MUST READ: "THE BANALITY OF EVIL!"

THIS IS FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN'S BLOG on the recent release by the Obama Justice Department of the horrific memos from the Bush-Cheney administration rationalizing the useless, inhuman and inhumane torture techniques used for years... and for what reason?

Here's Andrew:

"Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I've only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artifact 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.
I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith."