This week, two memos were released by the Obama Adminsitration, detailing torture techniques used under Bush. This is Sullivan’s response
I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years.
As Sullivan argues, it’s the bureacratic element that is the most chilling, a faceless largely unaccountable bureaucracy clinically eliminating civil liberties and perpetrating brutalities. It makes it so much harder to rally against this than against a visible leader such as Bush or Cheney. Although less grave, in the UK the recent story of a council spying on a family for three weeks, because they didn’t believe the family was in the right school zone is actually terrifying, in its sheer pointlessness and in the capacity for something we consider so benign to be spying.
About two years ago, I remember debating with Ed, whether the UK should have a constitution and subsequently a supreme court, at the time I felt we’d done fine without one, but now a full means of redress beyond a mini-media storm seems more than reasonable. Perhaps more critically it’s time we started, shining the light on bureacracies and demanding transparency from them.
April 17th, 2009 at 21:13
I don’t think a codified constitution is the panacea. The Supreme Court didn’t do much about this at the time, and even now the malefactors can’t be prosecuted without doing long-term damage to political structures. The”following orders” defence never gets outdated, it seems.
April 17th, 2009 at 22:30
I don’t think that a codified Constitution is a panacea, but it is definitely needed in the UK.
The courts have made some progress in asserting themselves as a balance against an unchecked parliament – even to the extend where a Law Lord declared in obiter that parliamentary supremacy should no longer be considered an absolute feature of the constitution, merely a general one (AG v Jackson; Lord Steyn at [around] 90-110). When parliament can override the rights of the individual so easily, and the political culture needed to sustain it has weakened so dramatically over the last century, it is time to open up a debate on what kind of constitution the people of the UK want.
It’s won’t necessarily ensure that stuff like this will never happen, but it could strengthen the position of rights in the law of the UK.
April 18th, 2009 at 09:48
Thanks Eurocentric, I didn;t know about that ruling – it’s interesting. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head the issue is that parliament is no longer the gaurantor(sp?) of rights, we need a new system.
My problem would be two-fold with a constitution
Firstly, how and who would draw it up, we could end up codifying a weakened position.
Secondly, I have to admit I’m sometimes wary of the UK legal system, although by and large I think it’s been very good, there have been some cases e.g. menezes where the establishment position must surely have influenced the judge
April 18th, 2009 at 09:49
And mark, you have a point about “following orders” I think i brought that up with Ed but he outfoxed me with meldious tones, only I can’t remember what he said…sounds dodgy doesn’t it?