Torture in Interrogations: Analogous to Gambling Rings Set Up to Allow for "Betting" on Institutionalized Rape

In some of these recent postings, I've discussed the similarities between the use of "government-sanctioned" torture and ongoing rape or attempted murder, given that many people who are tortured end up dying during or as a consequence of the torture. The dehumanization and viciousness of this type of treatment of people, by these types of pathetic pieces of trash, is more or less analogous to the setting up, by a government, of some sort of "private gambling ring," in which people gamble that the damage that might result from their decision to continue the torture is likely to be outweighed by the few scraps of garbage that they collect during the torture. Anyone who isn't an illiterate hillbilly knows that information collected through the use of torture isn't reliable, and so these people are gambling that the life of the person being tortured is worth just about nothing. It's not an intelligent gamble to make, especially given the appallingly-large number of workers in, for example, the US government who are more or less functionally retarded. I don't know why anyone would think that some bunch of hillbillies with big goddamn buck teeth who thpeek with lithpth like thith because they're so goddamn stupid, the fucking goddamn trash, affiliated with the US government or another government, should be going around engaging in acts that are, in my opinion, nearly indistinguishable from rape and then gambling on the possible outcomes of the torture. In the case of some of the things these people are talking about, such as the use of waterboarding (no I'm not going to explain what the fuck this means, you stupid goddamn dumb-shit hillbillies), they're basically talking about hooting and hollering at the people being raped and marching around on the Sunday talk shows or whatever, giving little bits of "gamblers' wisdom" to the public. I don't know why I bother writing this stuff, when nobody gives a shit about anything anymore.

I'm supposed to believe that these US government agencies, with billions of dollars at their disposal and national laboratories and all of these years and years and years and years and years and so many years are unable to get their goddamn acts together enough to act like human beings, instead of running around and coming up with elaborate, bullshit excuses for pouring out their disgusting hatred and ugliness on helpless "detainees"? How many years have you had to get your goddamn fucking act together, you goddamn fucking trash. Look at what you are, and then think about the absurdity of hanging around, torturing someone, and trying to "throw your pathetic weight around." And during the time you bark some coward's statement of abuse at someone being held in some fucking chicken-shit prison in another country, a trillion years of evolution and horror pass by, before I can finish snapping my fingers, and the best thing you can come up with is to hide in some medieval dungeon and torment some prisoner and tell him or her that he or she might be there for years and that no one's coming to help. You had all of those trillions of years to learn to use your power in something resembling a decent way, and you pissed it all away so you could try to teach some half-unconscious prisoner some little half-retarded lesson and try to bully the person into giving up his lunch money, so to speak. It's a weak and pathetic bunch of people who lie all the time and act like they've got a bunch of big, grand secrets that no one could handle knowing about. People who are truly powerful can always come up with flexible ways of dealing with new issues or problems. Powerful people don't have to hide in goddamn dungeons because powerful people didn't find power under a rock and steal it and then pretend to be doing people a favor by tormenting them with the hope of access to the power that no one ever had a right to restrict in the first place, from any person, you cheap little shabby-minded garbage. What the fuck do you do all day, for Christ's sake? Stare at the wall and jump around like animals and squawk like vultures when you steal other people's ideas, because you're too fucking stupid to come up with any of your own? It's like some bunch of kids who are playing games and  then get caught stealing or something and then give their parents the silent treatment. It's like someone who's throwing a goddamn temper tantrum and then trying to blame the victim of the torture or coming up with a bunch of bullshit to supposedly "justify" the use of torture. Anyway, anyone who has any intelligence knows that these types of actions would never be defensible, within the framework of the US constitution, but it doesn't seem like very many people have a good sense of the constitution anymore. Maybe if they didn't spend so goddamn much time in hillbillyville or whatever the fuck you want to call it--just "North" or "West" of the L4 and L5 Earth-Sun Lagrange regions, where the farmland begins or where the weathermen's radar can't reach or whatever bunch of stupid dummy lingo you want to use to describe "hayseed-ville" or "fireside-chat-based-idiotville" or something. I'm sure as hell not going to rehash all of the thousands of pages of reasoning that one would need to rehash, in order to discuss this kind of garbage.

A "Cult-of-Management" Mindset Behind Acts of Obscene Violence by Torturers and Other Practitioners of Systematic Violence, During "Interrogations"

The dumb pieces of trash that run around and come up with justifications for the use of torture in interrogations tend to not be very capable of thinking carefully about anything, but a person who goes around torturing people tend to "unconsciously" or consciously assume that he or she can manage the consequences of his or her actions. It's sort of like the person thinks that he or she is "weighing" the risks that he or she will be held accountable against the expectations that he or she will accrue "benefits" from the malicious and premeditated violence. Anyone who has any intellectual capacity should be able to see, as I've discussed in recent postings, that the use of torture in interrogations can be viewed as being analogous to either a continuous sexual assault or to a continuous form of attempted murder or both, given the way in which all of the hopes and rights of the person being tortured are utterly disregarded by the people engaging in the torture. Everyone decries the behaviors that the Nazis engaged in, by imprisoning and torturing (and, subsequently, murdering them) people, without charges, in concentration camps, in part because of the torture and subsequent murder and also because of the ways in which the Nazis singled out specific groups of people and tried to blame Jewish people and other groups of people for all of the ills of the Nazi society that had become so devoid of life and humanity. People who defend the use of torture in interrogations of people who are suspected to be terrorists are using, essentially, the same types of approaches and forms of reasoning that people in Nazi Germany used, when they rounded up Jewish people for the purposes of torturing and murdering them. The main difference is that, today, the approach is used to round up fewer people, on a smaller scale, and to, supposedly, torture mainly people who are not US citizens. For some reason, I think that many people buy into the notion that people who were not born in the US should not expect to be kept out of concentration-camp-like secret prisons and tortured in appalling ways, as they are likely to be, in my opinion.

The "managerial" mindset that is sort of implicit in the notion that one can "prudently" use torture to sustain all of the wonderful aspects of life in the US is very disturbing to me, in part because there is this notion that one can find coldly-rational uses for extreme violence. It is sometimes helpful to look at things in new ways, and one way to look at the use of torture in interrogations is to ask oneself if one would be upset if government interrogators were taking women from other countries to secret prisons and raping them for years, continuously, while making money off of a "gambling" operation, connected to the public sexual assault, and paying people to come up with ever-more-abusive statements that they might shout at the woman being assaulted, so as to intensify the psychological damage being inflicted. Is a man less susceptible than a woman to the damaging effects of prolonged sexual assaults? People certainly seem to think that it's A-ok for men to be raped in prison, and some assumptions that could be said to go along with that notion, about men, are that the psychological health of men is less fragile than that of women (this is a very commonly-held notion, even among psychologists whose thinking is enlightened or "progressive") and that the men must have done something to cause them to be imprisoned and to lose their basic, human rights. Particularly in the case of a male detainee who is being held in a secret prison without charges, these assumptions are unlikely to be true. Thus, if one is willing to accept the notion that chronic, sexual violence is no less heinous when perpetrated against men than against women, one can begin to look at the use of torture in a way that is different from the way in which people commonly frame the discussion of the use of torture. The similarity of the use of torture to a continuous, sexual assault is appropriate, in my opinion, because, as I have discussed, the set of cognitive responses that govern the person's sources of pleasure, or reward, and pain are being hijacked and controlled, during torture, in a systematic and vicious way and are being coupled with inherently-unmanageable, physical violence. To torture a person physically is to engage in the absolute violation of the person's mind and body by shattering the most basic aspects of life that a person needs to be a human and to have anything resembling a life. A person needs to feel that he or she can have physical privacy in his or her body and that someone is not going to use the person's most basic desires and fears against that person. One of the reasons that people think the crime of rape is especially heinous is that rape involves the violent control of a person's most basic physical and mental processes. It is characterized by the profound violation of a person's sense of personal, physical and mental boundaries. Within the context of the use of torture during interrogations, a commonly-accepted notion is that the person can "work" to extricate himself or herself from the assaults by revealing information. Of course, in my opinion, this is never true, given the open-ended quality of torture and given the fact that torturers use psychological manipulation to strip away a person's will and a person's hope of ever being released. When one considers this type of perspective and also considers that government workers would probably have to have set up a sophisticated information-gathering system and collected detailed information about the specifics of a person's knowledge and social habits and communications, in order to even suspect that a person would, at a particular time, possess specific knowledge about a specific set of plans [(http://hardcorephysiologyfun2.blogspot.com/2011/07/presentation-of-false-choices-and.html)], the notion that the purpose of torture is to extract information is, in a real sense, not true, in my opinion. When one uses this type of reasoning, one can expose the use of torture as being the obscene form of, essentially, purposeless abuse that it, in my view, actually is. After one begins to see torture for "what it is," it is possible to see that a torturer who tells a detainee that he or she can "help himself/herself" by answering the questions honestly or truthfully or "correctly" (something the person is unlikely to ever be able to do, in the eyes of the torturer) is basically someone who is shouting and sneering at a person being sexually assaulted, saying things such as "How can you let them do that to you?" or "Why don't you get yourself out of that situation, you stupid fool" or some such thing. I realize that this is a disturbing way of looking at the use of torture, but it should disturb people that anyone could support the use of government-sanctioned, "purposeless" violence of this magnitude.

Of course, as I was saying, extreme violence can never really have any purpose to it, and the notion that one can make cold, calculating, rational assessments of the supposed benefits of obscene forms of violence, such as the use of torture in interrogations, compounds the violence and, in my opinion, undermines many of the most basic, foundational "elements" of human society. On some level, I think that torturers are aware of the extremely-unacceptable aspects of the violence, and the decision to "do it anyway" amounts to a kind of calculated "devaluation" of the life of the particular individual being tortured. Does anyone believe that people are going to engage in appalling acts of violence, even in the absence of any evidence that the person has ever committed any crime, and then turn around and do wonderful things, using all of the wonderful pieces of bullshit "intelligence" that they have obtained through the use of that violence? In my view, people who go around making calculated determinations that such-and-such a person's self and life, referring to the person's most personal and intimate, human characteristics and traits and feelings that make the person human, can be assumed to be worth exactly nothing, ostensibly for some "limited" duration of time, are unlikely to have much regard for the basic characteristics of human life in general. But, hey, that's just my opinion. I don't see how one can exhibit absolute contempt for human life, with one set of people, on the one hand, and then claim to be turning around capitalizing on that contempt (using all of the "good things" that one has obtained through the exhibition of that contempt), as a way of defending or sustaining the social framework that allows people to expect to have basic human rights.

Torture as the Absolute Abandonment of All Characteristics of Living Beings: A Fun, Heartwarming, Fictional Story

In an exploration of the "street-thug-style" lies that many proponents of the use of torture throw around, it might be helpful to consider a "fictional" account of the most extreme picture of torture that one could devise. The most extreme torture scenario I can think of is one in which people who have access to time travel technology come around, after having left a "scientist" to suffer in a shithole life while they had been prancing around their "future" or "other-event-frame" paradise, and try desperately to get the scientist to kill himself. Keep in mind that this is a fictional account, sort of like a sitcom set in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Given that no one seems to be interested in knowing anything real or true, I like to emphasize that and sort of offer something that there is some demand for--namely, fun, fictional accounts of people abandoning all of the characteristics that even the lowest animal life forms have and subjecting a person to obscene forms of violence, unapologetically, and coming up with a bunch of goddamn bogus bullshit to supposedly justify their treatment of the scientist. I consider myself to be a jewish person, by the way, and I can goddamn well speak about the types of sick sitcoms that these fucking people would like to watch. The people who have access to the time travel technology have obviously learned to read people's minds, and they use this technology to continuously violate the scientist's body, in what amounts to a constant sexual assault (given that a person's mind is part of a person's goddamn body). If the scientist has sexual thoughts on a particular topic, the people set up holographic people who have loud conversations, laughing about the specifics of the scientist's thoughts. Whenever the scientist thinks of possible explanations for the actions of these people, the people honk a horn or cause a person nearby the scientist to clear his or her throat, always in confirmation. The people tell the scientist to continue to work on theoretical physics and to do various related "chores," and the people repeatedly "confirm" that they will soon give the scientist access to their medical technology, to give him access to the time travel technology (and, obviously, interstellar and intergalactic, instantaneous transport, using much-more-advanced-than-magnetic-reconnection-and-nuclear-grid-based-superluminal transport mechanisms, for time travel and interstellar travel) and fix his chronic, more-or-less-devastating health problems that have plagued him for the previous 15 years of his life. Almost as soon as they arrive in his life, however, they give him a mind-altering drug, which seems to be something like LSD, of some kind that enhances the power of suggestion and allows them to very transiently make him believe they are some sort of God or gods, and then they give him an antipsychotic medication against his will, as a punitive measure, and deride his religious beliefs and make fun of him for having believed that they were communicating on behalf of God. The administration of the antipsychotic medication twice, for even two-to-three days, causes rhabdomyolysis during exercise and causes him to barely be able to walk for a day or two, because of severe neurological complications from the intense, almost-insurmountable, cerebral vasoconstriction that the administration of the drug produces. He begs them to never give him the medication again and tells them that he had had a subarachnoid hemorrhage seven years previously and that he could easily have another stroke, if they ever give him the drug again, and, although they do not subsequently give the drug, they continuously threaten to do so, for no discernable reason other than to dominate him.

Soon, it becomes clear that the people are confirming everything he thinks or believes and are lying about everything, and they still refuse to speak to the scientist openly about the time that the nightmare might end. The scientist soon realizes that the people have attached a negative, aversive response to every single word one or phrase one might encounter in everyday life, through the use of repeated phrases that have been very, very precisely coupled to the timing of his thoughts and to the times and places at which he might encounter those thoughts. The scientist realizes that he could never speak to anyone about this, for fear of being labeled delusional or for being suspected of being in a hallucinatory state, and the people make this abundantly clear and continually make minor threats to sue the scientist or the like, none of which he takes seriously. As time goes on, however, it becomes clear that the people deliberately ruined his past relationships and that they are preventing him from meeting women or having any semblance of a real life. As the scientist does work that is "implied," simply from the knowledge that the Michaelson-Morley ether wave experiment was basically inappropriately disregarded and that "past" and "future" time frames are intact, in large part, it becomes clear that nothing the scientist could ever do in his or her life time would come close to even the most basic technology that the people have always had access to.

As the psychological damage, stemming from the constant violation of his mind, accumulates, the scientist realizes that any notion that the people could ever need him to do anything is a lie, given the ease with which the people can manipulate his choices with great subtlety and sophistication. The scientist cannot ever choose to do anything, given that they will know everything he will ever do or say or think, in the absence of his having access to their technology, before he ever thinks or says or knows it. It becomes clear that the scientist played some sort of meaningful role in the development of the time-travel and other faster-than-light technologies, although it's unclear to the scientist what, precisely, that role was or is. Whenever the scientist does anything, the people criticize him and deride him and cause people, in public, to make explicit references to unmistakably-personal details from his life and his thoughts. Still more bizarrely, it becomes evident that the entire world that the scientist sees is some sort of holographic, simulated "world" and that only a past girlfriend is able to know his personal thoughts. Although this provides comfort for awhile, it becomes evident that she is also a prisoner of some sort and has been "saddled" with some sort of bizarre, hate algorithm that generates hateful and abusive content, in the form of ads on television and conversations of people in public, almost like a word processor would impose a given format, such as to convert one font into another, on a chunk of text in a document. As the months go by, the analogy of the experience to physical torture becomes more and more apt, as the devastating stress and deterioration of his physical health begin to take their toll. The people tell him to throw away all of his music and all of his photographs from his childhood and the 2000+ pages of notes on theoretical physics and tell him that, if he does so, they will allow him to control his physical body, with the use of their technology, and thereby end his chronic health problems and allow him to see his girlfriend and to use their transport technology, to do anything he could ever dream of doing. He does so, and they do nothing. He begs them to stop the torment, but they intensify it and laugh at him and become more malicious and hateful in their statements, as they imply, multiple times per day, that the only way for him to gain access to the technology is to kill himself (given that it is their "custom" for people to do this to join their organization or some nonsense). They know that he doesn't believe anything they say and won't kill himself for a bunch of sadistic hillbillies, but they say it anyway. It's enough for them to know that they can keep reminding him that they have absolute control and that he has no hope left of ever being given what no human being should ever have been prevented from having access to. The scientist learns that the specific geometries in which cities have been built and the movements of people, during wars and into and out of stadiums for sporting events, would have been set up (if he had been in "real" spacetime, in the time frame that he has lived in) for no other reason than to facilitate superluminal/time-travel jumps, like a crude sort of counterweight. But the technology is far more advanced than all that, the scientist learns, and the days and months continue.

The appeal of exploring all of the details of the science fades more and more, and the scientist sees the similarity of his situation to that of a woman being raped for months, continuously, while people sit in some stadium and watch, shouting out things that might be analogous to "why do you let them do that to you, you dumb fool. Stand up for yourself--get yourself out of that" or "turn your head a little to the left, darling--you'll look better that way." The scientist realizes that, even though his girlfriend is nearby, she might just as well not be there at all, given that the people won't even let the scientist have a relationship with her in the body of another woman (as an "avatar" or, as they say, "gravatar"). Ultimately, the scientist realizes that he has never spoken to another living human, outside of a simulated, scripted, holographic world, and he realizes that there is no possibility for resistance or lack of resistance to this kind of domination and that there is nothing left at all, really, and he understands less and less, as time goes on, of the people's supposed "motivations." He realizes that he is smarter than the people but that they are content to dominate him for an indeterminate and unending period of time. They tell him that all he needs to do is scrub the walls down, to improve the resolution of his image in the fucking magnetic caging effect of this perceptual prison that some damn person put him in, for God's sake, but they know that he knows it isn't true and is absurd. Anyway, there's a fun piece of fiction. Maybe I'll submit it to some goddamn literary journal or some fucking thing.

What is the Actual Motivation for Torturing People?

As I've said, there's not much point in talking about any of this, given that these people who go around engaging in torture are beyond all reason and have no regard for life. It's as if they've been removed from anything resembling human life for such a terribly long time that they can't grasp the most basic concepts that living, human beings use to make sense of things and to interact. It's not a different philosophy that causes a person to do something so horrific, and a lust for authoritarianism is not enough to cause a person to do these types of things. There's some kind of irrationality that can overtake people who have been in power, and it's an irrational sense that their own interests and methods should seem not just correct to others but should be endlessly-understandable. People who become part of some sort of appalling system of violence are bewildered by anyone who finds the system to be unbearable and to shatter the most basic type of framework that any human society has to be based on, if it's going to endure in any meaningful way. One example of this is in the educational system, and I will not just stop criticizing the educational system because my criticisms are upsetting to some people, evidently. When every student who participates in the educational system finds the system to be tremendously oppressive and no student has any capacity whatsoever to voice his or her criticism, without hurting himself or herself, there is something very, very wrong, and one sees this type of absolute silencing of groups of people in social "constructs" or contexts or whatever--in hierarchies--that have become corrupted in serious ways. Anyway, one can develop all sorts of elaborate justifications for one's actions, but, when you think you "know better" than another person or group of people and you find yourself interacting with a person who is in a desperate state and who has no hope of ever reaching anyone (upsetting as this is for some people to hear, this describes many, if not most, students in educational institutions), you have to be willing to look critically at yourself and your approaches. There's something very wrong, when one has so, so much power and can't offer anything more than desperation and pain to those whom one is bossing around.

Note on Magnetohydrodynamics and Spacetime, etc.

I'm taking down the goddamn images showing the magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, using faster-than-light jumps, etc. I honestly can't know what real or simulated events that video actually shows, but, in my opinion, magnetohydrodynamic propulsion could obviously be used for time travel and for producing antigravity effects, as anyone with a goddamn brain knows. There are obvious and dramatic antigravity effects following nuclear detonations, nuclear detonations produce dramatic "causality violations," and I don't have any interest in discussing any of my ideas on these topics on some fucking blog. No one is interested in listening to my ideas, and there's nothing to be gained by sharing them. However, it's a pathetic, worthless bunch of people who would flail around like fools over some lousy devices and technologies based on magnetohydrodynamics. It's a profoundly-flawed set of processes to base technologies on, even in the case of the magnetic levitation trains that are used in various countries in Asia and Europe. When I think of all of the horrific things that have been done over worthless garbage like this, I just see a lot of people withering away, slowly, lashing out in their desperation for some miserable modicum of control. It's a fool's form of control, when you waste so much and shatter the foundations of human social interactions, for a bunch of fucking nothing.

The Presentation of False Choices and Simplistic Scenarios by People Who Defend the Use of Torture in Interrogations: The "Exigent-Circumstances" Defense

 Another important point to be made about the use of torture is that torturers tend to frame any discussions of their actions or motivations in "false" or simplistic ways. For example, as I've discussed previously, many people have discussed the supposed need for the use of torture in terms of various sets of "exigent" circumstances, and, in these types of "false" contexts, the people present torture as being one of a small number of "less-than-ideal" but necessary, possible courses of action, in response to the exigency of the circumstances. Supposedly, as these people have said many times in tv interviews, if a group of terrorists are planning an attack, people in the government may need to torture someone, in order to obtain information and thereby prevent the attack. Of course, the scenario is extremely improbable, given that people in the government are very inept and are unlikely to be sufficiently "on top of things," so as to either have access to the individual(s) that have the information or to know enough to ask the right questions or to even suspect that an attack is imminent.

However, supposing that people in the government could, at some point, know enough to suspect an imminent attack and know that someone in their custody might be able to provide information that could be used to prevent the attack, why couldn't the people in the government have devised some other set of methods that might have allowed them to not have to rely on medievalistic violence to obtain the desired information. Put another way, the people in the government would be very unlikely to be so skilled as to be able to unravel the machinations of would-be terrorists and then have to fall apart, at the last second, and flail around like idiots, torturing someone like a bunch of goddamn animals. To know that a given individual might have specific knowledge of a specific attack would, seemingly, require one to have been speaking with the individual for a long time or to have obtained intimate knowledge of the person's day-to-day activities. Chances are, the people in the government would already have very detailed knowledge about the types of information that the person had previously been privy to and that the person would be likely to possess at any given time, and the access of government workers to this detailed knowledge of the person's cognitive and social characteristics would probably mean that the government workers would not have to torture the person to know the extent of the person's knowledge about any would-be event or attack or whatever. To know that person A, known to be a member of a terrorist organization, would have knowledge, at a particular time (the time at which the person is in custody and is about to be tortured, for example) of a set of plans that other members of his or her organization had made, one would need, presumably, to know or to have reason to suspect that the person had been either present at the "planning meeting(s)" or had been informed of the plans at some other time and location. For a government worker to know that the person had been present at the planning or had been informed of the plans, the government worker would presumably need to have a significant amount of knowledge about (1) the places that person A had been (or the people that person A had been in contact with, at specific times) or (2) the time(s) or locations at which the plans for the suspected attack might be known to have occurred or (3) the time(s) at which various members of the organization had convened, along with the presence of some sort of information that would strongly imply that person A might have the desired knowledge. That's not a precise statement, but my point is that one would have to have a lot of very specific knowledge of both the person and the organization, and one would also have to have some sort of sophisticated, information-gathering framework already in place. The information that one would need to have would already be so specific as to make the notion of a need for an "information fishing exercise" an absurdity, in my opinion. Thus, the scenario that people typically present, in the popular press, is highly, highly improbable and is presented as a false choice between the use of torture, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the potentially-disastrous consequences that could stem from an unwillingness to use torture.

Almost by definition, an organization that uses torture to obtain information is one in which people are not making much use of their minds to solve problems, and the acceptance of the supposed need to use torture requires one to accept an absurd contrast between the use of sophisticated, professional approaches, most of the time, and medievalistic violence on some "special occasions." Supposedly, as people who go on television to defend the use of torture would have people believe, the situation is one in which government organizations primarily use highly-sophisticated intelligence-gathering techniques to gather information, through the use of wiretapping technologies or through other means of intercepting communications or whatever, but then have to suddenly have to go "medievalistic" and abandon all professionalism and drown or sexually assault people randomly, to obtain their final, brilliant, crowning achievement, in the form of a crucial piece of information. Even more surprisingly, the government workers usually only have to turn into street thugs when there is a need to obtain the most important bits of information. This is not believable and would be analogous to a situation in which the chief financial officer or chief executive officer of a corporation would, most of the time, rely on the use of banking and other complex transactions with shareholders or investors but then have to go on a mugging spree and rob a bunch of people on the streets, to guide the company through a crisis or to achieve the goal for the company's first-quarter earnings. "When my company hasn't met its projected earnings for the fiscal year, you're goddamn right I hit the streets and shake down some junkies for cash. Hell yes I do it, and I won't apologize for doing it. I know that most of my shareholders wouldn't object to that, if it'll prevent our company from going through bankruptcy." When one looks at this type of analogy to a commonly-cited justification for the use of torture, in the context of exigent circumstances, one can see the absurdity of the justification for the use of torture. If one were to suppose that a government worker knew that a given individual, in custody at a specific time, would be likely to have specific information about a specific event, the decision to use torture to obtain that information would, more precisely, be sort of analogous to the hiring, by one CEO of a corporation, of some street thugs to go and get "shareholder transaction" information from another high-ranking person, such as a CEO or CFO (presumably, only a high-ranking criminal in a terrorist organization would be likely to have information about some highly-planned terrorist attack). What information could you get from a CEO that you wouldn't already know? How could you be in such a pathetic position, as a sophisticated CEO, as to have to resort to violence to get the last bit of information from another CEO, when you'd have to already know enough, about both the other CEO and the specifics of his or her financial transactions, to obviate the need to hire the thugs to get the...last bit of information? What's the nature of the information? "We have detailed data on ten billion financial transactions, but I want you to go and shake down Bob [the other CEO] for that final, single piece of data on the last, additional transaction. Don't ask him or intercept communications, for Christ's sake--waterboard the motherfucker." Only a bunch of stupid, "almost-retarded" thugs would need to go around stringing people up on ropes or drowning them to solve their own failure to solve their problems by using their minds.

The Use of Torture in Interrogations as a "Dummy's Game": A Further Analysis of the Junk "Reasoning" That Underlies Systematic Forms of Violence

These postings on torture would be disturbing to read, if anyone ever actually read them. I doubt very much that anyone will ever read them, but, if anyone ever does read them, it's worthwhile to consider that there is a terrible tendency of people to think that constructive criticism is uncivil or that the knowledge of disturbing things is something to be terrified of exploring. Unfortunately, there can be a tendency of people to think that they have the right to abuse other people as a means of "teaching" the people things, and this is a terrible thing to see. When one is in a society in which people have no capacity to explore damaging and disturbing aspects of human behavior in a cognitive sense, one tends to find groups of people who end up, somewhat unwittingly, seemingly, "recapitulating" or "re-inflicting" their own abusive and poisonous experiences on other people, ostensibly with the aim of showing the "young people" or other set of people the supposed value of gaining "strength through pain." It's very similar to the tendency, in the absence of some sort of self-awareness of the risk, of abuse victims, for example, to become abusers themselves. One sees this in the prison system, for example, in which people have set up a set of institutionalized mechanisms of abuse that have, ostensibly and absurdly, been set up to teach criminals not to abuse others.

Unfortunately, when an organization delivers some bogus arguments on tv and gets some lousy money together, the organization can persuade a lot of people that their approaches are characterized by a lot of complexity and subtlety. Stupid people generally are able to hide their stupidity by developing convoluted, circular forms of reasoning that they can condense into propaganda-like sound bites. One saw this in the buildup to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which people were running around like fools and yammering about having the right to defend the US by setting up likely-to-be-permanent military occupations of foreign countries, etc.

I'll never understand it, as long as I live, and I'll never understand what goes on in the minds of people who are desperate to hold onto systems of power that do nothing but dominate large groups of people. It's a sign of weakness to hold onto secrets and to lie all the time, but, for whatever reason, people who are "leaders" of militaristic and totalitarian-like hierarchies have bought into the notion and succeeded in persuading people that the restriction of information is a characteristic of a powerful person or organization. The opposite is true. A secretive, exclusive type of power-hungry organization or system is unlikely to be able to maintain power, given the potential for internal strife to spread uncontrollably in such a penned-in, pathetic type of organization. And a person who is powerful doesn't need to hide information away and go around torturing people to get a few more little, pathetic tidbits of information that amount to garbage, in the long run. A person or "leader" who speaks openly about everything that they he or she is working on, at least in some general or honest and reasonable way, is a person who is confident that he or she will be able to develop new approaches or ideas, should some threat present itself. But the assumption that the revelation of information will automatically lead to the proliferation of uncontrollable threats, originating among the people who become aware of the information, is, essentially, totally irrational.

To maintain extreme secrecy and control is to lack confidence in one's own methods and abilities and to exhibit an irrational contempt for the people whom one is controlling or keeping secrets from. If you torture a person to death in some pathetic, hole-in-the-wall prison in a foreign country and honestly believe that your rational purpose for engaging in the torture is to obtain some information of great value, why not treat the person as an equal and obtain a thousand times as much information, over the long term. A lot of the old, standard approaches that stupid, secretive people have used, over the years, and that people deem to be valid are just profoundly irrational. Even when the most supremely-knowledgeable people who go around hurting people, the behavior is inherently stupid and irrational. When you engage in violence in a systematic way, you "lock in" and commit yourself to the assumption that there is no possibility that the person you are hurting could ever be smarter than you are or have better judgment than you do. Any violence that is on the level of the despicable acts of torture that the dummies talk about on talk shows shatters the most basic sense of trust that has to exist among people, if anything constructive is ever going to result from their interactions.

The profound violence that characterizes torture is always irrational, given that one who engages in irrational violence has decided that there is nothing of value, except the narrowly- and foolishly-defined information that one supposedly is trying to extract through the use of torture, that one could ever gain from the person who is being tortured. So anyone who says that he or she is getting something of value, through the use of torture, is lying, given that the destructiveness that results from the violence is necessarily going to obscure any attempt to understand the scope of the "value" that one might otherwise have had access to, through civil interactions, in the absence of torture. Anyone who tries to provide rational justifications for the use of torture (or for the bizarre, dehumanizing restriction of information that no one has ever had the right to restrict access to) is a fool and is lying to himself or herself.

I'm aware that it's disturbing to realize that people in positions of power can be at risk of being motivated by little more than a kind of semi-subconscious, "group imperative" to abuse other people, but, beneath all of the fancy jargon and monkey suits, that's basically what this stuff amounts to. I'm sorry if it upsets someone's delicate sensibilities, but a person who is older and more powerful than another person is not necessarily more wise than the other person. There are some things that no one has the right to keep secret, and there are some things that one can simply never do. You can't weasel your way out of being accountable for such a profoundly-violent action by saying you have some elaborate set of purposes in mind. Torture is one of those things that one can never do because the action undermines, in such an absolute and profound way, everything that human interactions are based on. You can't set up a fucking concentration camp to teach people about the evils of setting up concentration camps, and you can't justify an act of extreme violence by saying that you're aware that the action is unjustifiable and that you've simply decided that you've gotta do the violence. When one looks at the core of the reasoning that goes into this kind of violence, even among the most obscenely-despicable of individuals who have dominated people in these appalling and unfathomable ways, prancing around like a bunch of chicken-shit greek gods or something, with such a bankruptcy of emotion and reason, one finds that there's not really any reasoning, of substance, that has gone into the decision to engage in the violence. Torture is a stupid person's game, and anyone who tries to justify its use is just providing an elaborate set of bullshit excuses for abusing others.

Emotions as Characteristics of Living Beings; Standards of Human Conduct

I should make a note of the fact that there's been a very disturbing tendency, among people in a variety of areas of society that include academia and also medicine and psychology, to make "judgments" about the extent to which a person either should or shouldn't feel emotions about things. Part of this has been a result of some of the grave issues that exist in psychology these days, but it's simply not appropriate or possible for a person to make some sort of assessment about the emotions a person either should or shouldn't feel about something. Unfortunately, people have become so fearful of anything new or challenging to their mindsets that they are willing to be bullied into silence, essentially, and it's a very terrible thing to see. Let me also say that, with regard to torture, compassion and the willingness to help people who are sufferring terribly, as people thought to be held in the kinds of secret prisons, as discussed previously, are likely to be, are basic characteristics of living beings. Without those things, there's nothing much about a person that can distinguish himself or herself from a nonliving machine or robot. A piece of "intelligence" or a piece-of-shit machine isn't alive, but a person is alive. There have to be some halfway-reasonable standards for human conduct. If there aren't basic standards, there isn't much else of value that's left, in their absence.

Similarities Among Commonly-Cited Rationales for the Use of Torture, in Interrogations, to the Slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei"

The slogan or phrase, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei), meaning "work will set you free," was present at the "gates" of Nazi concentration camps, during World War II, and I shouldn't need to say that there is a fundamental similarity between that message and a message that is implicit in a commonly-reported "rationale" for the use of torture. Proponents of the use of torture would have people believe that the "purpose" of the torture is to cause the person being tortured to provide some sort of specific or as-yet-unspecified information, and the implication of this supposed "rationale" for the use of torture is that the person being tortured must simply do the "work" of providing the information and then either be charged with the crime or released, although the latter outcome seems unlikely to be something that would commonly follow the revelation of information through torture. One has to ask oneself if a person who would viciously assault a person in a torture session of indeterminate length, in a manner that is almost indistinguishable from rape, as I've discussed in recent postings on this blog, is going to be satisfied with only the information that the person purports to want the person being tortured to reveal. Torture always constitutes a no-win scenario for the person being tortured (and also for the people engaging in the torture, given the tendency of violence to incite violence and the erosion of trust and credibility that must result from obsecenly-violent actions by people who have tremendously-more power than the people they are assaulting), given that the revelation of the desired information by the person being tortured is almost certainly going to provide a message, to the torturer, that the person must have even more significant information that has yet to be revealed. The torturer won't take no for an answer, and nothing can ever satisfy someone who would abandon all of the characteristics of a living being for the sake of a few pathetic bits of bullshit, monkey "intelligence" that no one with any real "intelligence" would give a goddamn thing about. As everyone knows, the torturer can assume, even though it is unlikely to be true, that a person who is being tortured and who has failed to provide the "desired" information has simply not been pushed hard enough, through the use of more physical and, by way of the domination over the person's body and mind, sexual assaults, to "do the work" by revealing the information. No one thinks that people being held in concentration camps could have earned their release, during World War II, by "doing more work" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei), but, for some reason, people buy into that bullshit when some half-wit marches around on a tv talk show and blabs in an icy way about the potential value of torturing people and acting like a bunch of fucking animals.

There's a similarly-disturbing message that's implicit in the rationales that people have offered to support the idea of mandating public service by young people. Apparently, it isn't enough that young people are forced to do 16-24 years of mindless tasks, in the educational system, that have little relevance to the work they ultimately do. The notion of "self-sacrifice" for the greater good can become very similar to the situation one saw in Nazi concentration camps. As soon as you decide that someone has a responsibility to sacrifice his or her basic human rights (and one needs to be honest and acknowledge that this is exactly what mandatory public service would demand of people and exactly what the military draft demanded of people) and do some arbitrarily-defined set of tasks in "service" of the government or the public, you've handed an absolute form of control to the people who have thrown away the human rights of young people or the other people performing the "services." One saw some of these terrible consequences in the ways in which young people were treated in the 1930s by the agencies or contracted organizations that managed various government-associated public works programs. Many young people were never paid for their work, and the pittances of money were, instead, sent to their parents. Of course, this is slavery, much as the military draft is, as many people have argued, slavery and is almost certainly unconstitutional, but they're young people and apparently don't deserve to have the same rights as other people do. If the government were to require young people to do public service, no one is going to be likely to do anything in response to a young person's reports that he or she has never been paid or that the fulfillment of his or her "requirement" of forced labor is having a devastating effect on his or her well-being, etc. Who is going to believe a young person or a detainee in a secret prison, especially when the young person or detainee doesn't have any money or any means of defending himself or herself? A detainee in a secret prison doesn't even have the hope of ever obtaining any means of defense against the ongoing assaults, and any proponent of that kind of treatment of a person should be ashamed of himself or herself.

Clarifications and Expansions of My Discussion of the Profound Depravity Inherent to the Use of Torture in CIA-Style Interrogations

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.

Do CIA-Style, "Torture-Based" Interrogations Constitute Rape?

I would argue that the suspension of a person's civil liberties by "workers" at the CIA or any other heavy-handed organization that utilizes torture, as a means of conducting "interrogations," constitutes a sexual assault and could be defined as being rape. Certainly, no one seems to have any compunction about allowing prisoners, in the US or in other countries, to potentially be subjected to rape, but I think that any drastic and unwarranted imposition of control over a person's surroundings constitutes rape, and I think this is particularly likely to be the case when the control is imposed through the use of systematic, physical violence. Everyone is aware of the methods that "government-type" people discuss very openly and casually, and these methods include the use of "simulated" drowning and other physical assaults of various kinds. The "milder" examples of these physical assaults, such as sleep deprivation or sensory deprivation and isolation or whatever, are discussed routinely in the popular press, but I wonder, given the deplorable history of the apparent use of extreme forms of violence by CIA-style organizations, if these are really the only methods used by CIA-style "interrogators" or "officials" or whatever they are. However, a person who is being detained, without having been charged with a crime and without any knowledge of the expected duration of the detention, is being controlled in an absolute way, and the person can have no real hope of ever having access to the things, such as human interaction and the expectation of being treated in something resembling a fair or decent manner, that everyone knows a human being is incapable of living, in any real sense, without. In my view, it's this absolute contempt for the rights of a "detainee" that, in concert with ongoing physical assaults that the person can never have any hope of ending  through his or her actions or statements, causes CIA-style torture methods to constitute rape. Another reason I think systematic torture is rape is that the psychological effects of CIA-style interrogations are known to be devastating. Rape is regarded as being an especially egregious form of violence because, in part, of the way in which rape victims remain terrorized for long periods of time after they have been attacked.

I'm not sure why anyone would want his or her government shuttling people away to secret prisons, in foreign countries, to be subjected to systematic and institutionalized rape, but I would think people would not want this approach to be occurring. It's easy to say that the detainees are terrorists or "foreigners" or whatever the hell type of epithet one wants to use to label the detainees. However, there is a devastatingly-destructive effect on the fabric of a society whenever any person, in the US or other country, is subjected to this type of treatment. Other people have made the point that one defines one's standards of conduct, in a moral or ethical or whatever sense, by the range, meaning the nature of the extremes, of one's actions, and even the level of violence that a lot of these stories, in the popular press, describe is so obscene and appalling as to, essentially, shatter the confidence that one might otherwise have, in a world in which people can be expected to act with some decency. In my view, the discussions in the popular press may be the tip of the iceberg, and the whole discussion of this issue, among people, has become so ugly and devoid of humanity that I doubt anyone would even care if the folks blabbed openly and explicitly, on the Sunday talk shows, about the literal rape of detainees in secret prisons, etc. For whatever reason, many people seem to have accepted the notion that people in government offices have the right to make "big decisions" or "tough decisions" and, after an afternoon or lunch hour of careful deliberation in a big room with fancy walls or whatever, send human beings off to be dehumanized and assaulted in extreme ways that are nearly indistinguishable from rape. No one should have the right to make that kind of decision, in my view. It's a weak-minded set of individuals that have to rely on physical violence to assert their supposed authority over others, and, in my opinion, a person who condones the use of torture, for any purpose, should be ashamed of himself or herself.

More Shameful Behavior by Government Interrogators: An Analysis of Some Lies Promulgated by CIA-Style Torturers

This is an example of the type of reprehensible behavior that workers in the US government are evidently thought to have engaged in, with impunity (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/cia-exhales-99-out-of-101-torture-cases-dropped/). It's always a lie to imply that one could gain anything constructive by the use of torture, and anyone who claims to be accomplishing anything constructive through the use of torture is a fool and a liar. There's an inherent and extreme discrepancy in power that exists in a situation in which someone is torturing someone, and the people who are doing the torture are always going to be the ones who are going to decide if the person has or has not revealed some arbitrarily-defined volume of information or otherwise "given" something that the torturer deems to be "adequate." Of course, nothing will ever be adequate for someone who thinks torture is acceptable, and therein lies one of the lies that torturers like to try to use to deceive people with. What would be the content that a person being tortured could possibly provide, to a group of depraved torturers, and thereby extricate himself or herself from the torture? The person can never have any possibility of providing content that is adequate, and the person can never have any hope of extricating himself or herself from the situation. The definition of the adequacy of the contribution, provided by the desperate person being assaulted, is going to be redefined in an ongoing manner by the torturers. People assume that members of their government are going to exercise restraint and "only go so far" or only continue long enough to obtain the "desired" information. In fact, this can never be true, given that the underlying premise for the use of torture is that one does not know what information one desires. The abuses of prisoners in Iraq is an example of the way things go when people are dominating others and have drastically more power than the people whom they are dominating. Physical abuse is an inherently unrestrained approach, and people need to demand better behavior from people in their government.

For whatever reason, most people seem to believe the lie that the burden is on the person being tortured to "justify" his or her release from the physical and psychological assaults that the person being tortured is subjected to. Given that torturers never define explicitly and continually-redefine, in their own minds, the nature of the information that the person being tortured could provide, so as to win the abusers over and thereby extricate himself or herself from the abuse, there is never any possibility that the person being tortured could successfully "shoulder" the burden of proving his or her "worthiness" to be released from the abuse. In fact, nothing that a person being tortured can do or say will ever be capable of eliciting a response, merciful or other, from the person doing the torture. When a torturer assaults a person or temporarily stops assaulting a person, the assumption is that the torturer has done so in response to something the person has done or said. In fact, this is not the case and can never be the case, as long as the discrepancy in power is as large as it is in the context of torture. The fact that events occur in a given sequence, with one event occurring after another event has occurred, does not mean that a given event, such as the cessation or resumption of physical assaults within a given interval of time, has occurred as a consequence of (i.e., in response to) a previous event. If a bunch of low-life, street thugs are hitting someone with a baseball bat and then stop doing so and run off, no one would think that the street thugs' decision to run off, at that particular time, followed as a consequence of the "fifty-first" or "nth" plea, of the person being assaulted, for the thugs to stop the assault. The thugs simply made some arbitrary decision to stop, and no one would think that the burden is on a person being "mugged" or assaulted, on the street, to induce the criminals to stop assaulting him or her. A "judge" would laugh someone out of his or her kangaroo courtroom for arguing that the person being assaulted had failed to "pull himself/herself up by his/her own bootstraps" to an extent that would be sufficient to end the assault. A torturer is a weak bully who has decided to assault and dehumanize a person for some length of time, and there can be no real interaction of the torturer with the person being tortured. The physical assaults that torturers engage in are inherently one-sided. Torture is one-sided, irrational abuse and nothing else.

As long as this sort of behavior by people in CIA-style organizations or whatever other ridiculous organization continues, everything that's good about the US Constitution and the "expectations of human rights" that people have, in the US or in other countries is laid waste by this disgusting and inhuman behavior.