No ifs or buts, is waterboarding torture or not? If you think it’s a valid means to some end, read Derrick Jensen’s A Culture of Make Believe and then see if you still feel the same way.

Torture, stress positions, and other ‘interrogation’ techniques are not primarily attempts to gain intelligence but attempts to break the will and morale of an enemy. These are aspects of what Gen. Rupert Smith calls War Among the People, where an ideology is the real enemy of the dominant power. The power of an ideology can be broken by weakening the minds of its overt actors. Remember Winston Smith’s experiences in 1984? The torture we have seen in Iraq and the hidden torture programmes of the CIA are aimed at this end: you will stop resisting and ‘…love Big Brother with all your heart’.

This aspect of warfare has been happening since the wars against communism in the latter half of the 20th century, and it will only increase as multiple forms of resistance to hierarchical powers continue to increase. The forthcoming Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act in the US is a different manifestation of this mind control technique, where a witch-hunt will act to chill free speech and free thought in order to make activists and their ideologies less threatening to the dominant power. Thought crime has come of age.

Believe it or not one aim of this latter tactic is to help reduce the impact of the awakening (known as radicalization) that can occur when people read the same kinds of internet content that you are reading right now. You may be interested to know that the correct definition of radicalization is: to go to the root of an issue.