Tortured reasoning
Posted by Jeff Goldstein
protein wisdom
Neal Boortz, “Torture at Gitmo?":
<<<Yesterday we told you that the U.N. Human Rights Commission had made a finding that the United States was using “torture” at the detainee center at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. Now .. are we talking about driving wood splinters up under fingernails? No. What about breaking fingers or toes? Nope. Not that either. It seems that we were using light and temperature in naughty ways. How do you use light? You use light to keep people awake. That’s torture. Gitmo is hot too. Maybe they denied the prisoners air conditioning. Would that be torture?
The word “torture” is no longer a word used to describe treatment of a prisoner. It is now a word used as a weapon against the United States and its efforts to fight Islamic radicals.
This morning I listened to Robin Oakley, the British political editor for CNN, talk about the findings of this phony UN body. Oakley said: “Now we’re going to see pressure to have the U.S. close Guantanamo.” So, what else is new? Oakley also mentioned the light and the temperature, but he never mentioned force feeding. That’s right ... force-feeding One of the elements of torture mentioned by the U.N. at Guantanamo was the force-feeding of detainees who are on hunger strikes. So, according to the U.N., if a detainee tries to kill himself, and you take a measure to save his life, that constitutes torture.
Message: Don’t take anything the U.N. or the U.N. Human Rights Commission has to say about torture seriously. >>>
[My emphases]
As frequent readers of this site know, I often stress (ostensibly) small semantic concerns within a given controversy, partly, I suppose because I’m trained in rhetoric (and we tend to view things through comfortable prisms), but mostly because I sincerely believe that the terms and kernel assumptions we use to define issues end up providing both the support and the impetus for what we subsequently build atop those terms and assumptions.
The torture debate we had here several months ago reinforces the idea: my concern at the time—and this is a concern that Boortz echoes in his critique of the UN HRC report—is that, as we have done with words like “tolerance” or “racism,” we have essentially reached the point where we are defining torture in away that diminishes actual torture, having opened the word up to such a broad array of meanings, and coupling it to a hermeneutic system that allows the interpreter to determine “meaning” without an appeal to intent, that the concept has become practicably meaningless. If torture can be defined as simple coercion, for instance (including psychological coercion), or as anything that causes great stress or discomfort or fear, or is intended to confuse or disorient or wear down those at whom its techniques are aimed—then torture, insofar as it has become indistinguishable from coercion or interrogation, etc., has ceased to have any real force of meaning, except to those who are able to use it as a talisman against such techniques.
Which is to say, by folding so many things into the concept of torture, we have made it far too easy to level charges of impropriety—with the result that we have made victims out of those whose goal it is to kill us, even as we’ve make it nearly impossible on ourselves to interrogate captured terrorists in ways that may prove effective.
That we do so under the self-righteous assertion that we are acting civilized (and so are proving to be the betters of our enemies) is another canard that loses its force once the thing that we refuse to do becomes so all-encompassing that it is meaningless. Because it is one thing to say we repudiate torture on principle and in practice and to mean it, with a full-understanding of what it is we are repudiating; but it is quite another to repudiate torture simply on principle alone—and then allow torture to be so broadly defined that what we have actually repudiated is our ability to truly repudiate torture in any meaningful sense of the word.
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