Torture, Belmont Law School, and the Banality of Evil

This morning, five of us went to a class of Constitutional Law at Belmont University. We are not Belmont Law students, and we hadn’t done our reading.

We had done some different homework, though, spurred by news that Belmont had just hired Alberto Gonzales as its “Distinguished Chair of Law.” We researched what this man did as one of the chief architects of the Bush Administrations’ torture policies, authorizing waterboarding and other physical abuse of fellow human beings in US custody. That from his position of power, he argued that the protections of prisoners called for in the Geneva Convention were outdated and “quaint.” That he never expressed remorse for any of this.

And this person who gave a green light to torture was now teaching Constitutional Law.

The class was small, around twenty students, and as soon as the Distinguished Professor Gonzales entered, he knew instantly we weren’t supposed to be there. “I don’t allow visitors,” he said.