We Wouldn't

In late 2007, I declared that the upcoming presidential election “is about torture”. I was wrong. It wasn’t. Despite my assertion that torture should stay in the public eye until we come to terms with it and, ultimately, eradicate it, our preference towards inertia won out: We, as a people, desperately want to ignore this issue. We want to pretend it doesn’t happen. And unless there is a constant media blitz forcing Americans to come to terms with our torture policy, we’ll continue to ignore it.

The soldier accused of leaking material to WikiLeaks is currently being held in solitary. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, and he wasn’t on suicide watch (though now apparently we have to pump him full of anti-depressants to keep his brain intact). There is a solid case to be made, one this made in chilling detail in The New Yorker, that long-term solitary confinement rises to the level of torture.

But, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, the New Yorker’s question — is solitary confinement torture? — is no longer the most salient one. Years after Abu Gharib and waterboarding, years after a Bush administration that explicitly sanctioned torture and years into an Obama administration that has done its utmost to insure there is never any accountability for it, a more harrowing question emerges: Even if it is torture, would we even care?

I think the answer is clear. No. We would not. Much as we have with prison rape, we, as a society, have come to terms with permitting torture of those we detain — convicts, military detainees, even the accused. It is now part of who we are as a nation. And it will take a great, soul-wrenching shift to turn us away from it.

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10 Responses to We Wouldn't

  1. 1
    john says:

    reading this makes me incredibly sad.

  2. 2
    janinsanfan says:

    Amen. We torture.

  3. 3
    Charlie says:

    I personally spent years in prisons for drugs and I can tell you first hand that there are tens of thousands of Americans in prisons who face what Julian Assange is going through and worse as I write this. Those in county jails also face 24 hour confinement without a conviction or sentence, some in solitary confinement, many in our prisons and jails face daily torture at the hands of sadistic and over authoritarian guards, most face inadequate medical or mental health care. Torture is common place in American prisons and jails.

  4. 4
    Nicholas Wilbur says:

    President Bush went on tour promoting his use of torture and instead of putting him in prison, America bought the book to read the details. You’re right. Nobody cares. – “Obama Facing Decision Points on Bush’s Torture Confession” http://bit.ly/hwQ7NN

  5. 5
    squatlo says:

    There’s no question we’re guilty of torture by virtue of what was done in our names by the Bush/Cheney administration. As far as solitary confinement is concerned, if given a choice of being in the rape-friendly confines of the general prison population or being held in solitary, I’d happily choose to be left locked up alone for the remainder of my days.
    Torture would be to fear for your life every night in some hell-hole, having your pleas ignored by guards, or suffering abuse at their hands.
    Solitary might be torture for those who have to have human interaction and conversation, but I would gladly take solitary over that kind of horror.

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:

    Squatio, you seem to be implying (but not quite saying) that solitary isn’t torture.

    I don’t buy the “I’ll show you what REAL torture is!” form of argumentation. Saying “X is torture, and X is worse than Y” isn’t sufficient to establish that Y isn’t torture. I’d rather have my fingernails torn off than be flayed, but they’re still both torture.

  7. 7
    Dianne says:

    As far as solitary confinement is concerned, if given a choice of being in the rape-friendly confines of the general prison population or being held in solitary, I’d happily choose to be left locked up alone for the remainder of my days.

    Are you sure? Because solitary confinement doesn’t mean no interaction, it means interaction only with the guards. If they chose to rape you, who are you going to protest to? Who will protect you from abuse by the only people you are allowed access to? Even assuming that solitary confinement doesn’t also imply sensory deprivation and denial of any form of stimulation.

  8. 8
    Simple Truth says:

    There’s a Rule of 3 I heard somewhere on a writer’s website, and while it’s very rough times, it’s a good general guideline. You can survive: 3 hours in harsh climate without shelter, 3 days without water, 3 days without food, and 3 months without human interaction.
    Apparently, it’s something the military has had to deal with – I can’t find any citation for it but I remember reading that soldiers during Vietnam would surrender after being isolated for a long time in the jungle, knowing that they would face torture, just because they wanted human interaction. I wish I could find citations for it because it was really interesting.
    It would seem to apply to solitary confinement as well. I wish our country wouldn’t stoop to this – it’s not rehabilitory in the slightest. All stick, no carrot. Why break someone and then release them into society?

  9. 9
    Robert says:

    Not to be all picky, but you can survive up to a week without water, a month without food, and indefinitely without human interaction. You might go nuts in the latter case, but you won’t die. Soldiers very rarely are in the field on a solo basis (no matter what video games might think) so I don’t know where that one comes from.

    There is a link to a rule of three here which has those same (wrong) figures, along with three minutes without air, which is about right.

    (It is true that your ability to do anything worthwhile to boost your own survival will diminish pretty rapidly after a few days without water, even if you aren’t dead yet. But lots of shipwreck survivors, etc., have gone for longer than a week and made it.)

  10. 10
    MisterMephisto says:

    Robert said:

    Soldiers very rarely are in the field on a solo basis (no matter what video games might think) so I don’t know where that one comes from.

    I don’t think Simple Truth was saying that soldiers get sent out into the field on a solo basis. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have evidence of a single soldier surviving a firefight and still being trapped behind the lines for weeks or months at a time, which I think is more of what Simple Truth was addressing.

    But even if I’d be hesitant to accept Simple Truth’s statement about the “rule of 3” without more evidence, I’m absolutely willing to accept that “being driven insane” is equally as relevant to a discussion of torture as “threat of death”. It’s pretty clear that ST’s point was: “survive intact” rather than “still breathing at the end”.