“What’s fascinating to people about torture is it gives one person absolute power over another, which is both alluring and corrupting,”

   Torture is coming up more and more in the news, I don't know if this is because of the new presidency or my new sensitivity to the issue from our class. I wish I had been more aware of the issue in the past  5 years, because the current articles have a very distinctive tone- I wonder how different this was when Bush was still in office.

   There were two articles in the Times recently that really caught me off guard- the first was about how waterboarding was used 266 times against two suspects. Even in just writing that I realized that there is a difference in language between how I feel about the issue and how it is represented in the news. I used the word 'against', whereas in the article they simply said 'used on'. Although this is a subtle difference, I find it nonetheless important. By saying it was used against someone shows how it is a forceful act that attacks another human; using the phrase 'used on' just makes it seem like another tactic.  This is something that I thought was important when Zarkov was speaking about the use of children vs. "children" and mothers vs. parents in Body Of War.

   The other article that I thought was interesting and related to our class was about the difference between torture and war- where does that line fall? I've been trying to figure that out in terms of Foucault, but no luck.  There is something about torture that is almost fetishized by news and government policy which makes it somehow condonable, almost heroic, whereas war is seen as universally wrong. I think that especially in modern times some of this might be attributed to the abandonment of the 'rules of war' because of the new types of wars we become involved in (ie- guerilla fighting, terrorist cells and all sorts of fun government catch phrases). There's no structure there, no equations of 'attack here + move here= take this hill' like in WWI. Conversely, I think that's part of what's so attractive about torture, it's an extremely cause+effect relationship.