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From ancient Rome’s red-hot irons and lacerating hooks to medieval Europe’s thumbscrews, rack, and wheel, for over 2,000 years anyone interrogated in a court of law could expect to suffer unspeakable tortures. For the last 200 years, humanist intellectuals from Voltaire to members of Amnesty International have led a sustained campaign against the horrors of state-sponsored cruelty, culminating in the United Nation’s 1985 Convention Against Torture, ratified by the Clinton administration in 1994.
Then came 9/11. When the Twin Towers collapsed killing thousands, influential “pro-pain pundits” promptly repudiated those Enlightenment ideals and began publicly discussing whether torture might be an appropriate, even necessary weapon in George Bush’s war on terror. The most persuasive among them, Harvard academic Alan M. Dershowitz, advocated giving courts the right to issue “torture warrants,” ensuring that needed information could be prized from unwilling Arab subjects with steel needles.
Despite torture’s appeal as a “lesser evil,” a necessary expedient in dangerous times, those who favor it ignore its recent, problematic history in America. They also seem ignorant of a perverse pathology that allows the practice of torture, once begun, to spread uncontrollably in crisis situations, destroying the legitimacy of the perpetrator nation. As past perpetrators could have told today’s pundits, torture plumbs the recesses of human consciousness, unleashing an unfathomable capacity for cruelty as well as seductive illusions of potency. Even as pundits and professors fantasized about “limited, surgical torture,” the Bush administration, following the President’s orders to “kick some ass,” was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few “high target value” Al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.
Spencer Delane