"I Really Resent You Using the Word 'Torture'"

Amy Davidson has posted a transcript from an interview she conducted with Jose Rodriguez, who spent more than thirty years at the CIA, eventually becoming an instrumental player in instituting some of the United States' most notorious counter-terrorism methods. As it happens, Rodriguez wrote a book about his career, called "Hard Measures", in which he defends his agency's 'agressive' interrogation techniques and tries to explain how it might have saved American lives. Like all of those associated with the shameful campaign of torture, he still refuses to characterise waterboarding and other practices as such, and even expresses a slightly measure of pride at having administered them.

The techniques we employed were sometimes harsh," he told Davidson, "but fell well short of what is torture." Even a cursory examination of some of those measures would reveal both 'techniques' and 'harsh' to be euphemisms almost as laughable as the enhanced/aggressive interrogation line.

Everybody is free to devise their own definition of torture, but the general perception surely has to stand; in other words, that if most people agree that a practice constitutes torture or resembles it, then it should be considered such.

And yet the euphemisms are still making themselves unabashedly open for business. The problem for us is that most of them aren't obviously bullshit until you consider the precise nature of the torture. Everybody's heard of waterboarding, and most people will have at least a vague idea of what is involved in the ghastly procedure. And yet people say that it "simulates" drowning. Even for mainstream media outlets — only some of whom are finally confident to employ the T word in their reporting — it's still a simulation, when in fact it is no such thing. The person being tortured is being drowned, only the process has been deliberately prolonged so that maximum suffering can be achieved; so that the optimum amount of pain can be inflicted on the victim.

If that isn't torture, as the line invariably goes, I don't know what is.