Glenn Greenwald on Jay Bybee's sociopathic self-pity

[BurtWorm]

http://feeds.salon.com/~r/salon/greenwald/~3/-8MhZCvhYoM/sociopaths

Jay Bybee's sociopathic self-absorption

The New York Times has an article today on Jay Bybee, the torture-authorizing Bush OLC lawyer and current judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The focus of the article is Bybee's recent Congressional testimony that several of the torture tactics used by the CIA were never approved by the Justice Department -- which means they should fall outside the scope of the Obama DOJ's immunity shield from prosecution -- but it was the last passage that I think is most noteworthy (h/t reader rg):

<Bybee> said he was "proud of our opinions" at the Office of Legal Counsel, too, calling them "well researched” and "very carefully written."

Still, he said the controversy surrounding his tenure there had been difficult.

"I have regrets because of the notoriety that this has brought me," he said. "It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family. And I regret that, as a result of my government service, that that kind of attention has been visited on me and on my family."

Just think about that. The so-called "government service" Jay Bybee did caused countless detainees to be subjected to systematized, medieval torture techniques designed to permanently break their mind and spirit. Innocent men spent years wasting away in a cage, with no due process of any kind, subjected to horrific and life-destroying abuse because of what Bybee authorized. So frivolous were Bybee's opinions that they were scorned even by subsequent right-wing, Bush appointees such as Jack Goldsmith, and the DOJ's own Office of Professional Responsibility formally renounced and harshly criticized those memos. For that work, he was rewarded with a life tenured, permanently-well-paying job as a federal appellate judge.

But the only victim Bybee recognizes in all of this is himself, and the only "regret" he has is the self-pitying objection that the dark, ugly and destructive work he did caused him to be subjected to some criticisms. It's extremely similar to what Karl Rove identified yesterday as his "biggest mistake": not helping to start a war on false pretenses that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, but rather, failing to attack war critics with sufficient viciousness.

These are individuals who destroyed the lives of countless innocent people with gruesome and lawless "policies." Not only did they never suffer for it, they have been richly rewarded with wealth and life-long job security. And still, the only tragedy they see from everything that happened is their own trivial "suffering," i.e., the fact that they're criticized in some quarters for what they did. The term "sociopathic self-absorption" should have a huge picture of them next to it in the dictionary.