Torture porn

Posted on November 7, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

Liberal and left-wing critics of Bush’s “war on terror” have brandished the word “torture” to refer to every stressful interrogation practice that soldiers in Afghanistan and Guantanamo desperately and clumsily evolved in their effort to gather intelligence on presumed terror networks.   But when an argument requires describing the actual torture practiced by more ruthless regimes, suddenly American interrogation practices are demoted to “abusive interrogation,” say, so as to recover and redeploy the original meaning of the term (officially defined as the intentional infliction of severe mental and physical pain and suffering) heretofore lost in the ecstatic (and sometimes justified) denunciation of Bush’s anti-terror policies.

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4 Responses to Torture porn

  1. Derek Scruggs says:
    November 7, 2009 at 8:27 pm

    I’ve read this three times paragraph and still don’t understand your point. You seem at first to be aiming your dagger at the left, but then cite one of the left’s leading voice in documenting the Orwellian language of the right, which has been adopted by much of the media.

  2. Trident says:
    November 8, 2009 at 3:14 am

    What the article is saying is that all harsh interrogation tactics under Bush was labelled “torture” by the left despite it hardly coming close to the REAL torture as practiced by more ruthless regimes.
    So okay, fine. The left wanted to redefine it so that all non-liberal and easy going interrogation is “torture”.
    But then, when actual torture practices by more ruthless regimes need be described the American “torture” is somehow demoted back to “abusive interrogation” because the difference needs to be made and because Bush is no longer the boogieman in office to denounce. The left’s favorite man is now in office.
    You can see the same thing in the denunciation of the wars in general. Where is it from the “anti-war left” and the Hollywood anti-war big mouths, now that a Democrat is in office. Orwellian language is used by both major parties, both the authoritarian left AND the right. That was the point.

  3. mikespeir says:
    November 8, 2009 at 6:07 am

    I don’t know. I’ll bet some of that “abusive interrogation” would seem like torture if I had to endure it. That it might not be as bad on average as that inflicted by “more ruthless regimes” doesn’t necessarily argue that the difference is less in kind than in degree.

  4. Trident says:
    November 9, 2009 at 3:28 am

    @mikespeir

    Some people would consider all uncomfortable questioning to be torture. One guy i knew (Iranian immigrant) once told me as a prisoner he was “tortured” because he smoked, and his jailers waved a pack of cigarettes in his face and took them away instead of giving it to him.

    If the meaning of things is in the eye of the beholder, definitions become meaningless.
    Just because you “feel” it may be torture, doesn’t mean it is, just like “feeling” insulted doesn’t mean you really are.

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