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 disagree on their meaning. This “I remember it when I think about it” nature of this torture discourse makes it clear that this explanation is mostly left to the eye of the beholder. This is especially difficult when thinking about international law's reliance on self-enforcement. After discussing new misconceptions about intelligence gathering and coercion that are familiar to all sides of the torture issue, the section describes the world of power gathering. It then reviews the wide range of competing definitions of torture: those offered 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay I am arguing that torture is a microcosm, taken to the highest level of intensity, of the tyrannical political relations that liberalism hates most. I said that torture isolates and privatizes. Pain forcibly interrupts our concentration on anything outside of us; it collapses our horizon with respect to our own body and the damage we feel in it. Even much milder sensations of prolonged discomfort can distract us to the point of making it impossible to pay attention to anything else, as anyone who has had to go to the bathroom in a situation where they can't do so knows. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that the world of the happy is different from the world of the unhappy, and this is not simply a way of saying when we suffer severe pain. The world of the man or woman who suffers is a world without relationships or commitments, a world without exteriority. It is a world reduced to a point, a world that makes no sense and in which the human soul finds neither home nor rest. I do not mean to diminish how horrific these experiences are, nor do I mean to suggest that American interrogations never go beyond light torture. Waterboarding, withholding painkillers from injured prisoners, inserting lit cigarettes into their ears, rape and beatings go far beyond that. At least five and possibly more than twenty prisoners were beaten to death by American interrogators. My point is rather that liberals generally place a limit on forms of torture that mutilate the victim's body. This, like the limitation of torture to intelligence gathering, marks an undeniable moderation in torture, the world's most unrestrained practice. It's almost enough to convince us that soft torture isn't torture at all, or at least that it's not cruel enough to make liberals wince, at least not when the stakes are high enough. In fact, they might even deny that it is torture. Interrogators do not live in a world of loving kindness, or of equal concern and respect for all human beings. Interrogating resistant prisoners in a nonviolent and nonabusive manner still requires a relationship that in any other context would be morally repugnant. It requires extracting information from the subject by deception, and the interrogator does this by creating elaborate scenarios to disorientate the subject and push him into an alternate reality. The subject must be deceived into believing that his high-value intelligence has already been revealed by someone else, so that it no longer has any value. He must be tricked into thinking that his friends have betrayed him or that the interrogator is his friend. The questioner upsets his sense of time and space, disorientates him with sessions that do not.