The impact of torture on those who must suffer it is obvious, but torture also has wider implications for the rest of society. Even just the hint of torture possibly being used has negative consequences on a democratic society because it represents a massive increase in the amount of power which the state can have over the bodies, minds, and futures of individual citizens.

In Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers in American Empire, Mark Lewis Taylor argues:

Torture, announced as a necessary practice and then implemented (even if sporadically), atomizes a citizenry and increases a state’s capacity to rule without accountability. Here is where this point of empire’s star oozes another poisonous bile into the body. Even if torture is only vaguely hinted at, the state’s power to torture strengthens the state’s power over its people.

Torture is known to reduce the language of a tortured man to babbling sounds of his pre-speaking child. “He howls,” notes Jacobo Timmerman, recalling his own and others’ torture in Argentina. Torture is the state’s punishment of citizens’ bodies. It is control over speech, and its haunting power erodes the communication among citizens that is necessary for collaboration in a democracy.

Thus, as William Cavanaugh notes, “torture breaks down collective links and makes of its victims isolated monads.” Torture follows the first point of the star of empire in 9/ 11 USA, unipolar ulilateralism, directly. Unilateral exercises of power can readily turn to torture, the ultimate expression of unilateral power played out on human bodies, reinforcing unilateral powers of the state.

With other forms of punishment, the person being punished continues to be a member of a social group — even if it’s the social group of inmates in prison. In torture, though, a person is reduced to nothing more than themselves: an isolated individual consumed by suffering who wants nothing more than to end that suffering, whatever it takes. Such a person is no longer a member of a community, democratic or otherwise.

People who are tortured or even merely have to wonder if they could be tortured cannot effectively participate in the democratic process because they become physically and psychologically isolated. In fact, the mere threat of torture — and perhaps other government action, like hidden surveillance — may do more to isolate people from their neighbors and instill them with fear than the actual acts themselves.

Is it true that torture follows from the principle of unilateralism? Perhaps — when the decisions and actions of a government are no longer subject to independent scrutiny or judgment, when it’s no longer possible for government acts to be halted as unjust or illegal, then it’s surely easier for the government to violate accepted norms or standards. We can’t trust the government to refrain from unjust or illegal actions simply because those are the wrong things to do — we need accountability, and this requires check and balances from independent voices.

Unfortunately, the administration of George W. Bush has all but eliminated the existence of checks against its decisions or actions, and balances against its power or authority. The administration has adopted a theory of government according to which the administration’s decisions cannot be questioned, challenged, or halted by any outside agency of government — the president’s decisions on matters of national security are supreme and outside any legal review. Who decides what qualifies as a matter of national security? The president, of course, and once again those decisions are outside any legal review.

None of this is compatible with the principles of liberal democratic government or with the continuation of a liberal democratic society. There is no evidence of the Bush administration believing in open democratic government which is stronger than the evidence of the administration believing more in closed, authoritarian government. The Bush administration wants to rule, not govern, and to rule without accountability — something which is immeasurably aided by the existence of torture, warrantless surveillance, limitless detainment without trial, and secret trials.

 

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