A Form of Moral Paralysis
Torture and the Violence of Organized Forgetting
Henry Giroux
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition December 12-14, 2014
EXTRACT
The psychopathic undercurrent and the authoritarian impulse of such reactions finds its most instructive expression in former Bush communications chief Nicolle Wallace who while appearing on the “Morning Joe” show screeched in response to the revelations of the Senate Intelligence report “I don’t care what we did.” As Elias Isquith, a writer for Salon, contends, as “grotesque as that was, though, the really scary part was [the implication that] waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and sexual assault is part of what makes ‘America ‘great.’”[25] Wallace’s comments are more than morally repugnant. Wallace embodies the stance of so many other war criminals who were either indifferent to the massive suffering and deaths they caused or actually took pride in their actions. They are the bureaucrats whose thoughtlessness and moral depravity Hannah Arendt identified as the rear guard of totalitarianism.
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Phi Beta Iota: What the article does not do is point out that the Obama-Biden Administration — and the senior intelligence officials of the Obama-Biden Administration — have carried on in the Bush-Cheney traditional, and if anything, done even more harm.
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