Yes. You must be right. The Khmer Rouge agree.
Instead, let's be accurate about what torture really is. For one, the U.S. military would not visit torture upon its own. Extreme training, yes. But not torture.
Ergo, waterboarding is not torture.
Torture also connotes some kind of physical injury, temporary or permanent. Ergo, waterboarding is not torture.
Let's not rely on the left to define our words for us.
Yes. You must be right. The Khmer Rouge agree.
“It’s not that we’re ‘undefining’ torture — the left has already done that.”
I wouldn’t say the left has undefined torture. They’ve defined torture up, to steal someone else’s phrase. Waterboarding was perfectly okay until it was not. Thence it became torture.
I’m all for outlawing proper torture, outside of truly emergent situations. But who’s to say what torture is? Seriously. It’s not so objective as the ACLU would have you believe. What is evil about waterboarding? Not that it causes a great amount of pain, nor that it leaves the body disfigured, nor that it is something we won’t do to ourselves.
What’s left? That it scares people and makes them physically uncomfortable? I’d say the whole ordeal of being imprisoned and going through intensive interrogation is pretty uncomfortable and scary as it is. But not enough to break anybody. Staying up for hours at a time, not allowing for enough rest, giving them bad food to eat, etc., are dehumanizing. But not enough to break anybody.
So I ask, what’s the standard? Must we hurt people only so far as they break, and no further? That’s what I go for. Treating them like everyday prisoners? That’s what’ll happen if we pursue the current trend.
There is this illusion that people operate under, that there’s this line out there. That everyone can see the line. On one side stand civilized people; on the other stand barbarians. When people like Stalin and Hitler go to the other side, they become different from us. And we can rest easy in the knowledge that we’re not evil, and they are. Because they use force, and we don’t.
All the while, our government, no different from their’s, uses force all the time. Often it breaks out in grand-scale violence, as when we kill hundreds or thousands at a time indiscriminantly. Still, we think of ourselves as fundamentally different from the barbarians.
But we’re not. It’s a matter of degree. Government is nothing more than organized force, and every people who abide having a government must abide the legitimization of naked force. Whether or not the force is legitimate (i.e. legal) depends on the circumstances. Depends on whether there’s justification, whether the situation’s urgent, and whether we employ more violence then we need.
One thing is certain. When we waterboard people, we don’t become morally equivalent to Russian gulag artists, anymore than we do when we lock people away for their whole lives. There’s still an ocean between us.