Routine and Systematic Torture Is at the Heart of America's War on Terror

George Monbiot, The Guardian UK

In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront. After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being. Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist...

continua / continued