What 'The Biggest Loser' and the Bush administration have in common

A footnote that was included as part of the Bush torture memos uses this justification for starvation techniques employed for the purpose of information gathering: “. . . we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1,000 kcal/day for sustained periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision. While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

This quote is a flawless example of two things: One, the way the Bush Administration viewed torture, and two, the way our society has been conditioned to think about dieting.

First – and this seems strikingly obvious – people do a lot of things voluntarily that could hurt their bodies, and do it without medical supervision. They shoot heroin, they inflict self-harm in the form of cutting, they have unprotected sex, they go to tanning beds and fry their skin. Does this mean raping prisoners, injecting them with drugs, forcing them into casket-like devices and blasting them with UV rays is an ethical way to torture, too? Voluntary self-harm is problematic in its own way in terms of one's mental health and well-being, but when detainees are forced into it, another dimension is added that cannot be overlooked.

The Bush Administration hoped to trivialize their torture techniques by looking to commercial diet plans, but such a comparison also leads one to consider that, because 1,000 calories a day was employed as a means of torture, the human body will suffer if it is subjected to such methods, even if voluntarily. Mentally, it's not the same as being forced to starve. But physically, the effects are likely quite similar. And yet we do it all the time. In fact, fat people are told that if they don't do it, then they are killing themselves, or at least “letting themselves go.”

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