Two things that struck me as I listened to Eric H. Holder's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee (Holder is President-Elect Obama's nominee for the US Atorney General). One, in response to direct questions of whether waterboarding, the near-drowning technique used on prisoners, was torture, Holder say a direct "yes". He went on to say that waterboarding had been used to torment prisoners
during the Inquisition, by the Japanese in World War II and in Cambodia
under the Khmer Rouge.“We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam,” Mr. Holder said. “Waterboarding is torture.” Such a view is widespread and his view, shared by Obama, will make it hard for the new administration to avoid seeking prosecution of members of the prior administration on that basis. To hear Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush say that one mark of their success these last eight years is that we have not been attacked by terrortists again could only be heard in light of the means by which they achived this admirable goal. One might quote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche here, in Beyond Good and Evil, where he said "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" (Aphorism 146). here and say we "became a monster to fight a monster."
Second, it was remakable to listen to retired senator John Warner (R-VA) introduce Holder as I begin to think more deeply about my work on on learning in professional practice. Warner spoke of the slow apprenticeship to career lawyers in the court system and the government who by their mentoring taught far more than any law professor could. This slow labor of learning in professional practice, Warner thought, would give Holder wisdom but also respect for the so-called "careerists" in the US judiciary so dispised in the Bush years (as the case of Bradley Schlozman, who served as head of the Civil Rights division under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales).
anon, and peace,
Chris
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