The Necessity Defence and the Myth of the Noble Torturer

Jessica Wolfendale is assistant professor in philosophy at West Virginia University. 

 

When the morality of torture is debated, the debate typically begins and frequently ends with the standard “ticking-bomb” scenario, in which torture is claimed to be necessary to force a captured terrorist to reveal the location of a bomb planted somewhere in a city. Variations of this scenario have appeared in academic debates about torture, in public discourse on torture, and in television programmes such as 24.

 

The ticking-bomb scenario is an example of what the philosopher Michael Walzer has called “emergency ethics”—the idea that, in cases of emergency or extreme threats, it might be ethically permissible to ignore or violate what would normally be considered very stringent constraints on acts such as killing civilians in war or the use of torture.¹ Whatever we might think about the idea of emergency ethics as regards the killing of civilians, in the debate about torture the ticking-bomb scenario continues to exert a stranglehold on the issue, despite the extreme rarity of well-documented and substantiated real-life ticking-bomb situations and despite the fact that, as many authors have pointed out, the scenario bears little if any relation to how torture is practised by states in the real world.²

 

As far as I am aware, the ticking-bomb scenario is unique in being used by reputable academics, journalists, opinion-makers, and government officials in an attempt to justify publicly what is widely believed to be one of the most abhorrent acts that one human can do to another. There are no academics or journalists publicly appealing to similar scenarios to justify or excuse rape or genocide, for instance, even though it would unfortunately be relatively easy to construct a hypothetical situation in which these acts might appear to be necessary in order to save lives.³ No one is arguing that we should rethink the absolute legal prohibition on rape or genocide, or that we should allow a legal defence of necessity in cases where rape or genocide could save lives, just because we can imagine—if we put our minds to it—a situation in which these acts might appear justified or at least excused. No doubt anyone who published such arguments would be shunned, and rightly so. So why is the prohibition against torture so easily disregarded? Why are so many intelligent and influential people so willing to engage in serious debate on the morality of torture? Why have countries such as Israel and the United States that have publicly committed themselves to the prohibition against torture shown themselves ready to use torture when it seems desirable to do so? 

The Purpose of the Ticking-Bomb Scenario 

On one level, the ticking-bomb scenario can be viewed as simply a rhetorical device intended to challenge moral absolutists who believe that torture is always impermissible, no matter what the consequences of refusing to use it. Thus, in academic and public debates on torture, the ticking-bomb scenario is often intended to force even the most hard-line opponent of torture to concede that it could, in such an extreme situation, be permissible. The scenario is structured so as to make the consequences of not using torture so extreme that maintaining the absolute prohibition appears to border on the immoral.

 

But the ticking-bomb scenario serves more than a theoretical purpose. The scenario may seem to be simply a device for refuting moral absolutism but, as I shall argue, it plays a much more subtle and disturbing role in the debate about torture. The ticking-bomb scenario shapes the attitudes and beliefs of the public, government officials, and interrogators about the nature of torture, how it is used in reality, and the nature of torturers. The ticking-bomb scenario not only frames the academic debate about torture, it encourages the construction of what I will call the “necessity narrative” of torture, a narrative in which torture is the last resort of good people determined to save lives, and in which the torturer appears as a noble hero—a good person forced reluctantly to get dirty hands to do what needs to be done. This narrative of torture is not only extremely misleading, it corrupts the debate about torture and plays an important and continuing role in the rationalisation and normalisation of torture. 

The Necessity Narrative of Torture 

Torture in the ticking-bomb scenario is depicted as being necessary to save lives. This appeal to necessity makes the use of torture seem at the very least morally permissible, even perhaps a moral duty. Thus, this scenario has proved to be very attractive to states seeking to justify the use of torture. In the infamous 2002 Bybee memo written for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the White House, John Yoo, at the time deputy assistant attorney-general, argued that the legal defence of necessity would be available to US officials who used torture to extract information from terrorism suspects:

 

we believe that under the current circumstances certain justification defenses might be available that would potentially eliminate criminal liability. Standard criminal law defenses of necessity and self-defense could justify interrogation methods needed to elicit information to prevent a direct and imminent threat to the United States and its citizens.⁴

 

Israel’s High Court of Justice passed a judgement in 1999 that contained an even more explicit reference to necessity as a possible legal defence against an accusation of torture. When considering whether members of the Israeli general security service (GSS) could appeal to the legal defence of necessity to justify the use of torture in some circumstances, the court argued that the necessity defence “might arise in instances of ‘ticking bombs’ ”.⁵

 

In Israel the necessity defence is as follows:

 

A person shall bear no criminal liability for committing an act immediately necessary for the purpose of saving the life, liberty, body, or property, of either himself or another person, from tangible danger or serious harm, imminent from the particular state of affairs, at the requisite time, and absent alternative means for avoiding the harm.⁶

 

Applied to the ticking-bomb scenario, the necessity defence would be a legitimate defence if torture were used with the intention of saving human lives, as a last resort, and only because of the imminence of the threat to human life and the absence of alternative methods of preventing its loss. The necessity narrative of torture thus portrays the use of torture as an isolated, one-off response that occurs only in extreme (and therefore very rare) circumstances, and is used only to save lives, not to terrorise a population or punish the victim. As the Israel High Court of Justice explained, the necessity defence “deals with the individual decision of a person reacting to a given set of facts; it is an ad hoc endeavor, in reaction to an event. It is the result of an improvisation given the unpredictable character of the events”.⁷

 

The appeal to emergency in the necessity narrative thereby forestalls objections to the use of torture based on concerns about efficiency, institutionalisation, or the relative success of alternative methods of investigation. The use of torture in the necessity narrative is not part of any standard or routine interrogation procedure: it is an “ad hoc endeavour” in response to unforeseen circumstances. In the necessity narrative, there is no time to explore alternatives to the use of torture: if there was time, the narrative implies, of course torture would not be used. But in the desperate circumstances of the ticking-bomb scenario, one cannot afford the time to explore less heinous options. The circumstances of the scenario mean that one must consider options that one would normally abhor. In the necessity narrative of torture, then, those who authorise and use torture do not have time to explain their actions prior to the use of torture, because the logic of necessity entails that no time can be wasted on explanations and seeking approval.

 

But who is the torturer in this scenario? Who is this person who tortures to save lives, as a last resort? Those who use the ticking-bomb scenario to justify torture rarely if ever explain who the torturer would be (a police officer? A soldier?). Yet, as I will explain, the idea of the torturer that is implicit in the ticking-bomb scenario is central to its continuing appeal in debates about torture, and is central to the rationalisation of the use of torture. 

The Noble Torturer 

The first important point to note about the torturer in the necessity narrative is that the torturer is not trained or practised in the use of torture. Since the necessity narrative describes torture as a one-off event that is a last resort in the face of extraordinary circumstances, the torturer cannot already be trained in the art of torture. Such training would imply a prior readiness to use torture and prior experience in the art of torture.

 

Second, in the necessity narrative of torture, torture is acknowledged to be a serious moral wrong. Indeed, a defence of necessity is required only when an illegal act has been performed. So those who appeal to the necessity narrative to justify torture are not trying to deny that torture is normally morally wrong, even atrocious. Instead, they are claiming that there are times when one must do what is morally bad to prevent something that is worse. Thus, in the ticking-bomb scenario, the use of torture is depicted as being very different from its traditional association with sadism, authoritarianism, and cruelty. Similarly, the torturer in the ticking-bomb scenario is a very different character from the torturers we might associate with brutal tyrannies such as the former Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq.

 

Third, the necessity narrative of torture aims to reconcile the belief that torture is normally morally wrong with the belief that there could, in some circumstances, be a moral duty to use torture—a duty that would fall particularly heavily on public officials obliged to protect citizens from harm. Given the extreme circumstances of the ticking-bomb scenario, the narrative suggests, and given that lives are at stake, the use of torture seems not merely permissible but morally obligatory. According to commentators on the 1999 Israel High Court of Justice judgement, this was the view taken by the state’s legal representatives, who argued that an act meeting the requirements of the necessity defence is “a choice of the lesser evil and, therefore, its performance is not only permissible but also constitutes a moral duty”.⁸ Portraying the use of torture as a moral duty implies that someone who refused to use it in the ticking-bomb scenario would actually be guilty of a serious moral failing—would in fact be a bad person for refusing to use torture.

 

These aspects of the necessity narrative of torture give rise to the idea that torture may be used by morally decent—indeed, morally honourable—men and women. In the necessity narrative, torture is used only until the prisoner reveals the required information—it is not excessive or cruel. The torturer gets no pleasure from what he must do. As the legal philosopher David Luban argues, the ticking-bomb scenario allows us to think of torture

 

dissociated from cruelty—torture authorized and administered by decent human beings who abhor what circumstances force them to do. Torture to gather intelligence and save lives seems almost heroic. For the first time, we can think of kindly torturers rather than tyrants.⁹

 

The kindly torturer is a torturer who fully understands the moral seriousness of what he is required to do and who deeply regrets that he must do it. Such a torturer is indeed noble—a person who recognises what must be done and who has the moral courage to do it, where others of less moral fibre might baulk at the prospect or be too weak-willed or cowardly to do what has to be done. The ticking-bomb torturer is therefore a kind of moral hero.

 

This image of the torturer is found both in academic debates on the issue and in the popular media. In the latter, we have 24’s Jack Bauer, the renegade outsider who does what needs to be done when the authorities are too weak or corrupt to do it themselves, and who bears the consequences of his actions bravely and without complaining. He is the moral hero as scapegoat, whose actions allow the state to uphold its public commitment to the prohibition of torture while at the same time benefiting from his willingness to do the dirty deeds necessary.

 

In academic discourse, we have the noble politician, whose duty to authorise torture (even when torture is illegal) arises from his fundamental duty to protect the state and its citizens from harm. This is the politician in Michael Walzer’s article on “dirty hands”, who orders a captured rebel leader to be tortured in order to find the location of a number of bombs hidden in a city. The politician is convinced that he must order the torture “for the sake of the people who might otherwise die in the explosions even though he believes that torture is wrong, indeed abominable, not just sometimes, but always”.¹⁰

 

According to Walzer, when the politician ordered the use of torture, “he committed a moral crime and he accepted a moral burden. Now he is a guilty man.”¹¹ But the politician is very different from a torturer who tortures out of sadism or a desire to terrorise. Unlike those torturers, the politician truly believes in the wrongness of torture—that is what makes him a good man—and so his willingness to take on the moral burden of torture is a sign of his true moral virtue, rather than of cruelty or tyranny. Walzer suggests that, far from wanting our politicians always to uphold the law, we should want them to be willing to break it when doing so matters. Such a willingness to break the law, far from being the sign of a corrupt or venal nature, is in fact a sign of the politician’s deep commitment to the people he serves, so long as he knows that what he is doing is wrong and regrets that he must do it.

 

This picture of the torturer as honourable politician who publicly affirms the wrongness of torture yet is willing to use it when necessary is implicit in the Bush administration’s approach to torture. In 2006, President George W. Bush publicly stated “We do not torture”, and the US Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act banning the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees (prohibitions repeated in the Military Commissions Act of 2006). But at the same time, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) secretly issued two new opinions that aimed to justify the very interrogation methods that were explicitly banned in the Detainee Treatment Act.¹² This vivid discrepancy between what is affirmed publicly and what is done covertly is a clear example of the belief that the prohibition against torture should be upheld in public but violated in secret. President Bush acted as if he were Walzer’s good politician who knows he must get dirty hands to protect the state.

 

This image of the torturer as honourable official appeals to strong moral values such as duty, courage, and sacrifice. The noble torturer is morally virtuous (because he recognises the wrongness of torture), morally brave (because he is willing to sacrifice his moral wellbeing to save human life), and honourable (he does what he must to fulfil his moral duty). This is a powerfully seductive combination of traits. As is evident from the discourse of torture employed by the Bush administration, creating the image of the noble torturer is crucial for liberal states that use torture because such states must differentiate what they do from what is done by brutal authoritarian regimes, such as Saddam Hussein’s. Unlike torturers in those regimes, the narrative runs, we use torture only for the right reasons.

 

It is no surprise, then, that appeals to the necessity narrative have been made by almost every state that has used torture, and it is no surprise that torturers in such states frequently claim that they, unlike torturers in other, more brutal states, torture only for the right reasons and in the right way. The journalist John Conroy encountered this strategy several times in his interviews with torturers:

 

Bruce Moore-King [a Rhodesian torturer] told me ... that the tortures he administered were mild compared to what was done to people who were sent to Rhodesia’s Special Branch. Hugo Garcia [a Uruguayan torturer] told me that the Argentine torturers were far worse than the Uruguayan. Omri Kochva assured me that the men of the Natal battalion had not descended to the level of the Americans in Vietnam. A former U.S. Army interrogator who served and tortured in Vietnam told me how much worse the South Vietnamese National Police were.¹³

 

But the idea of the noble torturer is a myth, and a dangerous one. It is a myth because it masks the true nature of torture, and it is dangerous because it corrupts the debate about torture and prevents a real understanding of what torture is and how torture occurs. Torture is inherently cruel, and in the real world is not an ad hoc response to extreme circumstances resorted to by brave heroes filled with regret; it is an institutionalised practice that uses trained torturers and support from the medical and legal professions, and that becomes a standard interrogation procedure. 

The Cruelty of Torture 

In the necessity narrative, the torturer is not motivated by cruelty or sadism, but by the noble desire to save lives. Often, states that appeal to the necessity narrative encourage this idea by claiming that the torture methods they use are very different from those used by authoritarian regimes. In the necessity narrative, torture is “torture lite” or “moderate physical pressure”. The torture methods used are supposedly not physically violent and brutal. Instead, they are methods that allegedly aim to minimise the harm of torture as much as possible, and thus can seemingly be consistent with the state’s official commitment to the avoidance of cruelty.

 

However, the idea that there is a special category of torture that is more restrained, more humane, and less cruel than “real” torture is false. There is no “torture lite”. The methods used by the United States and Israel—methods including noise bombardment, extended sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, hooding, and forced standing—are not inherently less cruel than other, more brutal methods. A 2007 study of 279 torture survivors compared the long-term psychological effects of such techniques as isolation and forced standing with the effects of more physically violent tortures and found that the former “do not seem to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the extent of mental suffering they cause, the underlying mechanisms of traumatic stress, and their long-term traumatic effects”.¹⁴ Instead, the factor that was most highly correlated with severe traumatic stress was not whether a torture method was physically violent, but the victim’s distress and feelings of helplessness at the time of the torture.

 

The aim of all torture is to attack and undermine radically the victim’s physical and psychological integrity. In the writer Elaine Scarry’s words, the prisoner’s body is made to be an “active agent” in the process of torture:

 

the eyes are only access points for scorching light, the ears for brutal noises ... The prisoner’s body—in its physical strengths, in its sensory powers, in its needs and wants ... is, like the prisoner’s voice, made a weapon against him.¹⁵

 

The aim of torture is to use the victim’s intense suffering to force the victim to do the torturer’s will. The use of methods such as sleep deprivation, noise bombardment, and forced standing does not represent a commitment to avoid cruelty. Instead, these methods are chosen because they can be more effective in breaking down the victim, and because they leave little physical evidence. As the CIA noted in its infamous KUBARK manual of interrogation, the victim’s resistance “is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict on himself”.¹⁶ These methods cause intense suffering by placing the victim in circumstances that are intended to become unbearable. As a result, it may appear to the victim that her suffering is caused not by the direct action of the torturers (there is no hitting or beating) but by her failure to bear the lack of sleep, the noise, or the forced standing. By contriving to make the victim feel responsible for her own suffering, these methods are arguably crueler than many forms of direct physical attack.

 

All torture is cruel—that is the nature of torture. The necessity narrative depicts a torturer who tortures with regret, motivated only by the noble desire to save lives. But this is a myth. Just as one cannot imagine a noble rapist, so the idea of a noble torturer is a contradiction in terms.

 

The idea of the noble torturer is a myth for a further reason. Torture, when it is used by a state, is not a last resort. It is not a one-off, ad hoc response to an emergency. Torture is an institutional practice. 

The Institution of Torture 

Torture is a practice that occurs within an institutional structure. Unlike its depiction in the necessity narrative, torture in the real world requires torturers who are trained in the use of torture. It requires research into torture methods, and the support of medical and legal personnel. Far from being noble public officials who regretfully torture while knowing that torture is wrong, real torturers are trained to see torturing as a job: they must be trained to become inured to the distress that torturing may cause. Torturers, even if they might think of themselves as noble, are not noble heroes but trained professionals.

 

Training torturers is necessary because to be able to force a prisoner to reveal the desired information, torturers must be skilled and practised in what they do: if they are sadistic or inept, they will not be effective. Thus, states that use torture devote time and energy to researching torture methods and training torturers. During the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA funded extensive research into torture methods such as sleep deprivation and noise bombardment—research that was conducted with the active assistance of reputable and influential medical and psychiatric doctors.¹⁷ More recently, behavioural science teams were used to train interrogators at Guantanamo Bay in different methods of putting pressure on detainees. Israeli interrogators devised a chair that was intended to cause agonising pain to those who were shackled to it.¹⁸

 

Research and training in torture is also an international enterprise, involving thousands of military, intelligence, medical, and legal personnel. Torturers in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s were given lectures in various torture techniques by instructors from several nations outside the continent. As General Ramon Campos, the former chief of police of Buenos Aires province, stated: “In Argentina, we were influenced first by the French and then by the United States. We used their methods separately at first and then together, until the United States’ ideas finally predominated.”¹⁹

 

Torture is therefore not “an improvisation given the unpredictable character of the event”, as the necessity defence would have it. The training of torturers and research into torture methods must all be in place before torture occurs. There has never been, to my knowledge, a state that used torture only in a genuine ticking-bomb scenario. Instead, torture is a practice that is deliberately chosen and deliberately prepared for by states that wish to use it. The necessity narrative obscures this fact, and encourages the pretence that the use of torture may be the last resort of intelligence officials devoted to preserving lives. But torture is typically a first resort—within two weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the use of torture was being considered by the US administration—and torture rapidly becomes routine. In every country that has used torture to fight terrorism this is what has occurred. Necessity cannot justify the institutionalisation of torture, and torture in today’s world does not occur without such institutionalisation. 

Conclusion 

The appeal of the necessity narrative lies in the image of the brave and noble torturer that it presents. I have argued that this image is not only false, but dangerous. The necessity narrative masks the real cruelty of torture and the scope of its institutionalisation. The frequent appeal to the necessity narrative thus corrupts the debate about torture and forestalls a genuine analysis of the nature and costs of torture.

 

Furthermore, the logic of necessity is deeply problematic. If torture can be justified by appeal to necessity, can indeed be the moral duty of the noble politician, then it seems that any atrocity could be justified if the circumstances were sufficiently dire and the motives sufficiently pure. A noble politician, on this view, could authorise rape, terrorism, even the torture of an innocent child, if these deeds would prevent a catastrophe from occurring. This is the view taken by John Yoo, author of the 2002 Bybee “torture memo” referred to earlier. When asked in an interview whether the president would have the authority to order the torture of an innocent three-year-old child to force the child’s father to talk, Yoo replied: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”²⁰ If the use of torture is consistent with a politician’s duty to protect the state, then so might be any morally abhorrent act deemed to be effective in preventing threats. Thus, the necessity narrative, so far from restricting torture to only the most extreme circumstances, encourages impunity and the continued self-justifying belief that torture may be used for noble motives.

 

In conclusion, we should also consider what the necessity narrative reveals about the status of the prohibition against torture. The United States and Israel are among several countries that have signed international conventions banning torture absolutely. What does it mean to be committed to such a prohibition against torture? The necessity narrative suggests that the commitment to the prohibition of torture holds only so long as there is no threat to the state that torture might prevent. But this is to misunderstand what “commitment” means. Being committed to the prohibition against torture means refusing to use torture precisely when there are temptations to use it. By allowing the prohibition against torture to be held hostage to necessity, the necessity narrative in effect renders the prohibition meaningless. 

Endnotes

 

 1. Michael Walzer, “Emergency Ethics”, in Arguing about War (Princeton, N.J.: Yale University Press, 2004). In this essay, Walzer is specifically discussing the idea of “supreme emergency” as a possible justification for the direct targeting of civilians in war, but the idea is applicable to other situations as well.

 

2. See, for example, Henry Shue, “Torture in Dreamland: Disposing of the Ticking Bomb”, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 37, nos. 2 and 3 (2006); Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo, “Torture, Terrorism and the State: A Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 23, no. 3 (August 2006); and Jessica Wolfendale, “Training Torturers: A Critique of the ‘Ticking Bomb’ Argument”, Social Theory and Practice 32, no. 2 (April 2006).

 

3. Challenged at a seminar to come up with such a scenario, I proposed the following: Suppose you have captured a terrorist who has planted a bomb that will go off shortly unless you discover its location. The terrorist is a woman, and you know that sexual honour is valued extremely highly by her culture and that rape is considered the worst crime that could befall a woman. Rape appears likely to be the most effective method of forcing her to talk. It should also be noted that rape has been frequently used as a method of torture both now and in the past. I find it extremely strange that many of those who are willing to justify torture would probably recoil in horror at the thought of justifying rape. Yet torture is, by definition, an extreme assault on a person’s mental and physical integrity (as is rape), so torture is hardly less of an atrocity than rape.

 

4. US Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, “Memorandum for Counsel to the President, Alberto R. Gonzales, Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2 340A”, 1 August 2024 [http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/doj/bybee80102mem.pdf], p. 39.

 

5. H.C. J 5100/94 The Public Committee against Torture in Israel v. the Government of Israel 53(4) PD 817 (hereafter the Israeli High Court judgement), sec. 34, quoted in Mordechai Kremnitzer and Re’em Segev, “The Legality of Interrogational Torture: A Question of Proper Authorization or a Substantive Moral Issue?”, Israel Law Review 34 (2000), p. 523.

 

6. Israel’s Penal Act 1977, art. 34k, quoted in Kremnitzer and Segev, “Legality of Interrogational Torture”, p. 522. In US law the necessity defence is very similar, although exact details vary across jurisdictions.

 

7. Israeli High Court judgement, sec. 36, quoted in Kremnitzer and Segev, “Legality of Interrogational Torture”, p. 525.

 

8. Kremnitzer and Segev, “Legality of Interrogational Torture”, p. 522.

 

9. David Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb”, Virginia Law Review 91, no. 6 (October 2005), p. 1436.

 

10. Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (winter 1973), p. 167.

 

11. Ibid., pp. 167−8.

 

12. See Christopher Kutz, “Secret Law and the Value of Publicity”, Ratio Juris 22, no. 2 (June 2009), p. 198.

 

13. John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 6.

 

14. Metin Basoglu, Maria Livanou, and Cvetana Crnobaric, “Torture vs Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment: Is the Distinction Real or Apparent?”, Archives of General Psychiatry 64, no. 3 (March 2007), p. 284. Other studies have found similar results.

 

15. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 48.

 

16. Quoted in Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), p. 52.

 

17. See McCoy, A Question of Torture.

 

18. Jeremy Waldron, “Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House”, Columbia Law Review 105, no. 6 (October 2005), p. 1703.

 

19. Quoted in Wolfgang Heinz, “The Military, Torture and Human Rights: Experiences from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay”, in The Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters, ed. Ronald D. Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), p. 78.

 

20. Nat Hentoff, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, Village Voice, 24 January 2025 (Hentoff’s italics).