So, welcome Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, military commander of al-Qaeda, and the world’s third most wanted fugitive, to the Hotel California. Even as you read this, the recently captured terrorist will be having something complicated and extremely horrible done to his balls, most probably.
Torturers are never happier than when messing around with a victim’s genitals. And, you have to say, their imagination knows no bounds: torturers are supremely creative, more so even than advertising copywriters.
Who would have thought, for example, of training Alsatians to rape women? What a leap of imagination! And what application and hard, thankless work involved after that initial, brilliant germ of inspiration. Hats off, then, to the loyal functionaries of the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile in the late 1970s, for their important, pioneering work in this area.
Suffocation by the slow drip of water on to a towel across the face? Respect to the Chinese! How did they come up with that, one wonders? And so cost-effective, too! All you need is water, a towel and a chair.
And a bourgeois recidivist victim, obviously. Plenty of those around in the late 1960s, as it happened. Britain’s most-celebrated novelist, George Orwell, tested his own fecund imagination in this regard when describing the torture chamber in Room 101 in 1984.
He was totally crap; just not up to the job at all. A rat in a cage placed upon the face of someone who didn’t like rats very much was the best he could manage. Even Orwell admitted later that this was crude and ineffective. He just didn’t have that quintessentially human spark of genius that inhabits the truly professional torturer; the ability, when the chips are down, of relentlessly racking one’s brains to devise new and more excruciating methods of inflicting pain upon a fellow human being. In fact, this unique ability is almost what defines us as being human.
Even Saddam Hussein is deficient here. Bunging miscreants into a vat of acid for the pleasure of watching them dissolve, screaming? So jejune. So unnecessarily, you know, quick.
The torturers’ trade is difficult to master and terribly under-appreciated. Let us hope that the CIA has given some serious thought as to how we torture Mohammed. Because we can be fairly confident that he is being tortured. Right now; this minute; as we speak. As I’ve said, he’s in the Hotel California, a top secret United States base that might be in Uzbekistan or Diego Garcia or Afghanistan, any country where frying someone’s genitals is seen as a part of everyday life.
But really, to all intents and purposes, it is being done in Peoria, Illinois, or Daventry, Northamptonshire. Because it is being done in our name.
There is a spurious sort of moral dilemma being debated at the moment: is it okay, we ask, to torture Mohammed and people like him if, in doing so, we save the lives of some of ”us” in the process, by thwarting whatever psychopathic activity was planned by the terrorists?
Radical British cleric Abu Hamza — or Captain Hook as the British tabloid press have dubbed him — recently confirmed to me that I would burn in hell for eternity. I am — in case you were not aware — the scum of the Earth and lower than cattle. He said all this good
naturedly and with some sadness: it was not his judgement, but the judgement of Allah. If only I would see things his way. There was sadness in his pronouncement because we get on well, despite certain philosophical divergences.
And it is this notion that we, in this palpably ideological war, reject. In order to torture someone you need to be convinced that they are lower than cattle, that they are the scum of the Earth, for whatever political, religious or racial reasons.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I would guess, thinks this of me. And you, for that matter. But we do not think it of him, no matter what wickedness he may plan to inflict upon the rest of us. We think that he is fundamentally like us and deserving of our compassion as well as our opprobrium. That is the basis upon which this ideological war is being fought, surely.
So, a brief and hopeless plea to the CIA: let us be true to our concept of morality. Leave Mohammed’s balls alone, huh? — Â