Thank you, President Obama, for making a difficult and important moral decision yesterday to release the four OLC memos that institutionalized the Bush torture regime. Reading through these memos is a gut-wrenching, nauseating, and essential experience.
It's essential because, as digby describes it shows the process by which torture became policy.
The phrase "banality of evil" is very overused, I realized. But this is a case where it applies. Bybee writes as just another corporate-style lawyer finding a legal rationale for his client to do what he wants to do. Happens every day, no big deal. Except that he's writing memos justifying using techniques that have been known to be torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition.
Oh sure, he says it needs to be "medically supervised" and performed by only those who are "qualified" which makes it all bureaucratically neat and tidy. And he consistently asserts the twisted logic that because American military people had come through the SERE training without suffering any lasting harm, that prisoners would also suffer no lasting harm, which not only makes no sense, but gives him a quasi-legal and moral justification for perpetrating despicable acts. Everything is very sterile and very controlled. And that's what makes this opinion so chilling....
Bybee and Yoo and Addington and all those lawyers in the Bush administration who worked on this . . . obviously knew they were legally exposed, they researched the issue and in the course of that must have read the reasoning behind the laws they were seeking to circumvent. They weren't mere functionaries carrying out orders, as you might be able to argue the actual torturers were. (Which also wasn't considered adequate at Nuremberg, but never mind... )These were lawyers who were actively engaged in creating a legal rationale for something they clearly understood was controversial and which required them to think about what they were doing on a deeper level than someone like Eichman.
The psychology may have been the same --- they were just doing their jobs. But the act of doing their jobs required a consciousness that goes beyond the average bureaucrat, even the average Nazi bureaucrat ca. 1942. They thought it through.
It's chilling, and it's the strongest argument possible for not turning the page on this chapter of American governance. Reading these memos, you can only react viscerally and it's difficult to keep from concluding that these were evil people. But labeling the torture regime as the outgrowth of evil is too easy, it's too simplistic. And it's utterly inadequate if we want to make sure that this never happens again.
The process by which our government came not only to torture, but through torturous logic try to convince themselves that it was legal is not just the product of evil. It's the product of excessive, unchecked power that has proven far too easy to seize, to hold, and to exercise.
And we can't allow that to happen again.
That's why, at the very least, there must be investigations. Whether through the special prosecutor that the ACLU has called for, or Senator Leahy's proposal for a commission of inquiry, America has to know how this happened, gruesome step by gruesome step. There is no other way to prevent it from happening again.
And on that note, it's important to note that neither President Obama or Eric Holder completely ruled out the possibility of investigations/prosecutions, as Ambinder notes:
Senior administration officials have made it clear to me: neither President Obama's statement nor Attorney General Holder's words were meant to foreclose the possibility of prosecuting CIA officers who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.
So it's not correct to say that the administration granted blanket immunity to anyone.
But it won't happen without a concerted effort by the body politic--that's us--making it happen. We saw the political backlash that the administration was subject to just with the release of these memos. There will be unceasing political pressure on the administration to close this book. President Obama and our Democratic Congress need at least equal pressure from the majority of the American public who think that torture is not ok to do this.
To that end, both the ACLU and FDL have petitions urging Eric Holder to immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor.
Yesterday's revelations were so heinous that even Fred Hiatt's WaPo editorial page thinks that investigations are warranted. The Villagers might just be catching up to us. And speaking for "us," here's the Nation's Ari Melber making the case that the public wants illegal torture to be investigated.
Torture in our names can never happen again on our watch. We have to make sure it doesn't. Sign the petitions linked above. Contact the White House. Contact your senators and ask them to support Sen. Leahy in his commission.