At the heart of Gobsmacked

It would seem to me that any serious discussion of US policy in regards to torture and any abuses of foreign detainess at the hands of US forces starts with an understanding of what exactly torture is and isn't. But maybe that's me.

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg examined this concept in his Tribune column:

In other words, context matters.Not according to some.

Led by Time magazine’s Andrew Sullivan, opponents of the CIA’s harsh treatment of high-value terrorists have grown comfortable comparing Bush’s America to, among other evils, Stalin’s Russia. The tactic hasn’t worked, partly because many decent Americans understand that abuse intended to foil a murder plot is not the same as torturing political dissidents, religious minorities, and other prisoners of conscience. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was not asked to renounce his faith or sign a false confession when he was reportedly waterboarded. His suffering wasn’t intended as a form of punishment. The sole aim was to stop an ongoing murder conspiracy, which is what al Qaeda is. If accounts from such unbiased sources as ABC News’ Brian Ross are to be believed, his suffering saved American lives.

Comparing CIA facilities to Stalin’s gulag may sound righteous, but it is a species of the same moral relativism that denounces all pushers of old ladies equally.

Recently the Guardian published a "detailed" list of techniques used by the CIA in collecting information from detainees and labeled incessantly and routinely as 'torture.' Before we continue, a quick disclaimer from yours truly:

My blogging partner is and has been much more gobsmacked by these things than I. He was very distressed by Abu Ghraib and still thinks that it ought to have cost Rumsfeld his job. However, I beleive that we're both on the same page in saying what happened there was not torture and it most certainly was not torture-as-policy.

That is not to say that those men were not abused and in ways they should not have been. But it wasn't torture. And for administration critics to continue bleating about 'torture' when it is clear that the techniques specifically being mandated do not rise to that level, is absurd.

The Guardian listed seven techniques in it's piece: The techniques sought by the CIA are: induced hypothermia; forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; sleep deprivation; a technique called "the attention grab" where a suspect's shirt is forcefully seized; the "attention slap" or open hand slapping that hurts but does not lead to physical damage; the "belly slap"; and sound and light manipulation.

If sleep deprivation is torture, every University in the country is a gulag at least twice a year as zombie-eyed students roam the campus during finals week(s). No fun as I remember but hardly torture.

Likewise, sitting in a cold room is not torture. The coldest I've ever been was our Christmas 2003 visit with my in-laws here in Lompoc. Coming from Arizona where we lived at the time, my thin blood couldn't handle the cool, damp air. Nor could it take the near sub-arctic temperatures in the house.

My in-laws don't run the heat unless it is bone-chilling cold, which rarely happens here. They leave their thermostat in the mid-60's (barely) year round. For the four days we were here then, it was warmer outside than it was inside the house.

Was I uncomfortable? Of course. Cold as I've ever been inside...anywhere. Was I being tortured, were my in-laws running a gulag? Of course not.

And neither are detainess subjected to sitting in a cold room for an extended period of time.

I cannot commend Jonah enough for, at the very least, attempting to tack the issue of definition. How can we have a meaningful discussion about it if we're not talking about the same thing?

If we don't, he rightly points out what we get: Sullivan complains that calling torture “aggressive interrogation techniques” doesn’t make torture any better. Fair enough. But calling aggressive interrogation techniques “torture” when they’re not doesn’t make such techniques any worse.

Still, there is a danger that over time we may not be able to tell the difference.

Taboos are the glue of civilization because they define what is beyond the pale in ways mere reason cannot. A nation that frets about violating the rights of murder-plotters when the bomb is ticking is unlikely to violate the rights of decent citizens when the bomb is defused.

I suspect this is what motivates so many human-rights activists to exaggerate the abuses and minimize their effectiveness. Slippery-slope arguments aren’t as powerful as moral bullying. Still, their fears aren’t unfounded. Once taboos have been broken, a chaotic search ensues for where to draw the new line, and that line, burdened with precedent and manufactured by politics, rarely holds as firmly as the last. But that is where history has brought us.

In the recent debate over torture, everybody decided to kick the can down the road on what torture is and isn’t. This argument will be forced on us again, no matter how much we try to avoid it. We’ll be sorry we didn’t take the debate more seriously when we had the chance.