Chapter One

DEBATES OVER TORTURE are often mired in questions of definition. With torture, as with pornography, agreement on paradigmatic instances does not lead to agreement on a definition. Of course, torture involves violence or the threat of violence, but so do other political practices, including punishment and combat. Not surprisingly, these are just the places at which torture is likely to occur as well. When we try to distinguish torture from these other forms of political violence, we are always in danger of being captured by our cultural sensibilities. Most Westerners will think that individuals are tortured under the punishments of sharia but not when we place criminal offenders in prison cells for decades. Americans will be offended when Europeans accuse us of torturing those we have condemned to many years on death row. Abandoned forms of punishment-for example, the stocks and the lash-will be thought of as forms of torture while modern forms will not. The same problems appear on the battlefield. Our ideas of the honorable and dishonorable reflect our customary practices. We are more likely to approve the impersonality of the mortar shell than the violence of the bayonet charge. If sorting out the methods of applying political violence is all that is at issue, then we are better off separating the "cruel" from the "unusual" than speaking of torture. All violence against the individual may be cruel, but only some is unusual.

Our reaction to torture, however, is not just a matter of moral relativism induced by culturally specific patterns of violence. Our strongly negative at