Peter Van Buren’s Essay about Guantanamo Prisoner Tariq Ba Odah — Shows Us an Excellent Example of Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil”

12 August 2015

Bureaucracy frequently becomes camouflage for the evils of intentional non-action

This is the — “We can’t do anything because the rules won’t let us” — excuse:

Tariq Ba Odah has been convicted of nothing.

He has nonetheless spent 13 years inside Guantanamo living in a cage, and he is dying. The United States refuses to release him. He now weighs only 75 pounds.

A lawyer for Tariq Ba Odah has asked a federal judge to order his release because of his “severe physical and psychological deterioration.”

On Friday, for the third time, the Justice Department asked a judge to extend its deadline to respond, saying the administration needed another week “to further consider internally its response to petitioner’s motion.”

Ba Odah is starving himself in order to draw attention to the plight of those who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo without detectable due process and justice:

Tariq Ba Odah has been held in Guantanamo for more than 13 years. The Pakistani Army captured him along the Afghan border, and he is accused of having gone to the region to fight with the Taliban and of having received some weapons training.

In his U.S. government file, he is “assessed” to have been an Islamic extremist and a “possible member” of al Qaeda. It says he “probably” manned a mortar at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. He is “reported” to have been an “important man” with al Qaeda.

It seems incongruous that an important man in al Qaeda would have the job of mortarman.

It is likely that tens of thousands of young men, maybe more, fought and continue to fight against the United States in Afghanistan. Only a handful are in Guantanamo.

Vengeance 14 years after 9/11 is impersonal and arbitrary and thus somehow even more evil.

Consider — in this context —Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil”

The phrase comes from her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

As Wikipedia explains:

In part, at least, the phrase refers to Eichmann's deportment at the trial, displaying neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job" ("He did his duty...; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law." p. 135).

Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology.

Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional.

She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity.

The controversy over Arendt’s idea seems to revolve around whether:

(a) the Holocaust creators were “really” evil — and therefore apparently both exceptional and easily identifiable on humanity’s graphed distribution of good to bad people

(b) merely average, morally quiescent (“stupid”), sometimes ambitious bureaucrats.

Whatever Arendt’s banality’s relevance to the Holocaust, her idea is certainly pertinent to the United States’ now institutionalized flaunting of due process with regard to anything to do with our broadly labeled national security.

Tariq Ba Odah in the grip of bureaucrats

The government argument against his release essentially being:

Your Honor, after 13 years, we still need more time to answer the legal and ethical questions which have been obvious at the very outset.

Please grant us enough weeks, so that Mr. Ba Odah successfully starves himself to death. We do not want to concern ourselves with his possibly precedent-setting ass anymore.

In sum, as Arendt indicated — stupidity.

Unfiltered ethical and legal brainlessness so thick that even mildly thoughtful people would be embarrassed to have their names attached to it.

The moral? — Morally lethargic and legally nitwit bureaucracy has effectively become our national arbiter of law and ethics

Banality’s evil, indeed.

PeteFree.com

Peter Van Buren’s Essay about Guantanamo Prisoner Tariq Ba Odah — Shows Us an Excellent Example of Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil”