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That was a fascinating find!
I also wanted to suggest a book: Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. While I am not sure the second section of the book will interest you, the first has to. While published in 1987, it reveals a lot about what has driven our policies following 9/11. Most importantly, she connects torture with war. I think when we talk about our desire to be the biggest and the toughest and make others humble and submissive, we have to see the connection of our policies promoting torture with our war policies. We *know* that torture does not provide accurate or useful information. If anything, torture is most likely to provide inaccurate information that hurts our efforts, and yet we have this entire 24 culture promoting torture. We also have an administration that has clearly carried these policies out, and has fought for the right to continue to do so. Why? It is for exactly the same reason as with war, the need to humiliate an "enemy." The need to restore our strength following the attacks on 9/11.
