It's not a matter of whether waterboarding and other forms of torture practiced by our government during the War on Terror was cruel or not. That is the wrong way to think about it. We were, according to Bush, in a state of war, and torture is consistent with a state of war. What people must understand is that no such thing as civility exists in such a state. To believe there can be codes of conduct, rules, reason in war is to fail to understand what war is all about. What war opens is a realm not of law and order but of one where everything is possible; meaning, a realm dominated by nothingness. Here, everything comes down to nothing. This is the obscene freedom in which all manner of crimes thrive.

A real grasp of this fact would certainly make if more difficult to go into war. Why? Because if you think war can be contained and managed, you are likely to go into it in much the same way you would go into a sporting event (an event that is contained, has borders, refs, and penalties for foul acts). But if you know it is not about rules of engagement and disengagement, if you see it as it actually is, as an absolute chaos that consumes everything because everything in it is possible, you will use any diplomatic means to avoid what is the great (if not the greatest) void.

We must not say that torture is bad but that torture, in a state of war, has its home. Torture outside of war? Here it is a complete stranger.

So, our government declared a war on terrorists, the war opened its gates and we entered hell: torture, murder, sexual abuse, and so on and so on—the obscene freedoms. So far, so good. However, this was not the case. There was no real war on terror. All of this torturing did not happen in a state of war (a state of lawlessness) but of peace (a state of law). The state authorized torture of "enemy combatants" (soldiers without a state) was cruel for the very reasons that Frank Rich pointed out in NYT today:

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of... [the real] White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections.

We are now finding out that the torture was not about war with stateless terrorists but starting a war with a state that had nothing to do with international terrorism. As you can see, this is a major ethical problem. In fact, this is criminal. In war, there is no such thing as crime—which is why the expression "war crimes" is redundant. There can only be crimes during peace times. A disturbance is not a disturbance if it happens in a great disturbance. It is nothing at all—fire in fire, smoke in smoke, ashes in ashes, destruction all around. For a disturbance to exist there must be a situation in which its opposite dominates—stability, a state of peace. And that is precisely why torture, in this context, the context of trying to justify a war in a situation of peace, is criminal. Indeed, the fact that the enemy combatants did not create or confirm a phony link between themselves and Iraq, even under tremendous pain, makes them more honest and honorable than their torturers.