B.C.

[BigV]

This on the heels of numerous reports on what qualifies as "torture".

I can understand the difficulty in the intellectual exercise of trying to find the bright line of what is and isn't torture. Is putting a hood on a prisoner torture? No... What if the hood is left on for three days? How about standing with arms outstretched? No... for hours. Loud noise, bright lights, sleep deprivation... What about all these combined? Wait. Stop.

You know, I can remember having conversations way (waaay) back with my pals, and one of the unanswerable questions was "Is this love?" Girls on the brain at the time.... The best answer we came up with is that if you have to ask, then the answer is probably "no". Now my understanding of love has matured and deepened considerably since then, but the deja vu here is powerful.

If I have to ask "Is this torture?", then I probably have crossed some threshold in my psyche, my conscience has alerted me to something important, and in this case wrong. If I have to ask, then the answer is probably "yes". Any more than a little noodling around with that question and a dangerous transformation has taken place. The question morphs from "is it.." to "how can I justify my actions...", a much sadder and easier question to answer.

You want a bright line? Fine. Try this on. Imagine the roles were reversed--picture an image of one of our team hooded, stressed, deprived, held without charge and beyond the law, in the hands of the enemy. Same conditions, but the positions are reversed. Now ask the question--is my guy being tortured, or merely being subjected to "extreme interrogation techniques". (I swear to G-d I heard that on the radio today.) Is it torture? I thought so. Any double-standard double-talk is just rationalization, justification, *NOT* a change in the truth about whether it's torture or not.

And this goes for the (stupid disgusting self serving fear mongering) hypothetical situation of the "ticking timebomb or ticking terrorist". What level of physical (or mental--still possible to torture and leave physically intact) is acceptable in the case of a prisoner who is suspected of having information about an impending attack on (fill in a sufficient number of people to scare yourself here) nnn people. Maybe it's possible to justify it. But that doesn't make torture something else.

And the saddest part is, if we torture, how are we different? In what way are we better? What, besides words, distinguishes us from "them"?