The Trouble with Harry

On Friday morning, on Radio Bloke, Nicky Campbell chose to ask the White Van drivers of the nation for their thoughts on the whys and wherefores of torturing terror suspects. You can imagine what that was like, can’t you, and the replies, for the most part, were what you’d expect. However, this particular exchange between Campbell and ‘Harry in Birmingham’ (twenty minutes and thirty-four seconds into the podcast) on what did and/or should happen to Binyam Mohamed made me prick up my ears:

Campbell: If he was tortured, was it justified?
Harry: I would put the adeno... er, the electrodes onto his testes and put ’em on! This guy’s a pathological, homoeopathic murderer, a terrorist, and I’d do that just to get vengeance back off him! Okay?

A pathological, homoeopathic murderer? How would a pathological, homoeopathic murderer operate? Would he stab his victims with a microscopic knife? Would he strangle them with a human hair? Now we know what those bombers had in their water-bottles... infinitely diluted tinctures of Semtex.
Of course, if a murderer were to adhere to the homoeopathic principle - to cure like with like - then he or she would have to kill by using the life force against itself. The only way I could imagine this happening would be to shag the victims to death, to subject them to such an orgiastic, orgasmic marathon of debauchery that they would expire out of sheer sexual exhaustion. To coin a War-On-Terror phrase... bring it on!
I also quite liked Harry’s phrasing at the end there: ‘I’d do that just to get vengeance back off him!’ In other words, he’d commit the torture especially so that he could, later, be the victim of his own victim’s vengeance, enacted upon himself... which is, er, both sadism and masochism in perfect - almost homoeopathic - harmony.