thenatureofmind

Iraq: The Price of Oil

The American public who own and drive SUV's now have a good estimate of the cost of squandering the world's resources...

Study sees 655,000 Iraqi war deaths

What is the purpose of Torture?

When you listen to George W. Bush tell the country how they are being made safer if he is allowed to continue to arbitrarily detain and torture prisoners, you have to wonder. Of course as all governments do who wish to hide the truth, George Bush has his own definition of torture and reserves the right to arbitrarily re-define it as it suits his purpose. So words that are spoken have no relation to the acts actually committed. I suspect if 100 citizens were subjected to the non-torture that Bush speaks of, they would all say they had been tortured.

But recently I chanced to read the statement by a prisoner who survived the torture and genocide camps of the Khmer Rouge who stated very simply the reason why they were tortured. It seems that his torturers had no interest in hearing the truth. They knew what they wanted to hear and that was a confession. It was the job of the person being tortured to figure out what the torturer wanted to hear and tell him that. Once the torturer was satisfied, the prisoner would be killed and his suffering would end. The purpose of torture was to give the people in command validation of their badly skewed world view and justify their actions. Any amount of death, suffering and destruction was justified. George W. Bush and the United States of America are no different. This administration along with the 38% of Americans who still believe that Sadam Hussein was connected with Al Quaida need to torture people to validate their extremely harmful and destructive mythology.