Bill Kristol sees them as deeply intertwined, with illegal torture buttressing the rule of law in a democracy. My own view is different:
Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment
of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible.
As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and
reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist
or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to
maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of
personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary,
self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the
integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary
in a person and uses it to break that person's will. It takes what is
animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human. As an American
commander wrote in an August 2003 e-mail about his instructions to
torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen
regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want
these individuals broken."
What does it mean to "break" an individual?
As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne once commented, and
Shakespeare echoed, even the greatest philosophers have difficulty
thinking clearly when they have a toothache. These wise men were
describing the inescapable frailty of the human experience, mocking the
claims of some seers to be above basic human feelings and bodily needs.
If that frailty is exposed by a toothache, it is beyond dispute in the
case of torture. The infliction of physical pain on a person with no
means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely
subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy
as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own
reach. That is why the term "break" is instructive. Something broken
can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being
unbroken--of having integrity. When you break a human being, you turn
him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans
reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture
were inextricably linked in the antebellum South.
What you see in the relationship between
torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You
see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold
over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of
his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own
control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood. The
CIA's definition of "waterboarding"--recently leaked to ABC
News--describes that process in plain English: "The prisoner is bound
to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet.
Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over
him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of
drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a
halt." The ABC report then noted, "According to the sources, CIA
officers who subjected themselves to the waterboarding technique lasted
an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said Al Qaeda's
toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, won the admiration of
interrogators when he was able to last between two and two and a half
minutes before begging to confess."
Before the Bush administration, two documented cases of the U.S. Armed
Forces using "waterboarding" resulted in courts-martial for the
soldiers implicated. In Donald Rumsfeld's post-September 11 Pentagon,
the technique is approved and, we recently learned, has been used on at
least eleven detainees, possibly many more. What you see here is the
deployment of a very basic and inescapable human reflex--the desire not
to drown and suffocate--in order to destroy a person's autonomy. Even
the most hardened fanatic can only endure two and a half minutes. After
that, he is indeed "broken."
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