(3.1.2018) It turned out that torture wasn’t an improvisation of the interrogators but had been was organized and regulated at the directives of a secret ministerial committee. The directives were precise: how much physical pressure was allowed, for how long, under what circumstances and who was authorized to approve the use of special methods. And all of it under the ridiculous heading of “moderate physical pressure,” which has become a well-worn phrase.

The Landau Commission report of 1987 had exposed the bureaucracy of torture. It wasn’t the interrogator who bore personal moral responsibility, the report revealed; responsibility was permitted to lie with the faceless, personality-less system. As a devotee of Hannah Arendt and the “banality of evil,” I saw the bureaucracy of torture, the banality of torture, as the most meaningful Achilles heel of the system.