Clarification (yet again) on Torture

Jason Kuznicki was kind enough to … well … fisk me in my previous attempts to try to get to a working definition of torture. He makes the following points about my two previous essays (here and here).

• I had pointed that, for example, what an NFL lineman might call a day in the office others might term as abuse. Mr Kuznicki misunderstands for he writes:
  

  But this — call it the NFL lineman objection — is almost certainly a deliberate dodge of the issue. An NFL lineman signed up to be there. The detainees being held by the CIA can’t even suggest, by way of a lawyer, that they deserve not to be there. So while an NFL lineman knows what he’s getting into and does so voluntarily, the same is clearly not the case with the detainees.

  Which just shows that he missed my point entirely. My point is that if an average person was struck with a hard object with a force described by a certain momentum and energy which might (to (mis) quote the Gonzales memo) liquefy my (untoned) arm musculature and perhaps break my humerus and NFL lineman struck with the same force would not suffer the same injury. In fact he might just look askance at the striker. This is because of the lineman’s physical gifts, inurement to such abuse, and hard training. The same blow struck to him will not affect him the same way as it might another person. That was my point. Because such differences in people exist makes it difficult to ascribe hard and fast rules describing when interrogation techniques devolve into torture. Such differences do not apply merely to the physical. Similar levels of cleanliness, food quality, sleep, and mental stress all stress different in a different manner. This is not such a “outrageous” concept

• He describes an incident
  

  stripped naked, beaten until six of his ribs were broken, then hooded with an opaque and suffocating bag and suspended from the ceiling by his wrists until he suffocated to death, in a procedure that has been likened to crucifixion?

  I again have been misinterpreted. I was never writing an “apologetic” for the Administration nor trying to ascertain whether the interrogations undergone crossed the line. I was trying to define what the word torture means. I am trying to point out that things are a lot grayer than people admit. Reasonable people (including myself) may describe what the Administration is doing as torture. However, torture is the word used to describe inappropriate or illegal levels of stress applied during questioning. As per the definition, there is no way that any organization will describe their licit activities as torture. It’s inherent in the definition of torture.

• Mr Kuznicki writes
  

  The latter happens when a prisoner is abused in the attempt to win information from them, a practice that almost inevitably produces only what the torturer wants to hear. Even setting aside the moral questions, torture doesn’t work. Abusing a prisoner is merely perverse and cruel; torture adds to this by compromising our national security.

  Mr Kuznicki has written essays in the past to the effect that torture, by reason that the questioner can only attempt to verify that which he already knows, that interrogations are useless. The article he cites is basically a columnist who cites one study and one ex-CIA operative who doubt the efficacy of these techniques. I certainly don’t think that “harsh interrogation techniques” should be the only interrogation strategy in our arsenal. True or not, the media depict police interrogators as using “good cop” + “bad cop” give and take … not “good cop” + “better cop”. This certainly seems to be an issue which a good historian could research and establish (if in fact a unbiased researcher could be found). In the wake of the cold war, it would seem that certainly in the spy vs spy game and the subsequent opening up of documents we could find out if spies never divulged information under duress or not.

• Mr Kuznicki continues
  

  First, a great many of these people really are innocent, and the U.S. government’s own actions bear this out, as when it released hundreds from Guantanamo — a de facto admission that its policy of holding prisoners outside the U.S. justice system is wrong.

  We are not still holding prisoners from the Korean or WWII. Release of prisoners is not necessarily the signal Mr Kuznicki might hold it to mean. Release of the prisoners can mean either it is felt that they represent has passed or other situations have arisen in which it is to our advantage to release them.

• Mr Kuznicki finds that the Constitution and 8th amendment “apply” to illegal combatants. However the to links to find law cases, don’t bear this out. The first article he links shows more clearly that the question of whether the Constitution might apply to them is still … well … a point of question under scrutiny. The 8th amendment Mr Kuznicki feels applies to persons, not citizens. Actually, textually it sort of could be applied to everyone on the planet. Stalin was in violation of the 8th amendment, if you apply it broadly enough. Guess we should have issued a subpoena. More seriously, the 8th Amendment cannot apply to foreign combatants in the field against us. Killing a man in ambush is standard practice in war. One might think it to be a violation of the 8th Amendment, cruel and unusual to surprise a man and knife him.
• And I agree (in part) that
  

  Second, even if these people were terrorists down to the last man — since when is it written that a proper application of the death penalty is to beat a man until his ribs break, and then to hang him by his wrists until he suffocates?

  That is not torture (as I defined it). That is abuse of a prisoner in custody. And I categorically stated it to be wrong.

• Mr Kuznicki finally is aghast at the idea that “none of us” have set out a metric for deciding and measuring what is and what is not appropriate. Mr Kuznicki and I apparently have a very different idea of the word “metric”. Metric means measure. Stalin in his purges practiced torture, as recounted by Mr Solzhenitsyn. Hussein in Iraq also tortured his people. A person suffering criminal assault is also under physical duress. A person in the throws of a divorce undergoes mental duress. What I mean by metric is that there is not quantifiable measurement that can describe how much worse Stalin’s techniques were to a divorce. There is no metric to measure torture! One could imagine neuroscience reaching a state in which by measuring brain activity and neuro-chemical concentrations associated with stress and pain such a metric could be developed. But it hasn’t been. Until it has been, the NFL lineman effect will remain a problem associated with determining in some if not many cases whether questioning has devolved into torture or not.