The House
Judiciary committee met yesterday to revisit the infamous "Torture Memos"
written by John Yoo and David Addington. I was lucky enough to be there, so I must write about it.

These are the memos are the one with the quote
about how it's okay up until pain "equivalent to organ failure." (I don't know how they quite figure that one. When you torture a
subject, do you regularly check in: "so, do you feel like one of your
organs is failing?")


Yoo is a U.C. Berkeley law professor who works for the Department of Justice - here's his swanky faculty page.
(I can only hope that the Bears are protesting him on a regular basis.)
David Addington is the Department of Defense's homeboy in the White
House. Here he is. According to Wikipedia, he's an Aquarius.

 
Kurt Vonnegut's great masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five
is about how the human mind shuts down when confronted by things too
horrible to understand. The main character in the novel is Billy
Pilgrim, an American who survives the firebombing of Dresden. Dresden
was the most concentrated massacre in World War II, in which American
incendiary bombs burned 30,000 people to death in two days, and most of
the buildings in the city. 

 
The text of Slaughterhouse Five isn't
about war, or loss, or grief. Most of the book is about Pilgrim's
incredibly complicated mental disassociation that results from
Dresden: he imagines himself kidnapped by aliens and going on episodic
time travel. It's one of the best books ever written about 20th-century
industrial war - because it's not about 20th-century industrial war. We
have not figured out how to write about 20th-century industrial war,
because we have no idea yet how to explain things that are so horrible,
and so vast, that they defy comprehension, let alone description. We
intellectualize them. We speak of them in soft tones, or not at all. Or
we get kidnapped by aliens, and go off into outer space.

 
It
was hard not to feel this type of disassociation today in the hearing.
From 10 a.m. onwards, the committee questioned Yoo and Addington about
their role in designing standards for interrogation that completely
violate the Geneva Convention. It was a smooth. It was a polished and
quiet hearing. It was a formal procedure about whether our President
had authorized the ripping out of fingernails.

 
It was a legal
proceeding, conducted with no more weight than a particularly
contentious local zoning hearing. Although the committeemembers did
get occasionally argumentative, the witnesses refused to divulge any
information that could be later used against them. Outside, Codepink
lined up in the hallway in Abu Ghraib orange jumpsuits spelling out NO
TORTURE, and the mainstream Dems walking by on their way to the Rayburn
deli got annoyed.

 
But to be quite frank, the Pinkers were the only people there who
responded to the matter as any human being would who has blood pumping
through their veins. Torturing people is an atrocity, it is wrong, it
is illegal. If they wrote that memo, and people were tortured - they
should go to jail. End of story.

 
This was an episode of the Nuremberg trials. And all through
it, staffers in the hearing were lounging around and checking their
Blackberries. Or time travelling. I suppose. So it goes.