In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday:

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote famously of “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her 1963 account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who handled the logistics of murdering millions of Jews.

This is the evil of which Arendt spoke: the remoteness of the desk-bound bureaucrat from the torture chamber itself. Arendt wrote that “such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man.”

(Bybee did not write the torture memo he signed; it was written by John Yoo, then at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel,..)

And she quoted from the judgment against Eichmann: “[T]he extent to which any one of the many criminals was close to or remote from the actual killer of the victim means nothing, as far as the measure of his responsibility is concerned. On the contrary, in general the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.”

(Bybee, Yoo, Gonzales, Cheney, Bush in increasing responsibility order- my take, not the article’s author)

Arendt quoted Eichmann’s defense attorney as saying: “Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law.”

From the Wash Post, Saturday:

“I’ve heard him express regret at the contents of the memo,” said a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend,…”I’ve heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I’ve heard him express regret at the lack of context — of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under.

Guess as a judge he must be letting a lot of people off . Bank Robber to Bybee: “Judge, the pressure made me do it. I had to have the money by Friday and the time pressure just was too much to stand.” -again, my take. I don’t think real journalists are allowed sarcasm.

But if he regrets the contents, he must think something was wrong with them, so his talk of misuse doesn’t ring true.