Eric Rauchway from Altercation directed me to this today:
Bush demanded torture of mentally ill man so he wouldn't "lose face"
Who voted Bush into office? Oh yeah. The evangelicals. So we hear anyway. They voted for a man who's against abortion, against gay marriage... but who loves torturing people.
I guess that's a-ok in their book.
Interestingly enough, is one of the comments a reader, "DC Boy," left on the blog entry cited above:
The US military learned its torture techniques from POWs in Korea and later in Vietnam who had been subjected to those techniques. The first US military torturers were instructors who subjected US personnel (pilots, mostly) to mild torture and taught them how to resist and survive.2 + 2 = 5, right?
The Koreans and Vietnamese learned their techniques from the Chinese and the Russians, who had perfected them in order to break "enemies of the state" down so that they would testify against themselves and others at show trials.
The point being that these torture techniques were never intended to elicit the truth. They were designed to compel their victim to say whatever the torturers wanted them to say, no matter how obviously false or even ridiculous.
From the Inquisition to 1984, torture has never been looked on as an instrument of fact-finding. It has always been about destroying a person's sense of being so that he has no object in life other than to please the torturer so that the pain will stop.
Of course torture doesn't produce true and useful information. It's not supposed to.
How is acting like the Communists and Nazis helping us save our American way of life?
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