Convictions: Slate's blog on legal issues

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Must share this exchange from a session today on international law after Iraq at the American Society of International Law's annual meeting in Washington.

 

Audience member Jason Dominguez, a law professor at Texas Southern University, raised with panelist and U.S. Department of Defense lawyer Sandy Hodgkinson a question comparing the U.S. drive for rapid accountability against leaders of the former Iraqi regime with the rather different approach to domestic accountability for the abuse that Iraqi detainees endured at U.S. hands in the prison in Abu Ghraib. She answered the first part, then stopped. Dominguez's reply—"And as for Abu Ghraib?"—prompted Hodgkinson to a recitation of positive changes in U.S. treatment of the tens of thousands of Iraqis now detained in Iraq. On the list was this:

Indeed.

 

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"Memo to the next president" is the title of Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten's commentary about how hard it will be for the administration that takes office on January 20, 2009, to get the United States out of the complex mess that's typically subsumed within the single word "Guantánamo"—how hard it will be, that is, for the United States to pull back from abusive rendition-and-detention-for-interrogation policies pursued since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and yet to work effectively to combat terrorism. Essential to Rutten's exposé is a critique of "torture memos" like those discussed in posts here and here. He writes:

The reference, of course, is to a term coined fully 45 years ago, in the trial reportage compiled into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. As described in this post, Banality was philosopher Hannah Arendt's account of that early effort by a nation-state, Israel, to prosecute an individual in its national courts for internationally condemned crimes. In describing actions "so obscene in their nature and consequences" as "'banal,'" it's explained here, Arendt

For a time after 9/11, the use of words from a totalitarian past to describe the American present sparked instant controversy. Recall, for example, the furor in 2005 over Amnesty International's characterization of detention practices as an "American gulag." That harsh criticism now receives due consideration in the mainstream media—indeed, as in Rutten's case, is set forth in the mainstream media—is an advance in our avowedly open society. But that there remains cause for that criticism is no advance at all.

 

Eradicating abusive policies and, at least as importantly, the institutional structures within which they found root, indeed must be a priority item on the next president's to-do list.