Anti-Matter Me
Some days ago I made reference to the violence that the torture-apologists are doing to the English language. Today I was sent this link, which, in just about the best throwaway line I've ever seen, attacks the left for insisting on calling what went on in American military detention complexes "torture," rather than what is, natch, its proper name: "coercive interrogation." Once again, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.
posted by Finnegan @ 7:50 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
It was a throwaway line, but the point behind it is real, however undeveloped. Obviously, some of the abuses that have surfaced or at least been reported with some level of evidence do constitute torture. Nobody disagrees with that. But there also have been techniques that are clearly not torture, but merely coercive interrogation, that have been described as torture on the lefty blogs. My favorite example of this is the widespread "shock" expressed on the left over the accusation that prisoners were wrapped in Israeli flags. That practice is only "torture" because the prisoner in question is a raving anti-Semite. That isn't torture, it's coercion.
So while I plead guilty to short-hand, I was making reference to a much deeper debate about where the line should be drawn. My own view is that it is very unfortunate that this problem surfaced during a presidential campaign, because like all issues this year it immediately became a lever for partisan advantage. That prevented people from having a sober discussion about what we should be able to do to extract information from suspected jihadists. I'm not a "torture" apologist. I just believe that "torture" is a legal term, and that techniques designed to make prisoners profoundly uncomfortable, either psychologically or physically, are not necessarily unlawful.
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