"What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos"

george monbiot, writing in the guardian, crafts a scathing analysis of jose padilla and the u.s. interrogation policy of torture...

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.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilized nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

it's staggering to think that, in the supposed effort to collect information about potential terrorist threats, in the apparently more numerous than we think worst case scenarios, we are permanently destroying human minds, or, in less dramatic fashion, creating permanently fanatical terrorists...

(thanks to alternet...)

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