This is from the interview below.
And this is what makes the fact that there’s even something called “the torture debate” so ridiculous. This debate, quote-unquote, has been settled not for decades but centuries. Everything that we did as part of the war on terror, in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal, pretty much across cultural and social lines. (And the United States has prosecuted people as war criminalsfor doing things we did.)
So it’s not even a debate. There’s no debate. [The program's] defilement [of the United States] is self-evident and indisputable.
But first, lets connect today's news with the political theorist, Hannah Arendt
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt
From wikipedia
In her reporting of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the phenomenon of Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.
Our government, politicians and military, and the media used the hysteria of terrorism to follow Richard Bruce Cheney to "the dark side" continue below the squiggle on the Torture report released yesterday
The reason that story is so horrifying is because it’s the process of dehumanization. It’s literally removing what is human about us. There was a detailed account of what happened in what they called “the Salt Pit” — the prison in Afghanistan, where they literally froze people to death — ...
Psychological torture is, [it's believed] pretty much by consensus, worse than physical torture if it’s done at an extreme level. John McCain said that for him, by far, the worst part of captivity in North Vietnam was the isolation and the psychological torment — not the physical torture to which he was subjected quite extensively. There are studies about how people go insane if they’re kept in solitary confinement in American prisons in a way that doesn’t happen if the soles of your feet are beaten or you’re forced into stress-positions. And so much of this [program] was about dehumanization. It had nothing to do with interrogation; it was about exploitation and control. It was about the assertion of power.
And that’s what makes it so evil. Detainees are, by definition, helpless; they’re captive. So to completely brutalize them and remove their humanity is really worse than anything you could do to someone physically, including killing them. It’s basically like being dead while alive.
I added the bold in all these quotations.
We are now witnessing responsible actors hiding behind a scapegoat, the CIA.
Do Americans have the courage to face up to who we are? Or do we wait breathlessly for the Chuck Todd interview of Richard Bruce Cheney this weekend?
A war criminal who sullied the reputation of the US is trotted out to tell us that he saved us from the terrible Muslims. It has been said millions of times, but our "war on terror" supporting media doesn't make the connection, that the chances of death from slipping in the bathtub are more than from a terrorist. Unless you help women in an abortion clinic, then you are a target of terrorism.
I think there are several similar dynamics. For one thing, after World War II, when the full history got told, lots of people who had every way to know what was happening under their noses pretended they didn’t because the recognition of their complicity was just too painful. So they denied it and pretended they didn’t know and claimed that, had they known, they would have reacted a lot more strongly. That reminds me a lot of Tuesday’s reaction on the part of political and media circles in the United States.
But the broad strokes of the program and what the CIA did have long been known — for years — and I think what was more important about Tuesday was the ritual of official Washington finally admitting it.
If I had to identify one key point from Tuesday, the thing that bothered me most about the narrative: Yes, the CIA goes off on its own and does things that political officials don’t know about; and yes, they mislead and lie to the committees that oversee them; and they do all these horrible things, the details of which are sometimes unknown to the political branches — but that’s how Washington wants it.
They’ve always wanted it that way. That’s what the CIA does. The CIA does the dirty work of the political branches of Washington and when they get caught, publicly, the ritual is that official Washington pretends that it was just these rogue CIA officers doing this without anyone’s knowledge or approval. ....
That’s just the ritual Washington engages in; the CIA is kind of like their wild pit bull that they purposely let off leash. They don’t want to see the mauling but they know that it’s happening, and pretend they don’t know. And when it gets reported, they pretend that they’re horrified.
EXCLUSIVE: “Corrupt, toxic and sociopathic”: Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul Glenn Greenwald tells Salon how the torture report exposes true evil — and a nation drowning in hypocrisy