This stuff goes back at least to World War 2.
I will get round to writing by Big torture diary but I still have in excess of 1000 pages of background to read, but most of the techniques in use, go back to the French and British colonial governments in the 1920's. and a good quantity of the patterns of usage come from the US prison service. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
I am glad someone is looking into this history seriously, and I will be very interested to read your diary, once you have completed your research. I'd say I was looking forward to it, but that would be morbid and creepifying.
The Nazis are a convenient scapegoat, but from my reading so far it appears that theres a convenient forgetting of our own actions before 1945. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
"We don't torture we're a civilised nation"
The Au Pairs.
Generally Rape isn't covered in the textbooks on torture to the extent of other methods.
Part of the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib includes comments that one of the translators raped five or six teenage boys, while a female guard took photographs. These must be in the pictures that have yet to come out from the investigation. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
You had mentioned and have since elaborated upon the connection between abuses characteristic of the US prison system, past and present, and the use of torture by US authorities in occupied nations, prison camps, and like circumstances.
Rape is a form of abuse reportedly very common in US prisons. It is so much a part of expectation based on popular culture of movies and TV that it seems to constitute a broadly accepted form of extra-judicial punishment.
The tacit acceptance and even approval of prison rape in the American public seems to me related in some way to the tacit and even enthusiastic support for torture. There may even be a common base in racism, although I can't quite see what it is.
That's what I was getting at: not that rape is a form of torture used for extracting information, but that it is a form of degradation used to inflict punishment and establish or maintain dominance relations. And these are the main purpose of the institution of torture, according to some I have read. Extracting information is seldom the real purpose, which is why discussions of tortures effectiveness in that respect are moot. Torture (and rape) are very effective at their actual purpose which the instillation of terror.
One of the best cartoons of our times. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
An uncomfortable backdrop to the Abu Ghraib story is the knowledge that various sorts of abuse are endemic throughout the American prison system. Along those lines, here's a clip from a piece in Saturday's Times by Fox Butterfield: "The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system."
But our current crop of leaders doesn't do shame. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
At least there seems to be a consensus against privatisation of prisons in Europe and prison rape is not something that is almost celebrated in popular culture. And, thankfully, we have the ECHR.
And no one should be surprised it happens, considering the literature they read at Saint-Cyr. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
