It is been deemed, by certain omnipresent naysayers, a bad thing to repeatedly focus on torture. And of course it is bad, in that it means they have to embrace one of the nadirs of human behavior repeatedly and openly in order to defend the indefensible. So it seemed especially appropriate to point out a very fine post on torture by the writer Barry Eisler, now an author and formerly a covert CIA operative. He too is, terribly enough, focused on stamping out the New Torturers.
Not that torture is a new thing, what with the Inquisition, witch-hunts, and even our own probable covert actions–but it had gone largely condemned by Western culture at large for quite a while until our recent absurd spates of pulling it into the light and pretending that it's now a fine subject for polite debate. It's as if one's dinner guest dropped trou and polluted the rug, then pulled back up to the table and talked about an essay he'd read about the efficacy of an anytime, anywhere policy.
Eisner does a very fine job of contextualizing torture and condemning the practice of torture. The reasons to keep talking about it are simple. It's one of the worst things a human can do to another short of outright murder, yet we are prone to doing it. People who defend it must be addressed lest their insidious defenses actually do become acceptable. And those who have tried to legalize it must be condemned and and tried for their actions, lest it keep happening.
Better to focus on that than to focus on the thrill of fanning the flames of every fire you find.
Of course the New Torturers and torture apologists want us to stop talking about it. They're sick of defending the indefensible, of being seen in the light. Good reason not to stop.
Here's some of Barry Eisler, but the entire thing is very much worth reading:
What I find most remarkable about America's debate regarding torture — beyond the fact that such a debate could even be necessary in America — is the continual recourse of both proponents and opponents to the question of whether torture works. I can't think of any other illegal behavior — not murder, not rape, not kidnapping, not assault — that receives this kind of rhetorical makeover. When a murder has been committed, you don't hear people agonizing over whether killing can never, ever be justified. When someone has been raped, people don't ignore the crime in favor of a discussion of whether a rapist's satisfaction could possibly be proven to outweigh a victim's trauma and horror. If a child is kidnapped, the airwaves aren't polluted with discussion of whether kidnapping might actually be an effective way of acquiring ransom money. And so on. …
Unlike other crimes, torture has a constituency, in the form of the architects who created America's torture regime. These are the people who feed the public discourse with a steady supply of, "Can you really say that torture never, ever works?" And, "What would you do if your child were kidnapped and the kidnapper refused to reveal the child's location?" And, "How can you compare enhanced interrogation techniquing one terrorist to the 3000 people killed on 9/11?" Etc. The architects, and their media allies, know that as long as the talking heads of television and gatherers by office water coolers, literal and electronic, are discussing the morality and practicality of torture, they won't be talking about the illegality of torture. …
We also abhor helplessness. It's horrifying to consider that over time we will never be able to entirely prevent terrorist attacks. We prefer to believe 9/11 happened because we failed to do something we could have done, that there's some extreme we can still resort to that will make us safe again, that if we do that thing from now on, we can gain greater mastery over the possibilities that frighten us. Because, for the reasons set forth in the paragraph above, torture is already seductive, we seize on it like a talisman custom-made for our fearful psyches. …
Leave aside the irony that it's self-styled "conservatives" who are so eager to ignore the accreted wisdom of generations past. That the consensus against torture is the work of generations — the product of generations of mistakes and of continual, improbable appeals not just to morality, but to wisdom, too, to the better angels of our nature — makes the more debilitating the right's progress in once again coloring torture as something respectable, even desirable.
