I'm glad you wrote about this piece, Mr. Benjamin, shining some much-needed light on a horrifying topic. That our government is even doing torture is such a nightmare, and needs to be ended.

And I can't help but wonder how a technique that's supposed to invoke a hallucinatory and psychotic state in the victims of it yields good intelligence. I mean, isn't that contradictory? Akin to breaking their teeth and claiming that they'll be willing to talk then, only they've got mouthsful of blood and you can't understand what they're saying, because of all of the swelling and pain.

No, this whole "let's use torture" fetish has to be stopped, and, even creepier, the supposed sanitizing of torture (aka, Torture Lite) really has to be stopped. Either you'll end up with sociopaths on the payroll willing to inflict the torture, and/or fascists eager to do it -- I can't imagine fully-functional, moral people doing this stuff to other people and not suffering their own moral anguish for performing it. This isn't what we should be doing as a country. Certainly not one that thinks it's the Good Guy(tm).

Any politician who advocates it should be willing to undergo the tortures they're authorizing (akin to the police programs where they get peppergassed in the face or tasered to feel the effects). Seriously, if "Torture Lite" isn't appropriate for the legislators (or chief executives) willing to authorize it, it's not appropriate for anybody.

Lately when torture turns up in movies, I flinch, thinking "Christ, this is us." (most recently, Pan's Labyrinth, which has a couple of torture scenes performed by the fascist Captain, who delivers a bone-chilling account of the process by which he'll break his victim).

But something has changed that allows the continued drift toward George Orwell's world.

One thing that I'll wager contributed to it was the permanent wartime mobilization that occurred from Truman onward. Once the Department of War was transformed into the Department of Defense in 1949, you had a change from a temporary thing -- wartime mobilization and conscripted military, to a permanent thing: national defense and professional armies. You had to figure the standing armies would keep standing, and when they weren't standing, they'd be deployed abroad in adventures entirely conducive to imperial hubris.

Yellow Dog's mentioning of the nonworking weapon systems fits that, too -- the business of permanent war doesn't really require functional weapons, only expensive ones; or at the very least, lots of weapons that require a lot of maintenance. The appearance of power means as much as the reality of it, in an empire.

What's bitterly ironic in it (along with the everyday actual soldiers wanting for supplies in a shooting war, versus the private contractors making money hand over fist) is that empires always seem to throw their money elsewhere while they bleed the homefront dry.

That's been slowly going on in the US since the Cold War, and with the terrorists as the new barbarians (or even the new Cold War being breathlessly invoked, a rival empire, Russia!), it'll continue; there's a lot of inertia to empires, and I think what we're feeling in the States is an acceleration of the decline. Iraq'll probably speed things up all the more. How long do we want to be there? 50 years?

Can you imagine the racket on BOTH sides of the aisle if somebody suggested we free up $500 billion of Pentagon money for domestic spending (say, national healthcare, shoring up Social Security, expanding parks, fixing schools, etc.), leaving "only" $100 billion for the Pentagon? Our own latter-day Praetorian Guard would probably stage a coup just to keep the money coming. Maybe someday "Support the Troops" will be pitted against "Support the Country" -- an empire tries to blur the line, until eventually the Army IS the empire.

I'm surprised Carthage and the Punic Wars weren't mentioned in the context of Rome's transition from republic to empire, like setting the stage through a singular crisis of epic proportions. Before those wars, Rome was a republic confined to Italy; afterward, it found itself in possession of lands abroad, and had to figure out what to do with them. The seeds of the Roman Empire were sown in Carthage's destruction.

And in terms of cultural trauma, Hannibal's invasion in the Second Punic War was the Romans' 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, combined -- their policy after those wars, and even their approach to war-making was forged in those wars. They didn't even have a real navy before the First Punic War, and Hannibal initially took the Romans to school in the art of war, and they learned the hard way how to make war for real -- that martial supremacy they gained an used to expand their empire came from that experience.

Anyway, you can only go so far with comparisons, but the constant that links the differences of time and culture is that they were human, and we're human. And people react similarly to crises and opportunities, even if the tools they use are different. That's why history's so important and still has lessons for people today.

Let's hope all they're doing is praying for another terrorist attack to throw the country into a political death spiral, versus actually working to ensure one happens.

Given how much they lie, I can imagine some right-wingdings launching a bogus terrorist attack, the blame being pinned on Islamists (Remember Oklahoma City, y'all? People immediately assumed it was Muslims, and that rush to judgment wasn't even encouraged, it just happened), and use that to fire up the nation for more War Without End. A Reichstag fire, 21st century style! Treason's only called that if you're caught doing it!