Hail Melville House

++Amazon was right I need to get "The Meaning Of Existence" (I wrongly wrote "of Life") to recover from the Torture Report.

++Andrew Sullivan ran two pieces at The Dish on the copyeditors at the Brooklyn-based Melville House scrambling to get the Torture Report ready for the printer before the Holiday Season. The stories covered the young people pulling all-nighters and joking about the literary nature of the pseudonyms used to cover up the identity of the CIA agents and the psychologists. 

++The Senate staff and the people at Melville House are the only good things about the Torture Report. I lack the creativity,the wit,the language to express the degree of outrage I have reading this report. You can start with the redactions themselves before we get into the actual torture. The idea the CIA believed they could keep this report from the American people for two years is outrageous enough. Reading it you know why they tried to suppress it.

++I have worked in countries which routinely torture people and I can tell you they have nothing on us. Marc Thiessen, the leading apologist for Torture in America, writes in the Imperial Post that the Democrats lost the debate over torture. You actually want to win a debate over torture? You have totally lost any moral compass if you support anything done in your name in this report. 

++The good news is that while large majorities of Republicans back every technique of torture mentioned in the report,only 21% support rectal hydration which our CIA psychologist in the report says "makes you think more clearly."

++No one comes out of this report except in total disgrace. Congress, which didn't conduct a serious oversight while this occurred. The media comes off horribly, being willing pawns of the CIA. The legal profession should go hide from the number of crimes it committed. The psychologists were experimenting on humans. Their appearance in the report is horrifying because they kept suggesting techniques to discover how a human would react. And the notion of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has nothing to do with interrogation. Routinely they were used to punish for wrong information or inadequate information. The report makes clear that even with limitations Bush lawyers and the CIA put in place,the CIA routinely went way over these restrictions. 

++I have always been bothered by the nonchalant legal defense of the individual techniques because they were used serially to amplify the effect of breaking body and soul. They were exercised in a sequence not individually. The effect was that the United States created one of the most powerful torture programs the world has ever known. I can't help but think of Elaine Scarry's book "Body in Pain" about how torture victims will relive their torture with the same intensity throughout their lives. 

++The awfulness of what we have done is evidenced by the rash of PTSD victims among the Torturers themselves. The events were so emotionally destabilizing that these people can no longer function in their everyday lives. 

++The full report needs to be declassified and remedial actions must be taken against those who were involved in the program. I was glib when I said it is best to understand the torture report by thinking of J.G. Ballard. He doesn't deserve being remotely associated with this as a metaphor.