Is it torture yet?

If all involved gingerly avoid defining torture, how could it ever be said to occur? One way of accomplishing this is to define it, then redefine it, and redefine it again-as the memos have done-until a dizzying fog surrounds it.

Another way is to shrink from naming it. Media accounts abound of grisly and appalling deeds which, if done by foreigners, would swiftly be termed torture. Instead, they are labeled abuse or mistreatment. The T word rarely appears. And the media thus become partners in the administration's denials.

Even a Red Cross report on the harrowing of inmates at Abu Ghraib turned anemic and wobbly. It dared only to describe this behavior as "tantamount to torture." And as the hearings opened senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, repeated this convenient phrase to evade saying plainly that Americans have tortured their prisoners.

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The president may approve any interrogation technique for the sake of national security. Neither treaties nor U.S. laws against torture can diminish the commander in chief's supreme authority to do whatever the country's safety requires. Therefore subordinates, acting on orders from superiors, may do anything-except what "goes so far as to be patently unlawful." But what could be unlawful if presidential authority trumps all law?

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So the [confirmation] hearings will perform only the ritual of blessing Gonzales for confirmation by the full senate-unless they are resumed for the useful purpose of forging a clear definition of torture.

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To achieve this beneficial result the committee should conduct an inquiry akin to the medieval testing of witches to discover by rigorous methods who really were ones and who were not. Subpoena as witnesses several of the chief architects of the war on terror and its descent into torture. Subject them to a crescendo of the techniques that have been used on prisoners. And invite these human lab rats to announce when the sensations they are experiencing have ceased being abuse or mistreatment and have become torture.

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  Information Clearinghouse article