[dnautics]

I'm gonna be that guy and say that the concern about torture is orthogonal to authoritarianism. There were very much "less authoritarian/less centralized" eras in the US when it was general course of action was to do torturous things far worse than many of the things that got labelled 'torture' in the post 1990s era.

[nullhole]

My first reaction is that the step to torture was a step backwards, a disregard for what we've learned about the efficacy of torture in getting reliable information, and an embrace of sadistic revenge as an end in itself as state policy.

It's the state policy part that I find the worst. Individual acts of senseless violence you can blame on the individual; state acts that in retrospect are senseless violence you can - in some cases - blame on what was known at the time.

To purposefully do that when you now it's useless is a rare evil; to declare it's useful when you know it's useless is an Orwellian, totalitarian turn.

And it was torture, not 'labelled' 'torture'. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, high-volume constant music, others I'm glad I don't know about. It was torture.