Torture

(Warning: I'm using shitty ass IE so I don't have spell check, oh no's)

So I finally got around to starting my psych paper on torture. It's amazing how common one of the cruelest forms of torture really is for prisoners of all types, isolation.

I read a report from Physicians for Human Rights about the stuff going on at Gitmo and other places. Pretty horrible stuff. Now I'm starting in on the US torture instruction manual. Ok so its not called that, its called "The Manipulation of Human Behavior." What it is is a book from 1961 that lays out the most "modern" use of psychological knowledge for the purposes of interogation. I'm willing to bet that at the time they didn't realize the long term effects of such interogation. They thought of it simply as techniques, not torture. Oh and in the report I found it interesting that one of their major sources of info about the goings on at Gitmo et all besides the Red Cross was the FBI that was a bit stunned by what they saw, not so much because it was cruel and illegal, it is the FBI after all, but because it's not an effective way to get information. What I didn't see in the report is the real purpose of torture (admittedly I'm only 50 pages into that report) which is intimidation. Pure and simple, you don't torture people for intelligence purposes, you torture people to scare the shit out of everyone aligned against you, its the bully mentality of showing that you're the baddest motherfucker on the block. What the fuck has happened to this country when we need to flex like that? There was a time when you wanted to be our friend cause we'd help you out when you needed it, hook you up with shit if we really liked you, even fight wars for ya, and you didn't want to be our enemy cause we had the ability to crush anything that moved. Now (although not for much longer) we kinda sorta help our friends (other than Israel who's still our friend with benefits), and lets face it no one is nearly as scared of our military as they once were. Don't get me wrong, army vs. army, no country is stupid enough to face us. I made this point in the last post, but partially because of that, we don't see "real" wars anymore. Countries don't dare fight, instead they have to turn to ideological mad men, aka the enemy or terrorists or patriots or freedom fighters depending on the time and which side you're on. So whats my point? I have no idea anymore. I've been stuck doing fucking data entry for way to long and my mind has turned to mush. I'm a little surprised that we haven't started inflicting forced data entry onto prisoners, guess theres still some things that are just too cruel.

But on that note I need to get back to work on this evil ass paper.