture gets results. It has resulted in easier, swifter, more successful recruitment for terrorist organizations among the millions of young Islamic fanatics who are willing to use the one weapon against which an open society such as ours has no sure defense — suicide bombing. It also resulted in a sharp decline in America’s standing among allies who might otherwise have provided intelligence and other forms of help. It has cost us the respect of other countries that we enjoyed, which protected us against attacks from abroad.

Intellectually and morally dishonest lawyers (in the Department of Justice) disgraced not only their country but their profession. In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct. Our current wonderful president cannot promise the CIA practitioners of torture that they will not be prosecuted. With all those now exposed of complicity in torture pointing fingers of blame at each other, it is clear that the guilty include political ideologues, cowardly bureaucrats, and inexperienced psychologists, all of whom plead ignorance of the law. But what about the lawyers?

JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson in a speech delivered last week at the University of Nebraska Law School, as cited in Harper's Magazine.

the hollow men

Illus: Howard Penning

There's a horrible hollow that fills the belly when you wake to the morning and recall the world has changed.

I felt it when my dad was in a coma, each morning wondering fresh if he would survive the day.

Felt it when I learned my husband of 10 years had lied to me most of that decade.

Felt it after death took my friends. My family.

Feel it when I open the paper to read the latest wrestling over what to do, how to confront the horrible things we have done; committed in the name of Freedom, the principle we claim to have built our country on. Felt it when I read this morning's piece by Frank Rich, who also alludes to Hannah Arendt, on The Banality of Bush White House Evil.

The truth about those hollows? They take much time to fill, and they're never entirely whole again.

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us ‑‑ if at all ‑‑ not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

-- T.S. Eliot

the banality of evil

Today the New York Times published the full CIA documents released by the Justice Department on Thursday detailing the interrogation techniques that were approved for use during the Bush Administration and its War on Terror.

The danger, of course, in reading excerpts from these documents before I’ve had my morning coffee is that the hard edges of day haven’t yet supplanted the soft boundaries of dreaming where emotions float close to the surface. Which means that this morning, while reading about how my country, with intent, tortured captives in their custody, I wept.

I knew all this before -- we all did. As President Obama pointed out in his statement on the documents, “the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported.”

It’s the banality that’s horrifying. The simple labels, denuded of intent. The matter of fact assessments of their impacts.

Of Walling, a method in which the interrogator “quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall. ... The head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel ... to help prevent whiplash” it is decided: “while it may hurt ... any pain experienced is not of the intensity associated with serious physical injury.”

Of Wall standing, in which “The individual stands about four to five feet from a wall. ... His arms are stretched out in front of him, with his fingers resting on the wall.” it is decided: “any pain associated with muscle fatigue is not of the intensity sufficient to amount to ‘severe physical pain or suffering’ under the statute, nor, despite its discomfort, can it be said to be difficult to endure.”

Of Waterboarding, the effects of which Christopher Hitchens documented following his own experiments, it is determined: “In the absence of prolonged mental harm, no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted, and the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.” [1]

In his statement President Obama urged that we not prosecute the individuals responsible for the execution of the Bush directives; that we move forward from here because “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

Of course I thought of Arendt when I read that; of her 1963 reflection on Eichmann’s Nuremberg Trial; of her conclusion that:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that there were so many like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic but were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied ... that this new type of criminal, who is indeed hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

A Reporter at Large: Eichmann in Jerusalem V by Hannah Arendt in the 16 March 1963 issue of the New Yorker, p. 132

[1] Explaining and Authorizing Specific Interrogation Techniques in the 17 April 2009 New York Times.