In \u201cCrucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,\u201d<\/a> Joel Marcus presents a question in interpreting the use, during the Greco-Roman era, of prolonged, spectacularly public executions on elevated, crosswise structures: Why? There were speedier ways to kill someone. What work was the cross doing for the authorities of that era? He explains, \u201cin the ancient Greco-Roman context, the idea of bringing a person down by raising him up must still have struck people as incongruous, and presumably those responsible for the practice would have been cognizant of this irony\u201d (Marcus 2006). The \u201chuman object lesson\u201d that was crucifixion \u201cgained maximum visibility and hence optimal deterrent power.\u201d Marcus writes \u201cthis strangely \u2018exalting\u2019 mode of execution was designed to mimic, parody, and puncture the pretentions of insubordinate transgressors by displaying a deliberately horrible mirror of their self-elevation.\u201d He continues, \u201cpeople of any class who had not shown proper deference to the emperor,\u201d people who \u201cdemonstrated disdain for imperial rule,\u201d were particularly subject to this form of torture. \u201cThe graphic tableau of the cross\u201d is, Marcus argues, \u201ca prime illustration of Michel Foucault\u2019s thesis that the process of execution is a \u2018penal liturgy\u2019 designed to reveal the essence of the crime\u201d (2006, 79).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Fear: The History of a Political Idea<\/a><\/em>,<\/a> intellectual historian Corey Robin enumerates different uses of fear as a means of control. Specifically, Robin is interested in \u201cpolitical fear,\u201d by which he means \u201ca people\u2019s felt apprehension of some harm to their collective well-being . . .\u201d (2004, 3). He links different ways that political fear works, and his analysis is helpful for thinking about how torture works politically. Robin explains that \u201cpolitical fear,\u201d while \u201coften associated with government acts,\u201d is not unrelated to \u201cthe fear a woman has of her abusive husband, or the worker of her unkind employer.\u201d Although by some accounts \u201cthese fears\u201d are merely \u201cpersonal, the product of an unfortunate but entirely private derangement of power,\u201d Robin continues, \u201cthey are political . . . [and] spring from pervasive social inequities.\u201d These established rules of order are, in turn, sustained by fear. Fear \u201csustain[s] long traditions of rule over women and workers\u201d (2004, 3).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robin explains\nthat, during times of war, the form of fear used most obviously is to present\n\u201cpublic objects of apprehension and concern\u201d (2004, 18). The effort to\nnormalize torture in the United States, and, to some extent, in other countries\nparticipating in the ongoing \u201cwar against terror\u201d has involved depicting Muslim\npeople as \u201cpublic objects of apprehension and concern.\u201d There has been another,\nrelated, political use of fear\u2014a fear that \u201chover[s] quietly about the\nrelationships between the powerful and the powerless, subtly influencing\neveryday conduct without requiring much in the way of active intimidation\u201d\n(19). Linking Marcus\u2019s insight about the use of crucifixion as a \u201cdisplay\u201d or\n\u201cliturgy\u201d to warn against insubordination to state power, torture may \u201cwork\u201d\nto, as Hajjar words it, \u201cdeter opposition and signal the costs of resistance.\u201d\nHajjar quotes Henry Shue\u2019s 2004 essay on torture, noting that the purpose of\ntorture may be \u201cintimidation of persons other than the victim.\u201d She continues, summarizing\nother essays on \u201cmodern torture regimes\u201d: \u201cTerroristic torture is an invisible\nspectacle because people are made fearful of torture that they know is\noccurring but do not actually see\u201d (Hajjar 2009, 323). Torture, as a spectacle,\nas a possibility, as a hidden but known reality, may be used as part of a\ncomplex of social control. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Logistics\nof torture<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The applicable definition of \u201cencyclopedia\u201d in the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em> is as follows: \u201cA literary work containing extensive information on all branches of knowledge, usually arranged in alphabetical order.\u201d This encyclopedia entry\u2014this set of words containing information about torture \u2013 comes from a location central to one agency\u2019s pursuit of intelligence. This entry on torture comes from the vantage point of North Carolina in 2019. The North Carolina Commission on the Inquiry of Torture<\/a> issued a report in September, 2018: \u201cTorture Flights: North Carolina\u2019s Role in the CIA Rendition and Torture Program.\u201d The commission included legal scholars, clergy, veterans, and physicians working together to document how and why Johnston County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina was used as a launching site as part of the United States Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program. North Carolina was involved in trafficking people by air to places where people were assigned the task of torturing other people in the presence of other people tasked with recording words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In his \u201cForeword\u201d\nto the report, Alberto Mora, Former General Counsel (2001-2006), Department of\nthe U.S. Navy identifies the basics. He explains that the \u201cconnection between\nNorth Carolina and the government-sponsored torture of the era is clear:\naircraft operated by at least one local company, based at North Carolina airfields\nthat were subsidized by North Carolina revenues and subject to a measure of\nNorth Carolina regulation, and flown by North Carolina pilots, were engaged in\nthe transport of dozens of captive individuals to multiple foreign sites, some\nmanaged by U.S. officials, others by foreign governments, to be tortured\u201d (Read\n2018, 4). This 2018 report was part of an ongoing effort by citizen groups\nacross the United States to document U.S. sponsored torture. There was a saying\nabout the Italian government under Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini. Tourists were\nsaid to have noted that Mussolini \u201cmade the trains run on time.\u201d In their report, the North Carolina\nCommission documents how North Carolina made the rendition planes run on time.\nThis report was barely discussed outside of activist circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Linguistics\nof torture<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the United\nStates, the word \u201ctorture\u201d has become diluted in the cultural lexicon. This\nentry is written from a state that functions as a hub of the U.S. military and\nof defense contracting to institutions of higher education. The author is interested\nin the dilution of the word and legal definition. To write accurately about\ntorture for this lexicon requires that the author ask the reader first to note\nhow accustomed most readers in the United States have become to use of the word\ncasually in polite company. The word \u201ctorture\u201d has been used as a joke. As in,\n\u201cthis is torture!\u201d People in the U.S. hear this word used in gridlocked\ntraffic, while someone is trying on a swimsuit in front of a department store\nmirror, to describe a badly written song on the radio. The word \u201ctorture\u201d has,\nthrough common parlance and also through film and television, become something\nrhetorically other than what it is, technically. Actual torture has also been\ndiluted, visually, through the use of images on a screen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Torture has been used repeatedly since September 11, 2001 in Western, popular culture, to entertain, to warn, and to frighten\u2014from Game of Thrones<\/em> to 24<\/em> to Homeland<\/em> to complicated, story-driven video games. Actual people have been tortured as \u201chuman object lessons,\u201d to use Marcus\u2019s phrase, with originally limited, targeted viewing. And, at the same time, fictionalized depictions of torture have reached a wide, general audience. As recently as April, 2019, John Powers,<\/a> a television critic for National Public Radio, summarized the popularity of Game of Thrones<\/em> as \u201cthe world\u2019s most popular show\u201d at that time. Powers noted that \u201cjournalists are even writing elegiac articles about how, given our fragmented media environment, Game of Thrones<\/em> may be the last TV series that everyone watches at the same time in order to be part of the conversation\u201d (2019). While some journalists have been attempting for almost two decades to draw attention to a systemic, carefully orchestrated system of actual torture, watching (and commenting adroitly on) television series that depict torture has become a civic ritual, even a responsibility to be \u201cpart of the conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seventeen years prior, in an essay for <\/a>The Christian Science Monitor<\/a><\/em>, Gregory M. Lamb noted the precipitous increase in television violence after September 11, 2001: \u201cSo much for media critics\u2019 expectations that grisly fictional violence on TV would abate after the sobering events of September 11. Scenes of torture and sadism appeared on network entertainment TV at a rate nearly double that over the previous two years\u201d (2002). Lamb also named in particular a Parents Television Council (PTC) study that reported, in 2008, the show 24<\/em> was depicting procedural torture as commonplace: \u201cA Parents Television Council review found that 24<\/em> showed 67 scenes of torture in the first five seasons. [The main character of 24<\/em>] Jack Bauer has been involved in more than 160 separate instances of violence since the show began (all six seasons) and has killed at least 71 individuals\u201d (Lamb 2002). Other television programming was keeping up: \u201cthere were 110 scenes of torture on prime-time broadcast programming from 1995 to 2001. From 2002 to 2005, the number increased to 624 scenes of torture. Data from 2006 to 2007 showed that there were 212 scenes of torture\u201d (Lamb 2002).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bush and Cheney administration officials were open about their appreciation and emulation of the show 24<\/em>. In a succinct, 2008 review of two (then recent) books on torture\u2014Jane Mayer\u2019s <\/a>The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals<\/a><\/em> <\/em><\/a>and Philippe Sands\u2019s <\/a>Torture Team:<\/a><\/em> <\/a>Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values<\/a><\/em>\u2014journalist Dahlia Lithwick<\/a> begins by noting, \u201cThe lawyers designing [the Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s] interrogation techniques cited Jack Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.\u201d She continues, \u201caccording to British lawyer and writer [Philippe] Sands, Jack Bauer\u2014played by Kiefer Sutherland\u2014was an inspiration at early \u2018brainstorming meetings\u2019 of military officials at Guantanamo in September 2002.\u201d Lithwick explains that \u201cDiane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer \u2018gave people lots of ideas.\u2019\u201d Quoting Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, in his words to the Heritage Foundation about the show, it \u201creflects real life.\u201d Lithwick continues: \u201cEven Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. \u2018Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles\u2014He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,\u2019 Scalia said. \u2018Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?\u2019\u201d Lithwick concludes \u201cThe problem is not just that they all saw themselves in Jack Bauer. The problem was their failure to see what Bauer really represents within the legal universe of 24<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jane Mayer, the author of The Dark Side<\/em> (one of the books reviewed by Lithwick) summarized the legal universe created by the show 24<\/em> in a 2007 essay for <\/a>The New Yorker<\/a><\/em>: \u201cEach season of 24<\/em> . . . depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer . . . must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation.\u201d She continues: \u201cTerrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security.\u201d Mayer concludes that the show hinges on the choice, \u201cinvariably\u201d for \u201ccoercion,\u201d as, \u201c[w]ith unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused.\u201d And, \u201calmost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This \u201cunnerving\nefficiency,\u201d with which \u201csuspects divulge critical secrets\u201d is not only\nunnerving but in direct contradiction to the facts about gathering\n\u201cintelligence\u201d through torture. Lisa Hajjar<\/a> draws on\nhistorical scholarship on torture in Europe to explain \u201cits basic flaw was\nrecognized since the Roman era: What it proves is the individual\u2019s capacity to\nendure pain rather than the veracity of the statements elicited.\u201d Hajjar quotes\nJ.H. Langbein\u2019s 1978 essay for the University\nof Chicago Law Review<\/em>, \u201cTorture and plea bargaining,\u201d \u201cJudicial torture\nsurvived the centuries not because its defects had been concealed, but in spite\nof their having been long revealed\u201d (Hajjar 2009, 319). The visual loop of\ntorture continues to be part of the concealing of both basic, logistical truth\nand a longstanding, principled, moral consensus unequivocally against torture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a 2005 <\/a>New York Times<\/a><\/em> essay \u201cNormalizing Torture on \u201824,\u2019 <\/a>\u201d Adam Green notes a pattern that links different ways fear works politically-socially with how torture works politically-socially. Torture is, by one sociolegal universe, not only necessary to procure \u201cintelligence\u201d but creates ligaments to connect people in a social body. Suffering torture becomes a macabre form of bond. This is another way that torture has \u201cworked\u201d politically in the U.S. Green\u2019s narrative summary is necessary to understand the perhaps counter-intuitive claim that torture has worked to domesticate<\/em> torture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What is most striking about torture on 24<\/em> is how it affects not only politics but also emotional and professional relationships. The C.T.U. data technician Sarah Gavin, interrogated with tasers to discover if she were a terrorist mole, subsequently returns to work showing no signs of trauma. Indeed, she marshals the clarity of mind to renegotiate her terms of employment with her superior, who approved her interrogation just hours earlier. The war-protester son of Secretary of Defense Heller, more alienated than ever after a session of sensory deprivation in a C.T.U. holding room, receives a strikingly paternal lecture from his father about why that treatment was appropriate. Even Audrey\u2019s husband, Paul, somehow rises above his grievance to view his erstwhile tormentor as a buddy, helping Jack extract documents from a defense contractor and fend off attack\u2014and even loyally taking a bullet for him. In all of these interactions, torture doesn\u2019t deaden the feelings between people, rather it deepens them. . . . It is often noted that torture goes against the tenets of human community in two fundamental ways. Because torturers deny the basic humanity of their victims, it\u2019s a violation of the norms governing everyday society. At the same time, torture constitutes society\u2019s ultimate perversion, shaking or breaking its victims\u2019 faith in humanity by turning their bodies and their deepest commitments\u2014political or spiritual belief, love of family\u2014against them to produce pain and fear. In the counterterrorist world of 24<\/em>, though, torture represents not the breakdown of a just society, but the turning point\u2014at times even the starting point\u2014for social relations. Through this artistic sleight of hand, the show makes torture appear normal.” (Green 2005)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note that the creators of Game\nof Thrones<\/em> elicited what Terri Gross called (approvingly) \u201ca huge and\nfanatical international fan base\u201d by way of repeated scenes of rape, graphic\nviolence, and prolonged sequences of human beings torturing human beings. The\ntitle of that review was \u201cGame Of Thrones<\/em> Keeps Its Finger On The\nPulse,\u201d a phrase that warrants another question: What are the characteristics\nof a social body that has been trained to pulsate in this particular way\n(Powers 2019)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dilution of \u201ctorture\u201d continues. \u201cThe Good Place\u201d (2016\u2013the present) is a television series produced in the United States specifically and explicitly about morality. The show has as its core conceit a universe in which the main characters are set up to be tortured for eternity by their proximity with one another. The show\u2019s creator, Michael Schur, has explained his aim for The Good Place<\/em> is to bring moral philosophy to a mainstream, television audience. Schur has literarily made torture a laughing matter. To quote the title of a Vanity Fair<\/a><\/em> article<\/a>: \u201cThe Good Place<\/em> Makes Eternal, Hellish Torture So Hilarious.\u201d Schur explains: \u201cWe\u2019ve always tried to keep it sort of cartoon-y and silly, because what is actually happening is obviously awful for everyone.\u201d He elaborates thus: \u201cI have a 9-year-old son, and part of my thinking whenever we do something about how someone is being tortured is, \u2018Would my 9-year-old son laugh at this?\u2019 That\u2019s the sort of target audience for that kind of joke is, a 9-year-old boy . . . I\u2019ve gamed it out in my head\u201d (Bradley 2017). One possible reading of the series is that it upends the logic of suffering in shows like 24<\/em> and Game of Thrones<\/em>, depicting visually an alternative form of living together toward mutual flourishing. This fact of an era remains. During the same two decades when the United States might have been, under different circumstances, engaged in a United Nations investigation about U.S. sponsored torture, popular culture made \u201ctorture\u201d a household word. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are counterexamples. Yasiin Bey underwent the standard procedures for forcibly feeding a person imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in 2013.<\/a> Bey, known professionally in his career as a musician by the name Mos Def, underwent these procedures as part of a documentary directed by Asif Kapadia, in coordination with Reprieve, a human rights organization based in London, in an effort to bring awareness of the ongoing conditions at the U.S. military prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In describing the effort, the Guardian<\/em> notes, \u201cin its fight against human rights abuses there is no substitute for the court of public opinion\u201d (Ferguson 2013). <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cReal\npatriots\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The actual facts of whether torture \u201cworks\u201d to elicit intelligence have been established since the Greco-Roman era. Regardless of the court of public opinion, the courts of ethics have been clear about the morality of torture for decades. This is what must strike a reader at present. The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment<\/a> was established in 1984 and, from the outset, in Part I, Article 1 of its founding resolution, it defines torture as: <\/p>\n\n\n\n “. . . any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are multiple practices covered\nby this definition: prolonged and repeated pouring water into a human being\u2019s\nface so that he or she feels as if they are drowning; forcing prolonged\nconfinement in a small space alone, without even intermittent contact with\nanother human being; putting another human being, while naked, into a freezing\ncold space, causing hypothermia; shocking another human being, while naked, on\ntheir genitalia; and forcing water into another human being\u2019s anus. This is not\nan exhaustive list. These were some of the practices encouraged under the\nauspices of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency after September 11, 2001.\nThese practices are not allowed under U.S. law and are explicitly disallowed\nunder international law, including prohibitions established through the Geneva\nConventions following World War II. <\/p>\n\n\n\n People working\nwith and in the U.S. have been assigned the role of torturer; people have been\nassigned the role of assigning the role of torturer; people have assigned the\nroles of these practices, determining who is best suited to which role. And\npeople have been assigned the role of popularizing the necessity of these\npractices. There have been organizations and working groups of psychologists,\nfilmmakers, musicians, clergy and scholarly writers charged with the work of\ndetermining how to implement the \u201cdeterrent power\u201d of torture in the United\nStates and abroad (to use Joel Marcus\u2019s phrase again). To paraphrase General\nDwight D. Eisenhower in his departing speech, torturing other human beings\nbecame, after September 11, 2001, an industrial complex. Again, when threatened\nwith psychologically acute pain, most human beings will respond with an answer\nthat the executioner of such pain seems to be eliciting. But torture may \u201cwork\u201d\nin that it may spread fear across a region, a nation-state, a village, or a\nfamily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Scott Horton is an investigative journalist who has written extensively on U.S. sponsored torture. In his 2015 essay for <\/a>Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/a><\/em>, \u201cCompany Men: Torture, treachery, and the CIA,\u201d <\/a>Horton writes that when \u201cthe Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its torture report\u2014or, more accurately, a redaction-studded version of the report\u2019s executive summary . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n the authors avoided the tepid style of most congressional prose, opting instead for a clinical, precise, and engaging narrative that patiently unfolds one of the most dysfunctional and embarrassing episodes in the history of American spycraft.\u201d Horton contrasts the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence\u2019s narration with a story that was much more popularly regarded as truthful, a 2012 movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow, starring Jessica Chastain as a CIA operative serving on a team to use supposed intelligence to carry out the execution of Osama bin Laden. The Senate report \u201cmakes for an instructive comparison with Zero Dark Thirty<\/em>, which was written and produced with the CIA\u2019s secret backing. The film tells the story of post-9\/11 intelligence in the way Langley [a metonym for the Central Intelligence Agency] would like to have it told. But the Senate report unmasks the film as sheer fiction.\u201d The report \u201chas the distinct advantage of being true.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n This course of\nevents was not inevitable. It was possible that the United States could have\nembarked on a thorough, public reckoning with the facts eventually highlighted\nby the (partial) publication of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence\u2019s\nreport in 2014. But, there were new \u201cobjects of apprehension and concern\u201d (to\nuse Robin\u2019s phrase) in the form of \u201cISIS\u201d (the Islamic State) and November\nelections for members of the U.S. Congress. During an August, 2014 press\nbriefing, Barack Obama, then in the middle of his second term as President of\nthe United States, responded to a question about the Senate report by referring\nto people involved in the practice of torture as \u201creal patriots,\u201d conceding\nthat, although \u201cwe tortured some folks,\u201d and that torture is \u201ccontrary to our\nvalues,\u201d the acceptance of torture as a necessity is ethically conceivable. To\nquote from that briefing, President Obama explained, \u201cI understand why it\nhappened. I think it\u2019s important when we look back to recall how afraid people\nwere after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in\nPennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were\nimminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our\nnational security teams to try to deal with this.\u201d He continued, \u201cit\u2019s\nimportant for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough\njob that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under\nenormous pressure and are real patriots\u201d (Kludt 2014). His wording encourages\nempathy not only for the enlisted men and women expected to carry out torture,\nbut for the people above them in the hierarchy who created the moral and legal architecture\nthat made torture seem plausible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order better to\nunderstand the court of public opinion created at that time, and thus President\nObama\u2019s own political options, it is helpful to note two images from a media\nsource distributed widely in the U.S. in 2014. The line running underneath the\naddress label for The Week<\/em> was, in\n2014, \u201cALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS\u201d (Capitalization in\nthe original, 2014). In September of 2014, the two editions serving as\nparentheses around September 11, 2014 featured images about \u201cISIS.\u201d In the\nSeptember 5, 2014 edition, the highlighted article was \u201cBack on the Job:\nObama\u2019s decision to respond to ISIS\u2019s challenge,\u201d with a political cartoon on\nthe cover featuring Barack Obama, looking directly at a badge that would be\nknown to most readers in the U.S. as a sheriff\u2019s badge from the \u201cWestern\u201d classic\nHigh Noon<\/em>. That storyline asks a\nbasic question about a man\u2019s willingness to engage in a showdown against a\nmurdering gang. In this case, the object of \u201capprehension and concern\u201d is\npersonified by a caricature of another man with brown skin, with a beard and a\nturban. The badge is engraved with the word \u201cSHERIFF\u201d and \u201cOF THE WORLD.\u201d The Week<\/em> also announced \u201cThe Best of the\nU.S. and International Media\u201d on September 12, 2014, with a related image, of\ntwo young men looking at the image of a poster featuring a Muslim imam\npointing, in a style referencing the Uncle Sam military recruitment poster from\nthe U.S. in World War I and II, with the words \u201cI WANT YOU\u201d across the bottom. Two\nyoung men with brown skin are looking up at the poster. One young man has on an\nathletic jersey and is holding a basketball. To the side of the drawing is\nanother brown-skinned young man with an athletic jersey, walking away from a\nbasketball court and toward the poster. The racial dynamics are not subtle.\nWould the first African-American President of the United States be up to the\ntask of performing as Sheriff of the World, or, as the second image implies, would\nhe be on the side of the three other brown-skinned young men, \u201cJoining the\njihad.\u201d (xxii)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Postscript<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Joel Marcus writes in his essay on crucifixion: \u201cThe greater the insolence, the higher the cross; the proper response to excessive haughtiness was, in the words of the Clint Eastwood film, to \u2018Hang \u2018Em High!\u2019\u201d If the work of torture in the years after September 11, 2001 was in part to strike fear and deter haughtiness, and if the work of torture on television was in part to dull the sense that torture is neither moral nor normal, then it is my hope, as a citizen and a scholar in religious ethics that people will summon defiance and clarity. At a 2011 conference held in Durham, North Carolina, \u201cToward a Moral Consensus Against Torture,\u201d <\/a>Scott Horton named as a possible, very unintended consequence of the U.S. program in torture the acceleration of resistance that came to be known as the \u201cArab Spring.\u201d With the 2004 publication of images of U.S. coordinated torture of human beings at the Abu Ghraib prison, Horton proposed, people suffering under dictatorships in the region gathered courage to resist regimes held up through a combination of foreign (often U.S.) aid and torture. This possibility, that, contrary to American grand strategy<\/a>, the exposure of actual torture may have elicited such courage helps this author to continue her pursuit of our common discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Bradley,\nLaura. 2017. \u201cHow The Good Place<\/em>\nMakes Eternal, Hellish Torture So Hilarious.\u201d Vanity Fair<\/em>. Accessed September 11, 2019.\nhttps:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/hollywood\/2017\/09\/the-good-place-season-2-premiere-mike-schur-interview.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ferguson,\nBen. 2013. \u201cWhen Yasiin Bey was force-fed Guant\u00e1namo Bay-style \u2013 eyewitness\naccount.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>. Accessed September 11, 2019.\nhttps:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/shortcuts\/2013\/jul\/09\/yasiin-bey-force-fed-guantanomo-bay-mos-def.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Green,\nAdam. 2005. \u201cNormalizing Torture on \u201824.\u2019\u201d The\nNew York Times. <\/em>Accessed September 11, 2019.\nhttps:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/05\/22\/arts\/television\/normalizing-torture-on-24.html.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hajjar, Lisa. 2009. \u201cDoes Torture\nWork? A Sociolegal Assessment of the Practice in Historical and Global\nPerspective.\u201d Annual Review of Law and\nSocial Science<\/em>, 5: 311\u2012345. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1146\/annurev.lawsocsci.093008.131501.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Horton, Scott. 2015. “COMPANY\nMEN: Torture, Treachery, and the CIA.” Harper’s\nMagazine<\/em>, 04: 84-88.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kludt,\nTom. 2014. \u201cObama: \u2018We Tortured Some Folks.\u2019\u201d Talking Points Memo. Accessed\nSeptember 11, 2019. https:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/livewire\/obama-we-tortured-some-folks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lamb,\nGregory. 2002. \u201cTV\u2019s Higher Threshold of Pain.\u201d The Christian Science Monitor<\/em>. Accessed September 11, 2019.\nhttps:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/2002\/0823\/p13s02-altv.html. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lithwick,\nDahlia. 2008. \u201cLithwick: How Jack Bauer Shaped U.S. Torture Policy.\u201d Newsweek<\/em>. Accessed September 11, 2019.\nhttps:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/lithwick-how-jack-bauer-shaped-ustorture-policy-93159.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marcus,\nJoel. 2006. \u201cCrucifixion as Parodic Exaltation.\u201d Journal of Biblical Literature, <\/em>125: 73\u201387.\nhttps:\/\/epdf.pub\/journal-of-biblical-literature-vol-125-no-1-spring-2006.html.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/The-Week-Scan-1a-777x1024.jpg\")
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