Psychological Torture

As you might have noticed, I'm incapable of letting this torture thing go. the article here isn't from a prisoner or detainee; it's from an interrogator. An excerpt: "The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him. Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself. American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. " What type of response should we have? At what point does this type of behavior sway even the hardest of the hardcore? The great protectors of Traditional Family Values, like Jonah and Steyn, have seen fit to make jokes about our torture of other human beings. This light-hearted approach to a serious humanitarian issue wretches my gut; the casual attitude and flippant remarks show a lack of understanding of basic moral truisms. The article Goldberg writes here explains that it is OK for us to torture because we are the good guys: "...Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was not asked to renounce his faith or sign a false confession when he was reportedly waterboarded. His suffering wasn’t intended as a form of punishment. The sole aim was to stop an ongoing murder conspiracy, which is what al Qaeda is. " How does Goldberg know this, exactly? Never the less, he soldiers on: "... according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of context, even though we’d never dream of a blanket ban on killing. One reason for this disconnect is that we’ve thought a lot about killing and barely at all about torture. Almost no one opposes killing in all circumstances; wars sometimes need to be fought — the hopelessly suffering may require relief; we reserve the right to self-defense. Indeed, the law recognizes a host of nuances when it comes to homicide, and the place where everybody draws an unambiguous line on killing is at something we call “murder.”But there is no equivalent word for murder when it comes to torture. It’s always evil. Yet that’s not our universal reaction. In movies and on TV, good men force evil men to give up information via methods no nicer than what the CIA is allegedly employing. If torture is a categorical evil, shouldn’t we boo Jack Bauer on Fox’s 24?" This argument is categorically simple-minded; it needs to be broken down in steps. 1. The killing analogy Goldberg specifically selects a crime that contains loopholes of moral ambiguity; self defense, among other things, can be used to justify murder, as he alludes. A much better example would be rape. Re-write Goldberg's analysis, replacing murder with rape, and it loses all of its supposed potency. (By the way, do I see a euthanasia sympathizer here? "the hopelessly suffering may require relief" ??) 2. The movie reference Goldberg argues that even the "good guys" torture people on TV shows, and since we support the TV good guy, we also support torture. (At least I think that's his message - sometimes Goldberg's logic is a little tough to follow.) This myth is easily debunked using a rape example again. In the Clint Eastwood movie High Plains Drifter, Eastwood (the good guy) rapes a young woman in town. According to Goldberg, this implies that rape is not "categorically evil" (to use Goldberg's words) because we do not boo Eastwood in the movie. This assertion is obviously ludicrous. I still have no idea how torture supporters sleep at night. Maybe they could help the poor interrogators exercise their demons as well.