Yeah, I think I'm the only one around here who actually wants to abolish money, so you might want to hone your message a little more...

Dr. House physically and psychologically tortures his patients for their own good.

Bones beats, batters, and shoots suspects and gets away with it b/c she's technically not law enforcement.

The villains and anti-heroes on Prison Break torture each other for the sadistic joy of it, with the heroes condoning the anti-heroes' torture because they must bring down "The Company."

Sarah Connor and her Terminatrix torture (and murder) because the robots'll blow up the world if they don't (tho' they usually get bad intel from their victims and end up on wild goose chases).

Fox reality shows like Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, and American Idol revolve around abusive assholes putting people down and making them feel like sh*t.

And the Fox comedies are torture in and of themselves.

And how can you know T3's A, B, & C w/ 100% certainty without already knowing where the TTB is? How can you know the information you get from torture is true unless you already know the truth?

An since Fred Clark the Slacktivist (link @ sig.) said it so well, I'll just quote him:

"About here, inevitably, someone will chime in with what they seem to think of as the trump card for the religious totalitarian perspective. Aha! they will say, so what you're saying is you're all for tolerance, except when it comes to people who are intolerant!

"Well, yeah. And also, duh. Antonyms are incompatible. Opposites are opposed. That's not a particularly noteworthy observation, so I've always been baffled as to why this bit of adolescent wordplay was regarded as meaningful.

"...Intolerance is, necessarily, totalitarian. So when I say I favor freedom -- whether freedom of conscience or of any other sort -- then, yes, what I'm really saying is that I'm all for freedom except for when it comes to people who want to impose totalitarianism. This exception does not, as the JV sophists would have it, negate the claim that 'I'm all for freedom.' It simply demonstrates that, unlike them, I'm aware of what words like 'free' and 'tolerant' -- and their opposites -- actually mean."

...slinging crack on the corner down in Homewood are following orders, so all they need is to do it with patriotism and the Drug War will be over!

“... is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to rob them of their wealth, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.” - Friedman Khan

"Where were these people when Bill Clinton was being impeached for his indiscretion with Monica Lewinsky and the blue dress?"

They were on the White House lawn, pitchforks, torches, and lynching rope in tow, crying about perjury and Rule of Law. Nowadays, the popular rationalization seems to be for them to say, "And look how that turned out! The country was disgusted by the pols and pundits for holding Clinton accountable for petty indiscretions, therefore, the country will be disgusted by us pols and pundits if we hold Bush et al. accountable for major crimes!"

One imagines they'd come away from Antony's funeral oration saying, "Well that Antony's a swell guy! He said such nice things about Brutus and after Brutus murdered his best friend! But what was up with that angry mob? What got them so riled?"

They also seem to operate from two premises:

(1) People who kill people are bad.

(2) People who kill people who kill people are good.

They then cherry pick historical events to assign to Group 1 the people they've already decided are bad. Then for good measure, they include all of Group 1's family, friends, and coreligionists whether or not they've killed anyone. They're engaged an exercise in building a vast, byzantine architecture of rationalizations to support the conclusions at which they've already arrived.

Navigating it, let alone dismantling it, is a Sisyphean task, and I admire those of you who make the attempt.

My guess is that it stands for "Military Of The United States."

I was reading "Sexus" (1949) last night, and in it Miller refers to our troops using the "water cure" in the Philippine wars a half-century before.

As you suggest will happen now, back then our soldiers came home, went into law enforcement, and used water torture (and other tortures) on American citizens. See the Wickersham Commission's 1931 "Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement" (http://openlibrary.org/b/OL6764469M).

If history is any guide, it seems likely that we'll start seeing 'enhanced interrogation' techniques used domestically. But it'll just be a few bad apples, to be sure.

Our police are more and more militarized in both methods and equipment, SWAT and riot police being the most salient examples. (Heck, riot police even march in step formation and beat their shields much like the ancient Romans legions did.) I see it as part of a trend separating the people protected from those who are supposed to do the protecting, instilling a sense of awe and fear, and generally keeping people cowed and quiet.

Anyway, I don't know how much torture was used on bootleggers. From what I've read elsewhere, the torture described in the Wickersham Report (euphemistically called the "the third degree")(yeah, that's what they're talking about in those old movies) was used on uppity Blacks and unionists to coerce confessions of rape, murder, and terrorism, with forms of torture including the use of beatings, threats against friends and family, mock executions, and water torture.

Well no wonder teetotalers like Al Qaeda won't sign the Genever Conventions! But what about Al Quaeda, is he a teetotalitarian as well?