I’ve spent a good part of the past twenty-four hours mulling over the torture memos.

I want to start by giving props to the always brilliant (and observant) Hilzoy, who like many others noted a particularly horrific section of the 2002 Bybee-Yoo memo:

Hilzoy then notes the following passage in George Orwell’s 1984:

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “What was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

“In your case,” said O’Brien, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

“The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

There are no words for how appalling it is that our government — our government — approved the use of techniques that not only replicate those used by the world’s worst dictatorships, but also freinvented the worst nightmare that George Orwell, our poet-laureate of totalitarianism, could possibly imagine.  As one commenter on Hilzoy’s post noted, “Some people read 1984 and think of it as a warning.  For others, it is a training manual.”

I am reminded of what Hannah Arendt said about the bureaucracy of torture in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil (emphasis original):

[W]hen I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at at [Eichmann's] trial. . . Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely. . .never realized what he was doing. . . . He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness. . . .

We had heard the protestations of the defense the Eichmann was after all only a “tiny cog” in the machinery of the FInal Solution, and of the prosecution, which believed it had discoverd in Eichmann the actual motor. . . .  In its judgment, the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of a government.  But insofar as it remains a crime — and that, of course, is the premise for a trial — all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.

If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime — which set forth that so-and-so many crimes per day are committed in such-and-such a place. . . and declared that he not only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that those responsible for implementing the policies outlined in these memos are Nazis or Soviets or their contemporary equivalents.  Despite the fevered imaginations of the far right (re Obama) and far left (re Bush), we remain a democracy in which citizens still enjoy considerable rights.

But to suggest that those who designed and implemented this policy should not be held responsible involves pretending that individuals — – human beings — played no role in the machinery of torture.  That includes not only those who came up with the idea, but also those who developed the legal justification for it, those responsible for doing it, and — no matter how reprehensible these individuals’ crimes may be — those whose who were victims of it.

Taking — and demanding — responsibility is, after all, one of the fundamental tenets of every religious belief system.   Those responsible for allowing this to happen must be held accountable.  Yes, history will judge.  But so should our legal system.

The question here is not what kind of society we are but rather what kind of society we aspire to be.  Although we have often failed to live up to the vision of the founders, we always have believed that the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln’s phrase, would overcome our darkest impulses.

In the end, however, our better angels cannot triumph if we do not acknowledge our mistakes.  For that to happen, we must accept our own responsibility.  Each and every one of us (by which I mean each and every American citizen) must recognize that we did not prevent the Bush Administration from implementing these practices.  And even when we found out, we did nothing — or did not do enough — to stop it.

So in the end, who is responsible?  Who is accountable?

I am.

You are.

All of us are.

We have met the torturer, and he is us.

Related posts

• Torture: Something Old, Something New
• Thought of the Day: AIG and Torture
• The Torture Memos: The Two John McCains
• The New Executive Orders: Guantanamo, Torture, Detainees
• SERE-ing the Conscience