Sullivan: Wrong Definition of Torture

Here for some reason Sullivan asserts that torture isn't torture unless it has the aim of extracting information.

That's false, of course. The Catholic church tortured innumerable (innocent) people during the inquisitions, few of them in order to gain information; various tribal groups routinely tortured prisoners of war, and so forth. And then there's the 'T' in 'BTK'. There is almost certainly a hefty measure of sadism involved in almost all such actions--that is, such torture is almost certainly in part recreational.

The claim that torture necessarily aims at eliciting information is simply false.