What bothers me about the torture debate in the blogosphere is how thoroughly eager those in favor of torture harsh interrogation tactics used against accused terrorists are willing to define this deviant behavior down. Witness this comment in this post at Oxblog:

Toture [sic] is that which causes permanent physical damage.  Anything else is just hazing.

Our enemies are making a deliberate attempt to lower the definition of torture for the benefit of terrorists. 

It is not moral to refuse to waterboard someone and let innocent people die because we are unwilling to get answers to questions using a method that causes no physical harm.

How does this person "know" that this doesn’t cause physical harm? Because David Horowitz says so! (The Oxbloggers, to their credit, have been squarely against parsing the definition of torture.) So let’s so see who also waterboards. Courtesy of Marc Cooper, David Corn points out that this was one of the methods used by the Khmer Rouge. One would expect thinking people to find that horrifying.

Not Tom Maguire:

Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, this will be one of my longest posts.  Here is Vann Nath, an artist and former prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, and his drawings of various Khmer Rouge tortures (one of his pictures appears without credit in the Corn post, presumably through no fault of Mr. Corn).

So, let’s play Find the Waterboard!  Not here; not here; not here; not here; not here; not here. Hmm, those Khmer Rouge had a wide variety of nasty, didn’t they?  I don’t think I am going to rank "waterboarding" at the top of the list offered by Vann Nath.

So Maguire doesn’t believe that waterboarding is such a horrible thing because the Khmer Rouge had a wide variety of torture methods. This is what passes for intelligent commentary on the pro-torture right.

God help us.

If people want to understand why torture takes place, they would be well-served to read The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World:

What assists the absolute conversion of absolute pain in the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self-conscious display of agency. On the simplest level, the agent displayed is the weapon. Testimony given by torture victims from many different countries almost inevitably includes descriptions of the weapons with which they were about to be hurt: prisoners of the Greek Junta (1967-71), for example, were made to contemplate a wall arrangement of whips, canes, clubs and rods, were made to examine the size of the torturer’s fist and the monogrammed ring which "he wore and which made his blows more painful," or were compelled to look at a bull’s pizzle [the penis bone] coated with the dried blood of a fellow prisoner . . .

Torture is in its largest outlines the invariable and simultaneous occurrence of three phenomena which, if isolated into separate and sequential steps would occur in the following order. First, pain is inflicted on a person in ever-intensifying ways. Second, the pain, continually amplified within the person’s body, is also amplified in the sense that it is objectified, made visible to those outside the person’s body. Third, the objectified pain is denied as pain, and read as power, a translation made possible by the obsessive mediation of agency.

In other words, torture is a bald-faced attempt to assert power: over individuals, over nations, over groups, over enemies perceived, imagined and real. For those with fevered imaginations fueled with no more knowledge of interrogating than 24 episodes they believe it works. For those who have actually interrogated people for a living, they know it doesn’t.

Don’t you dare diss Kip Hawley! He’s head of the Transportation Security Administration, and he’s awfully touchy, you see. His minions also take it personally when you say unkind things about him.

P.S. Kip Hawley is an idiot. Spread the word. Let’s see that phrase spread all across the blogosphere.