Thoughts on Dayan (Part 2)

The passage that struck me the most in this portion of the reading was the part on pages 197-200 which implied that the people who are carrying out torture are the ones who define their acts as torture, rather than the victims of the torture. Torture is only torture if the person inflicting it means for it to "deliberately or intentionally inflict severe and lasting...pain". The person inflicting the pain on the victim is the determiner of if the act of violence is torture. The victim must endure the torture, and though it may cause severe pain and the incident(s) may stay with them for their lives, it is never considered torture under the law unless their torturer intended to harm them on purpose. This is interesting because it is harder to determine if a torturer meant to hurt someone permanently, rather than if a victim was actually hurt. It is difficult for me to see how torture is legitimized under the legal definition found on page 200. It seems as though the correct way to see if someone is being tortured is to ask the victim, not the perpetrator, since they are not the ones going through the pain. Another thing that was interesting in this reading was the sentence "glee and malice work together in the abuse of those targeted for humiliation." (189) This somewhat answered my question from discussion from last week about why pictures were taken of the torture going on at Abu Ghraib. I would like to look into this further to explain perhaps why it is so easy for people to carry out torture in the first place. It seems as though people have a tendency to feel happy when dehumanizing their fellow human beings according to Dayan.