Poulos and Torture

James Poulos is a very, very smart man. But I'm utterly dumbstruck at his latest post on the new Postmodern Conservative blog.

He offers up, in admittedly what he describes as a brief post deserving followup, that:

[S]ince I’m on record as saying that one dunk at the waterboard is not torture, whereas three dunks is, I judge 130+ dunks clearly to be torture, regardless of whether the issue is whether we ought to torture or not.

He further amplifies in the comments section of that post that:

My argument turns on two points, one more controversial, I guess, than the other. The more controversial claim is that nothing done once can be torture. I admit that waterboarding is ‘a procedure’ whereas, say, ripping out someone’s thumbnail once is not very intelligibly described as a procedure. But it seems to be that ‘proceduralizing’ things is of the essence of torture. Jumping out of nowhere, ONCE, screaming and pointing a gun: not torture. Building a process or an ordeal out of this event — and the distinction between one and three is that once is once and three is a pattern, while two is ambiguous — does lead us into probable torture territory. The less controversial claim is that we should resist the temptation to do the moral calculus that leads us to a precise decision about how many iterations we can perform before switching over into torture, because under the sway of this temptation our moral calculus turns quickly, if imperceptibly, into a legal calculus, which allows us to justify our conduct in legal terms so as to avoid having to do so in moral terms.

This argument, though tempting, is disturbingly compromising. Because the problem with torture isn't that we hurt the prisoner too many times, or too badly. It's that doing it even once can break a man.

Singular acts can alter the way we see someone - or the way we see ourselves - traumatically and persistently. I can't imagine that a person who's been struck once by their spouse ever can entirely reassert the same sort of unconscious familiarity and trust in him that they once had. While being waterboarded, even once, men are willing to do anything to make it stop. 

How will the man being tortured know, or credit, that he only gets one waterboarding, one day of being forced to stand in a stress position, one time of being slammed up against the wall so hard that whiplash can only be "minimized," not prevented?  

 He has to live with the knowledge that the men holding his used pain, and his body's own preservation instincts, to break him, just once. His jailers have done something that takes away not only his freedom of movement but his freedom to even say "NO." Why won't they do it again? 

So: He has to live with the constant, will-eroding fear of each dragging moment, never knowing whether footsteps in the hall are the torturer's approach or just the changing of the guard. He has been made to betray himself. He may be made to do it again. 

And that is unacceptable to a nation built upon the freedom of the mind of man.