Thursday, October 04, 2007
(11:17 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tantamount to Torture
To follow up on m. leblanc's post on the matter, I'd like to point out a common turn of phrase in stories about torture -- "tough interrogation techniques" that might "amount to" (or "be tantamount to") "illegal torture." Individual acts, innocent and wholesome in themselves, somehow incrementally build up to a level where, unfortunately, one might be tempted to use the word "torture" to describe what is going on. This has been a pervasive way of presenting the issue in virtually all the press coverage of torture -- I can't recall ever reading a story that didn't use this rhetoric.A new twist is this news story, which reveals that our good old American torturers actually conceive of the situation exactly like that: they're using permitted techniques, and they're trying to clarify that combining them doesn't "amount to torture." The media coverage exactly mimics the torturers' own rationalizations.
