What is Torture?

One of the trickiest issues is the definition of torture. Do we know when we see it?

My simplest definition is: infliction of pain or suffering on people by officials acting on behalf of a government. In this sense, torture discussed in these pages is not assault and battery done by criminals, but carried out by legal authorities for purposes of a state or other governmental entity. Those who do torture, the torturers, are carrying out the law.

These pages, therefore, focus on torture as inflicting pain according to the law.  How sick indivduals, criminal cops, or organized mobsters might inflict agony can certainly be defined as torture, but is not under consideration here.  Suffering inflicted by authorities, states, governments, or legally constituted officials are particularly relevant to the Witch Hunts.

Before 1800 many governments codified how to do torture. Afterward, Western governments began to remove torture procedures from the law books. The high point on banning torture may have been reached by the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (also at <http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/39/a39r046.htm> or <http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html>, proposed in 1984, in force by 1987, ratified by the USA in 1994). It prohibited

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

The last sentence exempts punishment from the definition of torture and the UN would hesitate to ban it. Yet, outside of criminal punishment, torture is unacceptable, according to this treaty. 

For more on the revival of torture, see Torture Post 9/11.

Using vocabulary to define or disguise torture:  When does torture begin? Where do you draw the line? 

• Questioning: sometimes clearly torture as "the Painful Question"
• Martyring: using the Christian word for one who dies for the faith as a "witness"
• Interrogation: which is usually understood to include lying, good cop/bad cop, some discomfort (bright light, thirst, pressure for need for restroom, isolation), but can disquise rougher treatment.
• Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: euphemism invented by the George W. Bush administration, which seems similar to the Nazi Gestapo term "Veschärfte Vernehmung."

Some Useful Links:

What Is Torture? An interactive primer on American interrogation by Emily Bazelon, Phillip Carter, and Dahlia Lithwick:  While the primer is more about modern torture, it provides good definitions and illustrations of motives and techniques. 

The Right to Freedom from Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment: List of relevant treaties.