VivirLatino

I just finished reading this Newsweek article about how detainees are being treated while being held in U.S. custody. Controlled drowning, forcing detainees to wear dog collars and perform like animals, “invasion of personal space by a female,” imprisoning in small boxes, and identifying phobias of prisoners and using those phobias against them were all named as techniques used against prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.

The ironic and horrible thing is, the people who were being asked to do this crap are also the people who had qualms with doing it:

While the basic outlines of these interrogations were previously known, the report provides new details and will likely add fresh momentum to calls for a “truth commission” or similar Justice Department investigation of U.S. interrogation practices—both of which President Obama suggested for the first time Tuesday that he was willing to support.

The report, an advanced copy of which was provided to several news organizations, draws on newly declassified documents that Levin says bolsters his principal message: That the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo were not caused by “a few bad apples,” as Bush administration officials repeatedly asserted. Instead, Levin said in a statement Tuesday, it was the product of high-level White House decisions to utilize a controversial series of “enhanced” and coercive interrogation techniques despite vociferous warnings by U.S. military lawyers and FBI officials that they could subject U.S. officials to prosecutions for torture and war crimes.

I don’t even know what to think about this mess anymore. I’m just so sickened and disgusted. Yes, I understand that whoever the hell we’re torturing is “evil” and all that, I really do. But will our torture kill an idea? Because isn’t resistance against U.S. (for whatever reason) based on an *idea*? Whether it’s the belief in freedom from the U.S. or a belief in martyrs and virgins (or whatever)–how does our torture kill those ideas?

Can it?

Also see this photographic history of torture. It’s ugly and brutal and makes you lose all hope in humanity. Just so you know.