The definition of torture is divided. The malleability of the term “severe pain or distress” at the heart of this definition has created the condition in which reality agrees on these texts but may not agree on their meaning. This “I remember it when I think about it” nature of this torture talk makes it clear that this explanation is mostly left to the eye of the beholder. This is particularly difficult considering that international law depends on self-enforcement. After discussing the new misconceptions about information gathering and coercion that are familiar to all sides of the torture argument, the section depicts the world of power gathering. It then reviews the wide range of competing definitions of torture: those proposed by foreign courts, those suggested by observers, and those applied by governments around the world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay I argue that torture is a microcosm, raised to the highest level of intensity, of the tyrannical political relationships that liberalism most hates. I said that torture isolates and privatizes. Pain forcibly interrupts our concentration on everything external to us; this reduces our horizon to our own body and the damage we feel within it. Even much milder sensations of prolonged discomfort can distract us to the point that it becomes impossible to pay attention to anything else, as anyone knows who has had to go to the bathroom in a situation where this could not be done. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that the world of the happy is different from the world of the unhappy, and this is not just a way of speaking when we are in severe pain. The world of the man or woman who suffers greatly is a world without relationships or commitments, a world without an exterior. It is a world reduced to a certain point, a world which has no meaning and in which the human soul finds neither home nor rest. I do not mean to minimize the horror of these experiences, nor to suggest that American interrogators ever go further than light torture. Simulated drowning, withholding pain medication from injured captives, putting lit cigarettes in their ears, rape and beatings go much further. At least five, and possibly more than twenty, captives were beaten to death by American interrogators. Rather, my point is that liberals generally end forms of torture that mutilate the victim's body. This, like the limitation of torture to the collection of intelligence, marks an undeniable moderation of torture, the most immoderate practice in the world. It's almost enough to persuade us that mild torture isn't torture at all, or at least isn't cruel enough to make liberals wince, at least not when the stakes are high enough. In fact, they may even deny that it is torture. The interrogators do not live in a world of loving kindness, nor of equal concern and respect for all human beings. Interrogating resistant prisoners in a non-violent, non-abusive manner still requires a relationship that, in any other context, would be morally abhorrent. This requires extracting information from the subject, and the interrogator accomplishes this by setting up elaborate scenarios to disorient the subject and propel them into an alternate reality. The subject must be tricked into believing that their valuable intelligence has already been revealed by someone else, so that it no longer has any value. He must.