Torture destroys human dignity in the one tortured. The tortured is reduced solely to pain and the tortured will say anything, do anything, be anything to make that pain stop. The tortured stop being a human being with a will. The reason the tortured who survive the torture often commit suicide is that they cannot live with the horror they feel at what they became under torture, a thing without a human will.

Torture also destroys the soul of the torturer. Torture places the torturer automatically in an unjust relationship with the one being tortured. Torture is intimate and personal. The torturer first of all has to consent to the idea that the tortured is without fundamental human dignity. This moral error strips the torturer of his or her own human dignity because he or she is using another human being as an instrument and not an end in themselves.

Finally, torture destroys the dignity of the society that authorizes it. In addition to morally degrading both the tortured and the torturer, the community that offers a license to torture is fundamentally degraded in its claim to be a civilized nation.

Any community that licenses torture then sets itself on a course of being incapable of distinguishing firmly between good and evil. This has and will continue to have a fundamentally destabilizing effect on a whole range of human rights distinctions (and it is obvious that this slippery slope is present in the United States). To be a torturing nation ultimately destroys the capacity of that nation to act against a recognized wrong (as was the case, for example, with South Africa under apartheid) and hence as a nation lose its soul.

In employing the tactic of torture, (and please, let us not add the disgrace of lying about the fact that we torture), we in the United States are on a path at odds with our own values. We are becoming degraded as a society because we can no longer fundamentally distinguish between right and wrong. We have descended as people into moral degradation. We torture.

This must stop.