Now when he was thus maimed in all his members, he commanded him being yet alive to be brought to the fire, and to be fried in the pan: and as the vapour of the pan was for a good space dispersed, they exhorted one another with the mother to die manfully, saying thus,
So when the first was dead after this number, they brought the second to make him a mocking stock: and when they had pulled off the skin of his head with the hair, they asked him, Wilt thou eat, before thou be punished throughout every member of thy body? II Maccabees 7:107
In wars throughout the 20th century captivity stripped soldiers of their physical and emotional freedom. Some of them survived, others perished, and many more were permanently altered by their experiences as prisoners of war. Secrets of War s9e1: Prisoners of War Part I: The Barbed Wire Front, History 1998
Many ignored these statutes and resorted to torture. ibid.
The Japanese did not follow the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention. ibid.
January 1991: In the desert outside Baghdad Western POWs were used as human shields to deter the bombing of an Iraqi military instillation. For centuries POWs have been used by warring nations to enhance their chances of victory. Secrets of War: Prisoners of War Part III: Code of Conduct
Back at home a conflict arose over how to deal with the POW issue: members of the US state department advocated using diplomatic measures to obtain the release of the POWs. ibid.
At the Geneva Conventions in 1929 and 1949 diplomats signed into law treaties stating that POWs must receive adequate food and medical care, and must be given opportunity to communicate with their families. ibid.
Americans incarcerated in North Vietnamese prisons were routinely subjected to torture. ibid.
Service men needed to be prepared to handle psychological manipulation; today instructors at the air force survival training school draw heavily from the lessons learned during the Korean War. ibid.
What made Guantanamo such a travesty – and what still makes it such – is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. Glenn Greenwald
The Americans began to turn to violence and torture to enforce their kind of freedom. Adam Curtis: The Trap III: We Will Force You to be Free, BBC 2007
They [US] called it enhanced interrogation, and they did it by waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times, by repeated smashing him against the wall, and locking him naked in a freezing box for weeks at a time. The CIA videotaped the interrogations but later destroyed the tapes. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBCiplayer 2021
The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul. John Calvin
3 suspected members of the 12 murdered so far, all of them by sadistic torture. Killing Eve s4e3: A Rainbow in Beige Boots, BBC 2022
Because, Lars, the artist formerly known as Johann, you have no choice. Someone is brutally torturing your peers and you’re next. Killing Eve s4e6, Carolyn
Kenya: ‘I presumed that we British were the good guys and we were trying to beat the bad guys. But then later I discovered that when we came to our own to struggle here, that wasn’t quite true.’ A Very British Way of Torture, man, Channel 4 2022
‘All of us were sucked into the vortex of violence where we really started to do indescribable things to each other.’ ibid.
‘The Mau Mau uprising is a freedom movement that takes place in Kenya in the 1950s.’ ibid. woman
‘But sides commit violent atrocities.’ ibid. man
For the first time, the release of documents a very much fuller account as to what had been done and why. ibid.
They are investigating how the British atrocities were institutionalised, and they were known from the top in London. ibid.