I was up early this morning. Escorted Kili from the bedroom into the kitchen, scooped cat food into enough dishes to satisfy the early cravings, removed the small rodent that Ms. Annie released in the house while we were eating dinner (by early morning, said rodent had been located and dispatched, then dropped on the kitchen floor), liberated Mr. Toby from the laundry room downstairs where he insisted on exploring last night and got forgotten, checked the local headlines, and went back to bed for another 30 minutes of sleep. For good or ill, not an untypical start for the day.
Reading this week’s accounts of the newly disclosed round of secret Justice (sic) Department memos authorizing torture of detainees and listening to comments of former DOJ Jack Goldsmith about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the administration, I couldn’t help recalling the vivid accounts of the bureaucratization of genocide in Raul Hilberg’s tome, Destruction of the European Jews.
Meda and I both waded through Hilberg years ago when trying to understand both the reality of WWII in Europe and the ways that the modern war crimes can be carried out by regular people following orders and “just” doing their jobs. Now we have this contemporary example of the same dynamics, torture authorized by nice people just doing their jobs. Very hard reading.
And speaking of the Nazi period, Secrecy News reports on another lesson recently taught by the process of declassifying records from that time.
The State Senate has made a number of documents subpoenaed in its probe of the Bureau of Conveyances available online. These are the raw materials of their investigation.
How about more musings on the future of newspapers, this time from tech writer John Dvorak.
A reader points to this story as an example of why English food is so bad: ” They can’t even breath near a Thai restaurant. Wimpy, Wimpy, Wimpy.”
Finally, it’s Friday, so time for a few more felines. Click on Mr. Toby, below, for your feline fix, or the sunrise for my collection of favorites from month of August. September “coming soon”.
1 response so far ↓
1 LarryG // Oct 5, 2007 at 6:18 am
“Torture authorized by nice people just doing their jobs” … ???
Sorry, but this phrase doesn’t compute. My brain cannot process it. Nice people don’t authorize torture, criminals do. Nor did anyone make them do this job. In order to torture or to authorize torture one has to make a personal decision to do it. Like any other job, the individual has a choice to quit and find another, but those who torture have chosen to stick with it.
There’s a far greater question here, more than can be accommodated in a mere comment. These people not only torture but are complicit in millions of deaths.
Not only are they not nice people, but we have to begin, at some point, to question our own role in allowing them to “do their jobs.”
It used to be that overseas one could still hear that Americans are ok, it’s just that their government is bad. This distinction seems to be disappearing. We have not stopped the torture or the killing and so it’s getting harder to separate the war crimes of government from the war crimes of people who continue to support the government’s actions. This is not to say that there are not large numbers of people who oppose the killing. We march, we blog, then we go about our lives while it continues. This is a dilemma, but it is also a collective failure.
You must log in to post a comment.