FBIEarlier
today, a state senator in New York echoed a not-unique sentiment on
Twitter about the Boston bombing suspect who’s in custody,
that he ought to be tortured.

The politics of torture, perfected over thousands of years of
human cruelty, is also American contemporary. Just today, Steve
Chapman
explained here at Reason how many Americans remain blissfully
unaware of the U.S’s very recent (and maybe even contemporaneous)
torture policies. Undoubtedly, however, the presence of torture in
the government’s counterterrorism toolbox went a long way in
bringing the widely condemned practice of torture back to American
political discourse.

Slavoj Zizek warned of the consequences of this in a 2007
New York Times op-ed:

It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but
also the fight against them, now has to proceed in a gray zone of
legality. We thus have de facto “legal” and “illegal” criminals:
those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers
and the like), and those who are outside legality, subject to
military tribunals or seemingly endless incarceration.

Mr. [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed has become what the Italian political
philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer”: a creature legally
dead while biologically still alive. And he’s not the only one
living in an in-between world. The American authorities who deal
with detainees have become a sort of counterpart to homo sacer:
acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is
sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of
law.

Some don’t find this troubling. The realistic counterargument goes:
The war on terrorism is dirty, one is put in
situations where the lives of thousands may depend on information
we can get from our prisoners, and one must take extreme steps. As
Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School puts it: “I’m not in favor of
torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have
court approval.” Well, if this is “honesty,” I think I’ll stick
with hypocrisy.

Yes, most of us can imagine a singular situation in which we might
resort to torture — to save a loved one from immediate, unspeakable
harm perhaps. I can. In such a case, however, it is crucial that I
do not elevate this desperate choice into a
universal principle. In the unavoidable brutal urgency of the
moment, I should simply do it. But it cannot become
an acceptable standard; I must retain the proper sense of the
horror of what I did. And when torture becomes just another in the
list of counterterrorism techniques, all sense of horror is
lost.

And then eventually
you get U.S. senators openly calling to strip a U.S. citizen of his
constitutional rights.