This is exactly right:

If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?

On Thursday, the Department of Justice released four secret torture memos generated by Bush Administration legal officials in answer to questions about the legality of using interrogation techniques designed to stress, humiliate, terrorize, and inflict pain on detainees who CIA and other officials said may have information about terrorist attacks or plans. It appears that American professionals trained in the law were no less susceptible to moral depravity than those trained in medicine.

Like Mr. Sullivan, I think it is important to be clear just what happened here: American officers, professionals in our military and intelligence services, held as prisoners without due process or legal protection human beings (who, we claim, possess inalienable rights endowed by our creator) on the simple unproven belief by fellow officers that these people had information.  To force this information from them, these officers kept them in solitary confinement, refused them food and water, and inflicted sadistic treatment on them.  This treatment included striking them, water boarding them, placing them in small spaces to cause muscle pain, and sleep deprivation, among other things.  None of these professionals stopped to wonder at the moral or ethical implications of treating other human beings in this fashion–at least not enough to stop doing so.  They were instead concerned only with covering their legal asses.

Any human being that can bring him or herself to this level of sadism has no claim to morality of any kind.  That many if not all of the people who found themselves capable of doing so call themselves Christians says all you need to know about the current state of the worship of God and his role in the lives of Christians in America.  From here out we can cut the “no morality without religion bullshit.”

Jay Bybee (now a federal judge) and Steven Bradbury, the authors of these memos, show a shocking level of professionalized moral depravity.  That these legal experts found a way to normalize and professionalize such sick, twisted, sadistic treatment of one human being by another makes clear that American leadership, at least under George Bush and Dick Cheney, wallowed as deeply in the mud of fear and loathing of others as the most provincial of uneducated fools in the darkest backwater of American society.

We haven’t come so far as I had thought.  Our ancestors were capable of murdering indigenous Americans just because the occupied land wanted by the colonists (John Wayne says it clearly: “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”).  The American elite class held as slaves human beings, and even managed to enshrine the institution in our founding documents.  Today we continue in a long American tradition of destroying our own souls out of greed and fear.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Tags: Torture