The concept of the “banality of evil” entered public discourse after the publication of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt’s thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the Nazi death camp bureaucracy, were not crazy and ruthless fanatics, but instead were just ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good civil servants.

Now speed forward nearly fifty years to last Friday when the Senate Intelligence Committee released two of its long awaited Phase II reports on the handling of Iraq related intelligence prior to the U.S. invasion. The reports are part of a five-report study that the Senate Intelligence Committee has undertaken into the Bush administration’s use of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq.

The long anticipated and greatly overdue reports, Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments and The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress, confirm what has been obvious for years now; namely that to this administration truth and reality are irrelevancies; if they don’t coincide with the agenda then they are to be, as Jesse Jackson might have put it once upon a time, suppressed, repressed, and depressed. Or to paraphrase the classic line from the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “Truth? We don’t need no stinking truth!”

The fact that the Bush administration feels free to operate both above the law and, worse, reality, is old news. Still, the fact that even a majority Republican committee could not avoid documenting administration misrepresentations is notable.

For example, according to the first report Saddam Hussein rejected pleas for assistance from Osama bin Laden and tried to capture terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi when he was in Iraq, conclusions diametrically opposed to the assertions put forward by the Bush hirelings prior to the invasion of Iraq. You may recall they repeatedly cited Saddam’s alleged ties to radical Islamic terrorists before the March 2003 invasion as one reason to take military action against Iraq.

Here, for example is Vice President Cheney on Meet the Press, Sept. 14, 2003:  “Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems and involved the Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al Qaeda organization.”

The 150-page report said the administration’s claims were untrue. “Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support.” In fact, the report declassifies for the first time a CIA assessment that Saddam’s regime, “did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye to toward Zarqawi and his associates.”

The report concludes that Saddam Hussein had no relationship with terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi and did not provide al Qaeda with either chemical or biological weapons. It also says there is no reliable evidence that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta ever met with
Iraqi intelligence in Prague.

The report does quote former CIA chief George Tenet as testifying the White House pressured him to back up the case for war. That would explain his former “slam dunk” certitude that Hussein possessed the banned weapons.

Yet dismaying as these conclusions are the best, actually worse, is yet to come. That would be the public statements, made by members of the Bush administration about the war justifying the invasion, and comparing that with the intelligence that was available to them at the time.

But what does all this have to do with the “banality of evil”? Consider Vice President Cheney’s appearance on Meet the Press this past weekend. He said that even if he had known in 2003 that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were mistaken, “we’d do exactly the same thing.’’

Specifically, he said:

It’s the toughest thing the president has to do, but it is absolutely the
right thing to do, Tim, because if we weren’t there, if Saddam Hussein were
still in power, the situation would be far worse than it is today. You’d
have a man who had demonstrated capacity for violence; who’d started two
wars; who had, in fact, been involved with weapons of mass destruction; who
had every intention of going back to it when the sanctions were lifted and,
by this point, especially with a Ahmadinejad living next door in Iran
pursuing nuclear weapons, there is no doubt in my mind that if Saddam
Hussein was still in power would have a very robust program underway to try
to do exactly the same thing. The world is better off because Saddam Hussein
is in jail instead of in power in Baghdad. It was the right thing to do, and
if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.

Now pause to consider this. Ahmadinejad was not even elected president of Iran until 2005 so that could not have been a motivation for Iraq. Is Cheney just forgetful or is he lying? Maybe he is just following orders to spout the party line. Both ways, it’s banal and it’s evil.

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