Bush Torture Memos Released

The memos authorizing torture of detainees by the Bush administration Justice Department have been released and can be accessed here. I have read excepts from them on waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the use of "stress positions" and they are a chilling example of artful and intentional deception. These techniques are defined as torture by every code of law in the civilized world. Yet, these memos make them sound as innocuous as blowing your nose. Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish agrees.

Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I've only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any "ticking time bomb" scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.

Sullivan goes on to point out that Bybee was representing George W. Bush in a clear desire by the President to justify and commit torture. That makes Bush and the other high officials in his administration who approved these atrocities war criminals.

I feel sickened and horrified that these actions were justified and taken in our names as Americans. I feel relieved and proud that President Obama saw fit to release these memos over the objections of several intelligence officials in his administration. A part of his statement on the release of the memos correctly notes that "we have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history."

The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.

I agree that the release of these memos is an essential step toward the full accounting of this issue that our nation desperately needs. I hope that it will be the first step in bringing those responsible to justice in a fair and legal manner.

--Ballard Burgher