Torture?

There has been a lot of yapping going on about the treatment of prisoners in the GITMO prison on Cuba. It appears as if things there are not as bad as first speculated. For example, the worst reported case details the treatment of a Saudi detainee captured in Afghanistan that was suspected to have been involved in 9/11.

Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

This is nothing new. When I worked on Wall Street, they used to do this to us all of the time. Particularly, right before bonus discussions. And we liked it. [We had to].

But this just doesn't sound like torture. Torture is bamboo shoots under the fingernails, cigarette burns and this...

Torture techniques reported include severe beatings, electric shocks, force-feeding torture, and injections of nerve-damaging drugs.

This is reportedly how Chinese authorities treat even the elderly Falun Gong detainees. I have not seen the Western press swarming to investigate these alleged tortures.

And they are not using the Chinese tickling torture.