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once again, i only have a couple minutes while i finish my last cup o joe before pitching outward...
the main reason that i have trouble with the abstracting of this use of torture by the cia out of its context, so out of its institutional framework, is that it is the bureaucratoc framework itself that makes this kind of thing so problematic. we've touched on this from time to time--doing one's job, compartmentalization: the way in which one's functions in a bureaucratic setting fragment the understanding, separating for example what's normal as part of the job from its effects--the extreme case is the holocaust which would not have been possible without an entire bureaucracy devoted to murder as an administrative matter....a bureaucracy, for all its efficiencies at the level of information movement from place to place etc, is a really stupid system in that ANYTHING can theoretically be made a normal objective, reduced to an administrative problem, worked on by absolutely regular folk like you and me with no malicious intent who just do their 9-5 the best they can....this is not to say that the fact of being in such a position changes anything about the outcomes--torture is still torture---but it does explain how it is that the starting place of an isolated or abstract individual standing in no particular place may describe how you or i writing here might react to this information, but in terms of thinking it through with an idea of how one would prevent this sort of thing from happening, it's the wrong place.
if a bureaucracy is a stupid kind of system in that it implements directives without providing space to think about the directives, and this as a function of how power is distributed, what a vertical organization is, how it works, then it is the fashioning of the rules that is a particular Problem in this case---i think that the people who worked out this policy should face charges. it is not ok to legitimate torture. it is not ok to create a situation in which torture is routinely applied. because from certain positions of power, it is all too easy to do it. to lapse into theological/ethical language, this process is the banalization of evil.
it's not a coincidence that international conventions that impose limits on technological systems that can be used in combat (gas for example) and human rights conventions (which extends to the geneva conventions) are products of the 20th century, which was a period of the explosion of bureaucratic forms of administration...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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