When I was nine, in the spring of 1987, I spent a school semester in England. My history-professor dad took advantage of a faculty-exchange program between Ball State University and Westminster College, outside Oxford, and brought the family along. We spent the weekend visiting castles and ruins and the countryside, and it one of those privileges you don’t realize you’ve been given until it’s past. Virtually all of these castles came equipped with a disturbing feature, especially for a nine-year old with an active imagination, who liked to put himself as the center of every story: the torture chamber. After visiting five or six of these, with their glass boxes full of ancient torture devices, illustrations of just what the rack did, and how they’d use hot iron hooks to gouge a man’s sides after they’d been pulling him apart for several hours, I didn’t really feel like seeing many more of these, and volunteered to stay outside while my parents went in and observed how this particular viceroy like to amuse himself. I’d had my fill of torture lessons. My mom tried to get me to come along. “It’s ok,” she said. “They don’t do this anymore.”
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Of course, people had been torturing other people for centuries after those English monarchs had passed on, but there’s some truth in the reassurance my mother attempted to use: Prior to 2004, we all thought that Americans didn’t torture. The Geneva Conventions were in place, and while the true horrors of the Allied firebombings were beginning to become known, most of us thought and felt with a reasonable degree of certainty that, say, no American would ever enter a prisoner’s cell and do anything that could be construed as torture.
And now that the so-called “torture memos” have been declassified, five years after Seymour Hersh first broke the story of the “abuse” that happened in the prison in Abu Ghraib, Americans know that, yes, Americans did do some things that could be construed as torture, and that will be considered to be torture if those impaneled to decide think about it seriously for more than two minutes.
The use of the word “abuse” is worth noticing in this context. (George Gessert’s 2006 essay “An Orgy of Power” first raised this point in my consciousness. It’s collected in the excellent Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace.) This was the term the last Presidential administration preferred to use instead of torture, for obvious reasons, some related to PR, some related to the International Criminal Court. But for a moment, think about the word “abuse,” and its noun forms: “abuser” and “abused.” Someone who is the “abused” will likely recover, once the wounds, whether physical or psychological, have had time to heal. Likewise, the “abuser” can attend counseling to temper their aggression, or if they’re a “substance-abuser,” they can enter a rehabilitation center to fight off that addiction. Central to the word “abuse” is that it is possible to recover from it.
And now we enter the semantic world of “torture.” A person’s thoughts can be “tortured,” logic can be “tortured,” and a person subjected to torture is also “tortured,” but the redemption latent in “abuse” is absent from “torture.” The scars run so deep, the nature is so firmly fixed, we intuitively feel, that there’s something that marks the person who’s undergone the trauma for the remainder of their life. 180 degrees away from the tortured, we find the torturer.
This is the key to why Dick Cheney is fighting so hard today, I think, for why there have been results from the interrogations and “enhanced techniques.” For if we learned something, and saved lives, then the torturer is not so bad, really; he was only following orders. And if those orders required him to do something that went against every honorable code of morality? It was justified.
But ultimately, if torture happened – and it did, and the notion that there can be any doubt is Dick Cheney’s greatest manipulative victory – then there have been torturers. Americans who committed torture. And just as the relationship between a person’s conscience changes after they’ve undergone torture, then it must change if they have tortured. If it hasn’t, if someone can walk into the cell as a “guard,” implying they are there to look after the prisoner’s well-being, and beat him, and waterboard him, and slam him into walls, and force him to stand for days on end, and not allow him to sleep, then that person is a sociopath. If you torture, you are a torturer. If you do something, you are its noun. They may tell themselves they were following orders. They may tell themselves any number of calm, reassuring words to calm their consciences. This was not being ordered to kill, which can be reasoned in a war. This was instilling fear, this was causing pain, and this is what torture is.
But for what the torturers did to those they tortured, for allowing such monstrosity into the world, they should pay. A society that countenances torture under the guise of following orders opens doors to other, even worse, orders being given and carried out. And since people do still “do this,” we should work to see that they don’t.