On my way to work listening to the news on the radio this morning they were reporting an investigation into techniques used by the CIA and the military to get information from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. One technique was called Waterboarding where they simulated drowning. They also used "sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation and menacing dogs" And God alone knows what else happened. It would seem despite denials that Donald Rumsfeld knew and approved all this.
Can you stare into this image for a minute, think about the people that would have been in that room, who rigged up that apparatus, their victims and what must have happened there and not feel dread?
The apalling thing about torture, quite apart from the morality of it, is that for all the horror and pain it inflicts torture just doesnt work. We know this because it was recorded in minute detail by the Inquisition that people confessed under torture to being witches, to being able to fly, to having had sex with the Devil and to being able to turn themselves into cats and bats and goats, and to having given birth to babies with the heads of frogs and legs of spiders. As a result these poor wretches were strangled or burned.
How on earth can anyone argue there is a place for Torture anywhere under any circumstance if it just doesnt work?
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