Back in those heady days when John Yoo enjoyed sovereign immunity, the discussion of how far interrogators could go took two avenues: define torture out of existence, as practices so unbelievably painful that anything a marginally sane agent might be willing to do would be legal, and otherwise to find ways to come right up to the very edge of the definition while leaving some uncertainty on which agents and their commanders could wiggle out of legal liability. The first avenue gave us waterboarding, the second prolonged sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, IV drips to induce involuntary urination and 'short shackling.'

It has been argued again and again that these 'harsh interrogation' methods aren't torture, and aren't something that reasonable people not blinded by emotion might object to. To this end, I recall Donald Rumsfeld saying that forcing detainees to remain in uncomfortable positions for long periods could not be so bad; why, Rummy himself stood all through his working day.

This passage from a letter by the indefatigable Clive Stafford Smith, in the most recent Harper's Magazine, really struck me:

 

There are, sadly, so many follies in this "war on terror." What, for example, should we do about the aural torture that my clients have suffered, earsplitting Eminem and Springsteen tunes blasting at full volume twenty-four hours a day? President Bush has tried to play down the severity of these methods, but a client of mine who had a razor blade taken to his penis during CIA-sponsored detention in Morocco said that the psychological torture he had experienced was worse than the physical, because while enduring mental torture, he had felt his sanity slipping away.

At first glance, it is maybe hard to imagine how disruptive tactics like loud music could be deemed worse than physical mutilation. But as I thought about it, I think this makes perfect sense. What we do when we keep detainees awake for days (as Japanese police interrogators routinely do), or keep them in solitary confinement for years, is aimed at undermining their psychological integrity. Never being able to hear yourself think for the distraction, or the cold, or the fact that your hands are chained between your feet, for hours at a time over days and months and years, or never having a respite from the solitude of your thoughts, is qualitatively much different from being subjected to pain at the hands of another. Physical torture might at least give you something to focus on to distract yourself from the pain, in raw hatred for the person doing you harm. Endless Eminem, keeping you distracted but unable to focus on anything external, I can see how that would be inescapably maddening.

To illustrate the contrast, Jose Padilla manifested signs of severe psychopathology at trial, after years of solitary confinement. Maher Arar, who was beaten in a Syrian prison for a year before getting released back to his family in Canada, appears by contrast to be functional, if scarred.

Perhaps the reason we ostensibly don't torture is that mere torture doesn't go far enough.