There are not a great number of people who have experienced torture and even a smaller number who have ever acknowledged it. From the extremes there are John McCain to Dr. Zawahiri, and in the middle are American Soldiers who experience the things Patton spoke of and forever are changed having nothing to ever prove again as they have been to the brier patch.
In all cases though, the respondent, as I detest words like "victim" as a victim is pure space taking refuse upon the planet in a victim never fights back on any level and allows the situation to happen, but the majority of respondents have no training nor ability in dealing with torture or confinement.
The games being played in intelligence training or inhaling tear gas in Marine training is not the realm of the preparation of any of this as there is no amount of training which can create the foundation for the human mind to deal with torture on full scale measure.
"Resistance is futile" seems to be a Terminator phrase, but resistance is completely futile, for how does one "resist" in being thousands of miles from home, locked in a bunker, bound with restraints until your joints are torn loose, suspended from the ceiling and beaten as a softening up treatment for days before the real questioning begins?
Fatigue, trauma, and the sheer desire for human companionship to attaching to your tormenters are all the seance of the respondent getting in touch with things spiritual, their nerves strained to be replaced from pain to a electrifying numbness.
The vista of this is one must face a repose of understanding to focus upon which can not be touched nor taken from the respondent. One chooses to have a God and an eternal future out of this world or one chooses incorrectly to enter the black abyss of nothing after life ends, as their resort to escape which can not be touched.
The fractional minority will find that the human personalty or psyche has one last self defense mechanism, and that is the division of personality.
Paranoid Schizophrenia is the psychological diagnosis, but in controlled measure, it is an amazing attribute which societies have self preserved from molestation, rape, battery in that thousand yard stare which the human soul preserves itself while the body is consumed.
The ability to remain sane in seperating from the body, and the person you thought you were defined is, in extreme situations is a life preserving measure, or at least a measure to watch euphorially as your body is inflicted upon, you feel it urninate, cry, vomit and deficate, while this "other person" is assaulted in the movie before your eyes.
Relative odds are the Grace of God, in state torturers, that one has a fifty fifty destiny in the inflictors will pile you into a corner to allow rats to chew on you for years as they forget about you or some enthusiastic psychotic will blow your brains out with a 7.62 at four inches, whereby you will piss on him with your brain blood forever leaving your mark on his territory.
Let them break the body, let them break the person, but watch it all from a place they can not touch as your association with this world is no more from patriotism, family, honor and persona..........if they can not interact with the subject they can not play with the individual.
It is a matter of will encased in a small psychic sphere which can not be touched. Some fortunate individuals enjoy pain and the transition is not that difficult, but pain does lose it's velocity of shock in short order in the human body, and one can derive pleasure from this too in "they can not hurt you" as you are already experienced in having your joints broken.
Even in that, the natural secret of the sadist is their ability to appreciate the spike in "pain" while dissociating the the encompassing "pain" which avails the body, but even in that the body is quite generous in self protection in it will vomit, deficate, urinate and cry to shed the "pain" and those natural responses allow the person to "feel better".
Torture only has potentional when the respondent is not experienced and when the torturer plies new methods, but even in those methods, from electricity, chemicals or physical infliction, it is all geared toward nerve endings. The physical once experienced is overcome, and once the psyche realizes that "it is happening to someone else" then the mind can not be overcome, because torture is about taking things from the respondent.
When the respondent takes away the foundation of the torture in life, liberty and the lies one tells oneself of their superiority in this world, then torture becomes an exercise of futility in which watching some demented soul wet with sweat from beating on you, becomes an amusing comedy in your obtaining the upper hand.
There are difficulties in all of this in John McCain in his broken body reveals even in his personality in new forms, that surviving one is not the same, and the fractured personality is something which only one can put back together with will as no outside source is capable of this.
Those though are the extremes. The moral altering unextremes of immorality inflicted in conditioning is another progressive captivity of a generation in which broken homes are the teaching mechanism to create sociopaths in a mass society.
The frontiers are vistas great and small............
agtG
