Our military establishment's main objective for the last 56 years has been to appropriate between $300 and $400 billion annually (in 2002 dollars) from the national treasury. They take what they can out of our pockets, and put the rest on our nation's credit card.
Needless to say, it's not always easy to spend all that money. Sometimes the brass hats and their civilian overlords have to find novel and creative ways to squander the fruit of our ill-advised largesse. Consider the missile defense shield, which at this point consists of defensive missiles that can't hit anything and, in some cases, can't even get out of their silos.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the military is using shrinks at Guantanamo to think up and implement new and original ways to torture people, as is detailed in this Truthout.org story by William Fisher. Groups known as BISCUITS (Behavioral Science Consulatation Teams) are on staff at Gitmo, according to former torture masters at the facility, "to advise the military on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes using their medical records to find ways of exploiting their fears and phobias, to make them more cooperative and willing to provide information."
For example, if an "illegal combatant" is known to be afraid of the dark, he can be locked away in solitary total darkness for a few days to encourage him to tell what he knows (or make up shit he doesn't know, as the case may be). If a guy's medical history indicates a phobia concerning dogs...well, you get the idea.
This approach is identical to that used by Big Brother's sadistic pain engineers in "1984," where they used "Room 101" to finally and invariably get "thought criminals" to confess.
What was in Room 101? It varied from person to person, but it was always that thing you were most afraid of.
So why am I not surprised? The fact is, here in the Empire of Pentagonia (formerly U.S.A.) nothing is surprising. Pentagonia, 'Tis for Thee.
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