Clay Burell's Library tagged torture →  View Popular

In those days every tribunal of Christian Europe resounded with similar
arrests. The faggots were lit everywhere for witches, as for heretics. People
reproached the Turks most for having neither witches nor demons among them.
This absence of demons was considered an infallible proof of the falseness of a
religion.

It is generally well known what
Plutarch, Seneca, Montaigne, and a hundred other philosophers allege in favor
of suicide. It is a common subject and an exhausted one. I do not claim here to
present a defense of an action condemned by the laws; but neither the Old
Testament nor the New ever forbade a man to depart from life when he could no
longer bear it. No Roman law condemned self-murder. On the contrary, here is
the law of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which was never revoked.

"If your father or your brother, convicted of no crime, kills himself
either to remove himself from grief or through weariness of life, or in despair
or in madness, his will is valid, or if he dies intestate, his heirs inherit
according to law."

Despite this humane law of our ancient masters, we still rip apart and
pierce with a stake the body of a man who dies voluntarily; we render his
memory infamous; we dishonor his family to the extent that we can; we punish
the son for having lost his father, and the widow for being deprived of her
husband. We even confiscate the possessions of the deceased, which is
tantamount to plundering the patrimony of the living to whom it belongs. This
custom, like many others, is derived from our canon law, which deprives those
who die a voluntary death of the rights of burial. The conclusion drawn from
this fact is that no one can inherit on earth the property of a man who is
deemed to have no inheritance in heaven. The canon law in the section, De
Pœnitentia, assures us that Judas committed a greater sin in hanging
himself than in betraying our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime - combined with
panic and paranoia - created an imaginationland of untruth and
half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire war. It may well
have led to the president being informed of any number of plots that
never existed, and any number of threats that are pure imagination. And
once torture has entered the system, you can never find out the real truth.
You are lost in a vortex of lies and fears. In this vortex, the actual
threats that we face may well be overlooked or ignored, as we chase
false leads and pursue non-existent WMDs.

This is how totalitarian regimes justify themselves: by inventing enemies and proving their guilt through torture. The parallel dynamic in such regimes is that torture itself needs to be concealed, and errors of judgment, which could discredit the regime, need to be covered up. The techniques used by Cheney were, after all, once used by the Gestapo precisely to avoid the public embarrassment of clearly physically destroyed human beings, to present the appearance of normality, while behind that screen the psychological warfare of torture could proceed unimpeded. And if an error were made, if someone totally innocent were captured or tortured, the regime could then torture the victim to say he was guilty after all. In this closed loop, there are no loose ends. The executive is always right and its victims are always wrong - and torture provides all the evidence you need to prove it.

Mercifully, America under Bush and Cheney was not a totalitarian regime.

It had an executive branch that embraced the ethic of tyranny in warfare, and a legislative branch so supine it was a toothless adjunct, but it retained a judiciary that began, too late, of course, to push back against the hermetically sealed war-and-torture cycle. The Founders were wise to add such a check. Without it, we would have no way out of the maze that Cheney pushed us in.