The Psychology of Torture

[norml]

The Psychology of Torture
20 Aug 2005



There is one place in which one's privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed - one's body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The torturer invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture.

In a way, the torture victim's own body is rendered his worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the sufferer to mutate, his identity to fragment, his ideals and principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the tormentor, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a treasonous, poisoned territory.

It fosters a humiliating dependency of the abused on the perpetrator. Bodily needs denied - sleep, toilet, food, water - are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct causes of his degradation and dehumanization. As he sees it, he is rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies around him but by his own flesh.

The concept of "body" can easily be extended to "family", or "home". Torture is often applied to kin and kith, compatriots, or colleagues. This intends to disrupt the continuity of "surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others", as the CIA put it in one of its manuals. A sense of cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both one's biological body and one's "social body", the victim's psyche is strained to the point of dissociation.


snip


http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=29418

[wli]

1. pretty much Bushler's playbook n/t

[norml]

2. Abu Ghraib, Satanists, And Spoon-Benders

Abu Ghraib, Satanists,
And Spoon-Benders
by Edward Spannaus

In a legal battle currently raging in Federal court in New York, the Pentagon is desperately trying to block the release of more photos and videotapes of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. At issue, in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and others, are 87 photographs and four videotapes, which are reported to contain images of rape, sodomy, and other conduct far more horrendous even than that which has been disclosed so far.

The question raised, is what connection does this have to the reports received by EIR that the Special Warfare crowd based at Fort Bragg, N.C., is deeply enmeshed in "spoon-bender" Mind War programs and experimentation, and intersects outright Satanic circles?

`Rape and Murder'
An examination of this question, should proceed in the light of recent hearings in the U.S. Senate, and the explosive New Yorker magazine article by investigative reporter Jane Mayer, which have further documented that prisoner abuse and torture was a deliberate, systematic policy, one that came from the very top of the Defense Department, and also that these practices were deliberately introduced into Iraq, after having first been tried at Guantanamo.

It may seem far-fetched to some readers, to suggest a link between the torture scandals, and Satanic pedophile rings that operated out of the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, or around Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. But consider the following


snip


http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3233_abu_ghraib.html

[wli]

3. so far so good, now for the reliable sources

Often LaRouche produces factually reliable stories (but interpretation is rather spun for LaRouche's benefit), so tracing it back to LaRouche's sources is needed.