Dirty work

One of the problems with torture is that somebody has to carry it out — someone has to do it, has to inflict deliberate, coercive pain on another individual. And in the doing of it, it doesn't matter a bit what this inflicting of coercive pain is called, whether the word torture is used or some nicer-sounding euphemism like "tough" or "aggressive tactics."

And most people can't do this. They just can't. Not at first anyway. This is part of why the word "inhumanity" means what it means.

Soldiers can be trained, conditioned — almost programmed — to obey orders, so they can always be ordered to perform this "duty." But soldiers are also trained to respect things like honor, and given such orders most soldiers will refuse. Some few will comply, accepting that their superiors must have some greater good, some greater purpose in mind. And following their orders, they may, as ordered, betray their own instincts and their own sense of honor. But such "good soldiers," ordered to become bad soldiers, bad men, burn out pretty quickly. They become substance abusers or suicides, or some sad halfway case.

Which leaves only one reliable group of people who can be counted on to perform this duty: Those who enjoy it. These people — the sociopaths, the sadists, those who find cruelty sexually gratifying — must be deputized, empowered and rewarded for their work.

But this deputizing, empowering and rewarding also doesn't just happen. Someone has to do it. Someone has to be present to unleash them and to congratulate them. To ensure that their requisitions — chains, ice water, cellophane, jumper cables — are carried out. To look on these monstrous servants without blinking, without recoiling, and to smile on this partnership which allows our dirty work to get done while pretending our own hands are clean.

And again, most people can't do this, won't do this. The only ones willing or able to do so are those who share a bit of the sadist's glee or the sociopath's detachment, those who get a bit of a sexual kick out of it. So a steep and narrow chain of command has to be established, as direct a line as possible from the sadists directly to the very top consisting only of those who share a measure of their sickness.

And what of those at the very top? Denial, detachment and compartmentalization are powerful things. Those tools — the very same ones that may allow some few torture victims to survive — can be employed, for a while, by someone who isn't yet a monster. But soon enough these people at the very top, the ones ordering, commissioning and endorsing monstrosity, must either come to embrace the sadism and sexual perversion of the monsters in their employ, or else they must become wholly delusional, creating a sense of self utterly unrelated and irreconcilable with the reality of who and what they really are, the reality of what they do.

Those at the top have names, so we might as well use them: President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace. I do not know these men personally, so I cannot say which is the case with them, but there are only two options.

Gen. Pace either gets sexually thrilled at the idea of waterboarding, or else he is a deluded fool further removed from reality than Walter Mitty or Elwood C. Dobbs.

Bush and Rumsfeld have both displayed occasional flashes of raw anger when defending their prerogative to order torture, glimpses of the snarling faces of the sadistic pervert. But then each has also maintained the fantastic claim that the interrogation tactics they are defending — things like waterboarding or the "no-touch" torture tactics learned from the North Koreans — must never be called "torture." So perhaps Rumsfeld and Bush are delusional fools rather than perverts.

But those are the only options.