'The Christian in me says it's wrong,' ... 'But the corrections officer in me says I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"

Torture Fatigue: "By Silja J.A. Talvi | 06/29/05 - -

'The Christian in me says it's wrong,' Army Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. said of torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 'But the corrections officer in me says I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
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In an exhaustive May 2005 Amnesty International report, "Guantánamo and beyond: the continuing pursuit of unchecked executive power," the running count of detentions in the global war on terror stands, at least, at 70,000 people, including the known deaths of 27 individuals in U.S. custody since 2002. To take but one example, consider this June 2004 account of Martin Mubanga, a British citizen who was kidnapped by U.S. Forces in Zambia and eventually brought to Guantánamo:

I needed the toilet and I asked the interrogator to let me go. But he just said "you'll go when I say so." I told him he had five minutes to get me to the toilet or I was going to go on the floor. He left the room. Finally, I squirmed across the floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimize the mess ... He comes back with a mop and dips it in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering me with my own waste, like he's using a big paint-brush, working methodically, beginning with my feet and ankles, and working his way up my legs. All the while, he's racially abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the poor little ####." He seemed to think it was funny. What such systemic brutality means, on some level, is that Americans bear collective responsibility for the damage our government has done. That's not an easy thing to contemplate. But the public won't find any such admission represented on the pages of our commercial newspapers and magazines. Instead we see outrage and compassion about things that we're not responsible for, the deaths of Terri Schiavo and the Pope, for instance, or the toll of the tsunami.