Torture is Terrorism

A good way of determining whether an interrogation technique is a form of torture is to ask whether you would like to have the technique applied to your spouse or children if they were interrogated by police in a criminal investigation.

You might not like your loved ones being deprived of freedom for a period of time while being interviewed or investigated, but being strapped to a board and being given a near-drowning experience is torture, even if no organs are damaged or bones are broken.

Make no mistake about it, America has been a terrorist state for many years. The U.S. Army has taught forms of torture to foreign militaries at trainings at the infamous School of the Americas and other similar facilities. Interrogation techniques using fear of death or further injury have not only been used, but have been put into secret military and intelligence literature for many years. This is beyond denial.

Long before Abu Graib prison went from a torture facility under Saddam Hussein, and certainly before the Americans used the same facility to torture people, Americans have tortured Afghans and Somalis and Yemenis and Syrians and other peoples of the world. American forces have kidnapped people without due process and held them in secret and killed and disposed of their bodies in secret.

The Bush Administration is a terrorist organization in and of itself. Terrorism in the name of national defense is still terrorism, and torture is a brutal form of terrorism, designed to punish and invoke communication simultaneously by infliction of pain and fear. Fear of future torture is the key to torture. A torture victim who loses fear of past torture is no longer useful and might as well have never been tortured in the first place, yet torture victims may tell their interrogators anything they thing the interrogators want to hear to provoke relief.