What a Torturous Web We Weave...

I remember seeing in a news clip, Nixon's secretary turning herself into a halfway decent contortionist in a pathetic attempt to show how she could have "accidentally" erased important parts of the Nixon tapes.

Apparently, the only real success of the Codpiece administration has been to outdo Icky Dicky. This time, evidence requested by a judge has been deliberately destroyed. We're not talking about a few minutes of a half drunk Icky Dicky babbling about "getting his enemies" -- this is hundreds of hours of video recordings shredded. What was on the tapes was Coercive Interrogation in the rough, so to speak.

The discerning mind does not need to be told that the Codpiece-in-chief has heard and seen these tapes, enjoyed them and had a boner or two. In fact, he has edited versions -- that is, the juicy parts with screams and vomit -- on DVDs.

The question least likely to be answered is: where did the orders come from to destroy the tapes? Far up the food chain to be sure, but how close to the top?

The question least likely to be asked, let alone answered, is: why were they destroyed -- probably not the screams or the techniques eliciting them -- rather it was the words, the names and, most of all, the unreliable information gained, for example, from that crazy schizo, Zoobiyah.

Of course, the public mind will be fluffed with a lot of spin and flimflam about national security and secrets and oversight and jim bauer 24 crap steaming out of the glowing screens about torture and when and what is torture and when torture is not only illegal but "justifiable" Because Our Cause Is Good.

Therefore, boys and girls of the more or less human variety: It's time to talk about torture once again.

Torture is the deliberate abuse of someone under your total control, someone who has no way to escape your abuse or recourse to defend themselves, legal or otherwise.
All other definitions of torture is bullshit on a waffle. College fraternity hazing, the training special forces endure -- this is not torture because the victims not only know their ordeal will have an end but also a purpose to which they have voluntarily acquiesced.

The main purpose of torture is terror: This applies to both government sponsored torture and the torture of your more run-of-the-mill freelancing sadist. In both cases, the terror is aimed not only at the victim -- but the surrounding population.
Torture as a means of gathering reliable intelligence is not cost effective. The French in Algiers found the exception which proves the rule -- they tortured large numbers of people more or less randomly rounded up in dragnets. By comparing the information they squeezed out of people with electrodes, water boards, dogs and anal rapes, they compiled information they could actually use against the resistance against them.

However, the bottom line is that they ended having to leave Algeria, so the net gain was a loss, a lot of useless agony, pain and broken bodies.