The subject of torture came up again this week. I just so happens that I've had several hours of dental work over the past two weeks and in that chair, I've had plenty of time to think about torture. It doesn't take much.
I have been blessed with very strong teeth and a high tolerance for pain. I've also been cursed with fairly weak gums. So in my infrequent trips to the ordinary dentist I've been accustomed to hearing. "No cavities, but you should do something about those gums, but I'm not a gum specialist." So I finally got to a gum specialist and he's whipping my ass into shape. As part of that whipping, I have become intimately familiar with a device called a cavitator. It's essentially a jackhammer that vibrates at about the speed of jet turbine. The dental hygienist with forearms like Popeye grinds that bad boy on all the surfaces of my teeth and even though the nerves of my jaw have been properly zapped, it still feels like high pitched whine of crossed light sabers inside my head. Naturally, on one of my teeth, all the nerves weren't adequately deadend and I got a taste of what real torture might feel like, for one eighth of a second. In your dental career, something similar might have happened to you.
So a thinking person might suggest, that when the US says "We don't torture", that the lines between advanced interrogation and torture might be pretty slim. Waterboarding, for example. A thoughtful person might say.. yeah that could be considered torture. But from the perspective of someone strapped to a chair with his mouth open, I think that it's fair to say that it's damned easy to torture if we really wanted to torture. And I know, that in that position, I would give up my grandmother in a heartbeat. I know damned well breaking off a tooth with pliers is torture. I don't have to think twice, I don't have to consider the nuances and shades of gray.
There are so many different ways to torture that any idiot could do it. We serve up examples in horror movies for fun. But interrogation is a different kind of thing, and I believe that there is a significant qualitative difference between those things that bring the noise for information's sake and those acts which bring the pain for the sake of pain. Torture is easy. Interrogation is hard. Think about it.
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