Torture is Wrong

I haven't had much free time the past two days and won't really have much chance to post until the weekend (if I'm lucky), but since it's Friday I thought I'd throw a current events topic out there: torture. It's a huge a topic and I don't have time to comment, so I'll post a couple of links:

Andrew Sullivan writes a really good article in The New Republic:

WINNING THE WAR ON TERRORISM WITHOUT SACRIFICING FREEDOM.

The Abolition of Torture (registration may be required)

A few choice quotes:

"Torture is the polar opposite of freedom. It is the banishment of all freedom from a human body and soul, insofar as that is possible. As human beings, we all inhabit bodies and have minds, souls, and reflexes that are designed in part to protect those bodies: to resist or flinch from pain, to protect the psyche from disintegration, and to maintain a sense of selfhood that is the basis for the concept of personal liberty. What torture does is use these involuntary, self-protective, self-defining resources of human beings against the integrity of the human being himself. It takes what is most involuntary in a person and uses it to break that person's will. It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human. As an American commander wrote in an August 2003 e-mail about his instructions to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."

...

"The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach. That is why the term "break" is instructive. Something broken can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being unbroken--of having integrity. When you break a human being, you turn him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture were inextricably linked in the antebellum South."

...

"What you see in the relationship between torturer and tortured is the absolute darkness of totalitarianism. You see one individual granted the most complete power he can ever hold over another. Not just confinement of his mobility--the abolition of his very agency. Torture uses a person's body to remove from his own control his conscience, his thoughts, his faith, his selfhood."

One thing Sullivan doesn't discuss, at least to my satisfaction, is the affect of torture on the torturer. I would like to echo what I wrote last week about the death penalty - ensuring that torture or anything that resembles it is illegal keeps those who would be in the position to commit such acts safe. It is a mercy to the actors as well as the victim. I have more to say on this, but not more time. More later.