I listened with lots of quietly anxious attention to author Naomi Klein today on Democracy Now. She is a powerful speaker and I’m looking forward to reading her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism .
This is from today’s interview with Amy Goodman (and you can listen to the full interview at the first link above):

And we talk about torture so often in this country as being just about getting information. Torture is a tool of state terror. That is what torture is, and that is why it’s prohibited. It is about instilling — it’s a method of instilling terror in an individual, and it’s also a method of spreading terror throughout a whole society, saying we are willing to use these techniques; if you cross us, you will be subject to these techniques. So it is the science of terror. It is literally terrorism. You know, if you have somebody in your control, and your goal is to convince them that they are going to die, and as they gasp for breath their lungs are filled with water, what are you, if not a terrorist?