[lit-ideas] Re: Is torture wrong by definition?


Yet I think we're at war. It doesn't make me
happy. I wish it were not so, but I will not go
into denial about it. You seem to dismiss the
whole thing as a scam by Bush. I think Bush
certainly may have manipulated parts of the terror
war to benefit his cronies and his party, but I
also think the war is  real.

So far in this discussion, we have been using as our test case the possibility that by torturing someone, we might be able to obtain information that would prevent great future harm. For instance, if by torturing someone, we might get them to reveal the location of a bomb that was about to go off, in time to go and defuse said bomb....

I submit that another test case we might consider is that of torture as punishment, as a deterrent to future wrongdoing. We need to face the fact that the NeoCons of the current administration were confessedly longing for something like 9-11 to happen, for some time before it happened. They had no reason to want to detect such a plot in advance, because they had no reason to wish to prevent such a plot from succeeding. They needed for such a plot not to be detected. They needed for such a plot to succeed. The primary reason why they did not connect the dots, before the attack, was not that we then had scruples about torture, but that they desired that the dots not too soon be connected. These government officials who carefully refrained from detecting this 9-11 plot wanted to be able to pull out their pre-existing laundry list of NeoCon desiderata and impose them upon us. They are traitors and fully deserve to be punished. Forget trying to get these NeoCons to confess anything -- just torture them, inventively, until there aren't any pieces left that are large enough to torture. Perhaps torturing them to death will prevent future NeoCons from committing similar treasons.

As a model for this torture, we might consider the Year of Our Lord 1606 in jolly old England. Nicholas Owen was a Jesuit and a builder, competent in the construction of what were known as "priests' holes" -- secret cupboards and passages within the houses of wealthy Catholics in which their priests could hide from the Protestant King James's men. During this year he wound up in the Tower of London, suspended by his thumbs, being threatened with the rack. The official report of his demise alleges that he committed suicide with a very dull blade. Guy Fawkes and his Roman Catholic friends also had their day. In a contemporary illustration, you can see the stages of the ceremony, with the condemned men being dragged to the gallows, and behind the gallows tree, the fire for the burning of the ripped-out organs and the pot for the coating of the fresh bodies with hot pitch, so that they would last longer as objects of warning.



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