Umberto Eco Quotes
There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
Neilson had flown in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It was the first bombing of Tokyo in WWII. He was shot down and captured. He was tortured including the torture of ‘waterboarding.’ The Japanese who administered the torture and who allowed it were tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—the Tokyo War Crime Trials. They were convicted and punished. In the first decade of the 21st century the George W, Bush Administration argued that waterboarding was not necessarily torture despite the fact that Americans had tried and punished foreigners who engaged in the practice and even Americans who did. It was completely outlawed by military regulations but some Americans felt that it should be allowed by the CIA in dealing with terrorists.
The George W. Bush administration had issued a memorandum to key Federal Agencies stating that certain types of torture were legal—a finding that was quickly repudiated after Bush and VP Cheney—who was a leading force for allowing torture of terrorism suspects—were out of office. But Bush had told the American People and the World that the United States will not torture any prisoners. The dilemma was “solved” when someone came up with this euphemism.
At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.
Umberto Eco OMRI was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator, and novelist. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory, and Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
