The Week in Human Rights

It's hard to be encouraged by this week's events. First off, while this rises to the level of dog bites man, the president, who has repeatedly said "We do not torture," is a baldfaced, shameless liar.

Charles Schumer and Diane Feinstein are a disgrace to their party.

Could someone please remind the wingnut right that 24 is fiction? And, while you're at it, please have them read the US Constitution.

Also, have them read Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Here's a cogent excerpt as to why torture is committed:

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 short, it has everything to do with asserting power and control over someone and precious little with obtaining information. It's dehumanizing and it's wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter the fantasist's case being made for it.