I feel like I need to clarify some things in more depth on the subject of the use of torture in "psychopathic" interrogation techniques, given that there's this kind of persistent confusion and "mental fogginess" on the part of "people" who are proponents of the use of torture. A person who is being tortured has no hope whatsoever of extricating himself or herself from his or her nightmarish situation. Nothing will ever satisfy someone who has decided to be a torturer. So the person being tortured is continually tormented with the possibility of "trying" to do something to escape the unbearable pain, but there is never any possibility of achieving this escape through specific actions alone. The only escape is to be "content" with enduring the constant assaults, but the psychopathology of a torturer is such that the torturer will never provide any information about the amount of time that he or she intends to continue torturing the person.
Another point is that there can never be any true, rational purpose to the use of torture. The most basic way to look at this is to realize that people in the government routinely lie through their teeth in public statements. In the archives of my blog, which I may or may not be able to upload to blogger in the 1300-page pdf format that it exists in, I pointed out many, very obvious instances in which people in the government lied in an explicit way about aspects of the use of antivirals in the context of the swine flu vaccine. Given that this is the case, it is helpful for a "person" who is a proponent of the use of torture to ask himself or herself if, in the event that a friend of the person were a detainee at one of the US's prison camps (i.e. at Guantanamo Bay or whatever the hell other secret, coward's prison camp in some other country), he or she could ever imagine a scenario in which people in the government would lie outright about the details of a hypothetical set of crimes that his or her friend could be envisioned to have committed. It might be "easier" for some torture-mongerers to think of detainees in kangaroo-court prison camps as being human beings and not "enemies," if one thinks of the possibility that the government has simply cooked up a lot of bullshit about the supposed crimes of the detainees or stretched the truth. In fact, the very notion of holding a person indefinitely, without charges, and investigating the person's degree of supposed guilt, through the use of torture, is fundamentally and always going to be false, meaning that it has to be a lie. If one is willing to torture a person to obtain "evidence" when one doesn't know enough details of a person's actions to charge the person with a crime (or if one is willing to suspend the basic human rights of a person who is thought, based on evidence, to have committed crimes and then to commit horrific crimes against the person for an indefinite period of time, through the use of torture), one is, essentially, reducing the entire notion of the "rule of law," referring to the supposed "legality" or "illegality" of the person's actions, to nothing. In essence, the crime against the person is so profoundly and appallingly violent that it never could be legal and never could be "more legal" or "less heinous" than any crimes the person may or may not have committed. If one uses one's mind and thinks carefully about some of these things, one finds that any supposed rationale or "justification" for the use of torture and indefinite detention can never be true, in any context.
But I guess there's not much point in trying to persuade anyone of this, given that a torturer is, almost by definition, someone who can't be reasoned with and who will never exhibit the kind of basic decency or compassion that one even sees in small rodents or in birds, for example. When a robin or crow or something was killed by an eagle in my yard, a whole group or flock of birds kept diving at the eagle, to chase it away, and there was an intensity to the behavior that implied that the birds were outraged or angry at seeing a member of their species being ripped apart by the eagle, in front of them. The eagle was sitting, ripping the bird apart, slowly, in the middle of that part of the yard. One might expect to see something of that outrage or sense of horror among humans who are considering the viciousness and monstrous violence with which some retard, hillbilly, CIA-style torturer is treating one of their fellow human beings, but, in many of the most important instances, one doesn't see anything but a lot of twisted, bullshit, icy reasoning, spoken by pathetic cowards who then go running around the Sunday talk shows in monkey suits and blabbing about the defense of the US or whatever. That kind of depraved indifference provides a devastating statement about the shape that the society is in, in the US, and I'll never understand cruelty for cruelty's sake. In fact, cruelty can never have any true purpose. It's easy to say that this is a bunch of cliches or that one is making the "tough decisions" or "big decisions," like some fucking piece-of-trash hillbilly torturer, but those are just other examples of obscene attitudes that proponents of torture throw around, so cavalierly.
Another point is that there can never be any true, rational purpose to the use of torture. The most basic way to look at this is to realize that people in the government routinely lie through their teeth in public statements. In the archives of my blog, which I may or may not be able to upload to blogger in the 1300-page pdf format that it exists in, I pointed out many, very obvious instances in which people in the government lied in an explicit way about aspects of the use of antivirals in the context of the swine flu vaccine. Given that this is the case, it is helpful for a "person" who is a proponent of the use of torture to ask himself or herself if, in the event that a friend of the person were a detainee at one of the US's prison camps (i.e. at Guantanamo Bay or whatever the hell other secret, coward's prison camp in some other country), he or she could ever imagine a scenario in which people in the government would lie outright about the details of a hypothetical set of crimes that his or her friend could be envisioned to have committed. It might be "easier" for some torture-mongerers to think of detainees in kangaroo-court prison camps as being human beings and not "enemies," if one thinks of the possibility that the government has simply cooked up a lot of bullshit about the supposed crimes of the detainees or stretched the truth. In fact, the very notion of holding a person indefinitely, without charges, and investigating the person's degree of supposed guilt, through the use of torture, is fundamentally and always going to be false, meaning that it has to be a lie. If one is willing to torture a person to obtain "evidence" when one doesn't know enough details of a person's actions to charge the person with a crime (or if one is willing to suspend the basic human rights of a person who is thought, based on evidence, to have committed crimes and then to commit horrific crimes against the person for an indefinite period of time, through the use of torture), one is, essentially, reducing the entire notion of the "rule of law," referring to the supposed "legality" or "illegality" of the person's actions, to nothing. In essence, the crime against the person is so profoundly and appallingly violent that it never could be legal and never could be "more legal" or "less heinous" than any crimes the person may or may not have committed. If one uses one's mind and thinks carefully about some of these things, one finds that any supposed rationale or "justification" for the use of torture and indefinite detention can never be true, in any context.
But I guess there's not much point in trying to persuade anyone of this, given that a torturer is, almost by definition, someone who can't be reasoned with and who will never exhibit the kind of basic decency or compassion that one even sees in small rodents or in birds, for example. When a robin or crow or something was killed by an eagle in my yard, a whole group or flock of birds kept diving at the eagle, to chase it away, and there was an intensity to the behavior that implied that the birds were outraged or angry at seeing a member of their species being ripped apart by the eagle, in front of them. The eagle was sitting, ripping the bird apart, slowly, in the middle of that part of the yard. One might expect to see something of that outrage or sense of horror among humans who are considering the viciousness and monstrous violence with which some retard, hillbilly, CIA-style torturer is treating one of their fellow human beings, but, in many of the most important instances, one doesn't see anything but a lot of twisted, bullshit, icy reasoning, spoken by pathetic cowards who then go running around the Sunday talk shows in monkey suits and blabbing about the defense of the US or whatever. That kind of depraved indifference provides a devastating statement about the shape that the society is in, in the US, and I'll never understand cruelty for cruelty's sake. In fact, cruelty can never have any true purpose. It's easy to say that this is a bunch of cliches or that one is making the "tough decisions" or "big decisions," like some fucking piece-of-trash hillbilly torturer, but those are just other examples of obscene attitudes that proponents of torture throw around, so cavalierly.
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