Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul

From AlterNet:

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far -- in Texas and Washington state -- both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds -- physical or mental -- produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

Click here for the rest.

I'm still totally amazed that the US now gleefully supports torture. Of course, as the above linked essay implies, we've gleefully supported torture my entire life and longer--the reason I didn't really realize this until recently is because when we're doing it to US citizens we don't call it "torture;" we call it "prison." I continue to be at a loss for words. A simple condemnation doesn't seem to be nearly enough. I could speculate as to why we're now a totally immoral nation on par with, say, the Uganda of Idi Amin, or the Gestapo, but that's obvious: 9/11 scared Americans so much that they're willing to publicly support absolute evil in order to make themselves feel safer. And really, that's the only possible upside of torturing people; it makes Americans feel good--it is well known to psychologists that torture, especially the kind we're using, is wildly unreliable as far as intelligence-gathering is concerned.

But then, listen to me going on like this.

For some reason I feel compelled to explain why torture is so totally wrong. I shouldn't have to do that. It's completely self-evident that torture is an act of absolute evil. Beyond worrying about the moral decline of our nation's soul, I should also be worrying about why so many Americans are so fucking daft that they just accept this shit.

How is it possible that torture is now acceptable and desirable among Americans? This, more than anything else, truly makes me afraid that our civilization will soon collapse.

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