To torture is to surrender.

[BuyingThyme]

[lonestarnot]

1. Besides it is done by a bunch of sick motherfuckers.

[TahitiNut]

2. Well, nearly every father of two or more children ...

... is, strictly speaking, a ... :silly: (I hear it's nearly illegal in China.) :dunce:

The Bushoilini regime, however, is populated with sociopaths and sadists and bullies - the senior ones being war criminals who, if this nation is to ever again call itself honorable, must be imprisoned for the rest of their lives.

[lonestarnot]

3. I hold the dicks at the top responsible for all of it, but the torturers

are some sickass pups to be able to do the things I've seen and heard. They need psychological treatment to recover what ever it was they lost to be capable of such dehumanization.

[TahitiNut]

4. The grim reality of it is that the vast majority of people are capable ...

... of torturing and abusing people under their control, particularly under even the thinnest veneers of authority, The lessons of the Milgram Experiments and the Stanford Jail Study are pretty conclusive in that regard.

[lonestarnot]

5. I will have to read up on those two and I still do not know if I will

believe it.

Milgram Experiments
Stanford Jail Study

[TahitiNut]

7. Here ...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Milgram+Experiments&btnG=Google+Search

http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=Stanford+Jail+Study&btnG=Search

Perusal of the hits on the first pages should be more than enough.

[OwnedByFerrets]

6. Especially when it is encouraged......

by authority.

[lonestarnot]

8. Ok Milgram is shit.

http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm

[lonestarnot]

10. Stanford Jail Study very interesting, but all guards did not torture, in

fact some did favors.

"There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were "good guys" who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior. The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured our authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners."

[lonestarnot]

11. Intervention was not possible according to role, not according

to individual feeling about the matter. Maybe I'm just too freak'n rebellious. I was almost thrown out of bootcamp for telling the squad leader to go fuck herself. Military was a bad place for me. I got through six years and was honorably discharged, but I don't know how. My unit was better than bootcamp, but not much.


"At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation -- a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically.



Even the "good" guards felt helpless to intervene,



and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work."

[BuyingThyme]

9. ..

That you cannot fight a moral war with immoral means. And if we're ready to embrace immoral means, if that's how we're going to fight this war, then we have lost.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2175987

[lonestarnot]

12. We have become worse than the enemy.