IF WE'LL EMBARGO, FIREBOMB AND NUKE YOUR WOMEN AND CHILDREN, WILL WE NOT WATERBOARD YOUR MEN?:

Ice Water and Sweatboxes: The long and sadistic history behind the CIA's torture techniques. (Darius Rejali, March 17, 2009, Slate)

In the 20th century, there were two main traditions of clean torture—the kind that doesn't leave marks, as modern torturers prefer. The first is French modern, a combination of water- and electro-torture. The second is Anglo-Saxon modern, a classic list of sleep deprivation, positional and restraint tortures, extremes of temperature, noise, and beatings.

All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern.

Mr. Rejali's book, Torture and Democracy, like this essay, is useful precisely because it refutes the notion that torture is a departure from liberal democratic norms and demonstrates the great care we've taken to devise and implement "clean" (humane) methods for when we are forced by our enemies to resort to such unpleasantness.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 18, 2009 9:40 AM