The Legacy

I've pretty much avoided the torture discourse, simply because to me it's a no-brainer: It's wrong on every level. Period. Maybe I should be writing about it more, just to keep it in front of you, but it disgusts me as much as the fact-free anti-gay right (and, come to think of it, it's a lot of the same people), and you know what I think. However, Digby and her colleagues keep bringing it up, bless their hearts, and you can do a lot worse than note this post which is largely a reprise of a post from 2005:

Today, [Jason Vest] has written a piece on torture for the National Journal that is fascinating because he's spoken to old guard CIA who have had some experience with this stuff in the past. They all agree that the moral dimension is huge, but there are good practical reasons for not doing it as well. These range from the difficulty in getting allies to cooperate because of their distaste for such methods to the fact that the information is unreliable.

But the thing I found most interesting is the observation that it does something quite horrible to the perpetrators as well as the victims:

"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions." Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself. . . ."

To some extent civilization is nothing more than leashing the beast within. When you go to the dark side, no matter what the motives, you run a terrible risk of destroying yourself in the process. I worry about the men and women who are engaging in this torture regime. This is dangerous to their psyches. But this is true on a larger sociological scale as well. For many, many moons, torture has been a simple taboo --- you didn't question its immorality any more than you would question the immorality of pedophilia. You know that it's wrong on a visceral, gut level. Now we are debating it as if there really is a question as to whether it's immoral --- and, more shockingly, whether it's a positive good. Our country is now openly discussing the efficacy of torture as a method for extracting information.

The submerged part of the Bush Legacy: not only do we have former soldiers wandering around with mental conditions that mostly aren't even acknowledged, much less treated, but we now have a whole generation of torturers who are in the same boat, in a country that has come to see something that civilized societies regard as completely immoral as business as usual.

Thanks, George. Heckuva job.