yet another Memo… »
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madness…

Posted on Wednesday 2 April 2008


Call It the Abu Ghraib Memo
By Dan Froomkin
April 2, 2008

The Justice Department memo released yesterday is a key link in the chain of evidence connecting the monstrous abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere straight to the White House. President Bush has described the torture and murder of prisoners by U.S. military personnel as the work of an aberrant few. But this 2003 memo opened the door to precisely the kinds of abuse so horrifically chronicled in the Abu Ghraib photographs.

And the memo’s author — John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel – was a longtime ally and notoriously pliant scribe for the radical legal views of Vice President Cheney and his chief enforcer, David S. Addington. Yoo’s memo is a historic document. It is the ultimate expression of Cheney’s belief that anything the president or his designates do – no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American – is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.

It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness…
I’ve been wondering about why I can’t stop reading articles and posting about on John Yoo’s recently released Torture Memos written the week before we invaded Iraq. I think I’ve been trying to find something, but didn’t know what it was until I read Dan Froomkin’s column and saw that last sentence. The Memos themselves are absurd – sophmoric rationalizations to excuse the unexcusable – 81 pages worth. Their existence makes it clear that the Administration knew that what they were doing was unlawful and un-American. You just don’t go to that much trouble to find someone who would pen such a monsterous opinion to cover your ass if you believed that it was okay to do what you planned to do. But it’s the meaning that I hadn’t clarified. Froomkin hits it in spades – madness. It’s madness, plain and elegantly simple.
Traditionally, insanity or madness is the behaviour whereby a person flouts societal norms and becomes a danger to himself and others. Greek tragedies and Shakespeare often refer to madness in this sense. Psychologically, it is a general popular and legal term defining behaviour influenced by mental instability. It is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a deranged state of the mind or lack of understanding. Today, it is most commonly encountered as an informal term or in the narrow legal context of the insanity defense, and in the medical profession the term is now avoided in favour of specific diagnoses of mental illness as schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.
It’s true that in my whole career in Psychiatry, madness was never mentioned outside of historical documents. I often mused about the term, because rage and aggression are regular components of the productions of the mentally ill. It made sense that the ancients called severe mental illness, madness. It’s the thinly disguised madness of the Torture Memos from August 1st, 2002 and March 14th, 2003 that stands out. The logic is trivial. The authors obviously started with a conclusion and retrofitted the logic. In the first week after the September 11th attack, Dick Cheney said we needed to work on the "dark side." Was Dick Cheney driven mad by the 9/11 attack? Or was he mad even before? While the former might be a more sympathetic way to understand him, the answer is both. He seems mad in the two senses of the word – angry and crazy. In these famous pictures, he even looks both:

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