DOES TORTURE CAUSE PTSD?

What kind of ignorance and denial is required for supposedly intelligent people not to realize that they are killing a brain with anoxia and constant slamming a head into a plywood wall causing concussion, swelling, and brain damage? After a war, how many POWs would the USA want back who are arguably close to being brain dead?

A lot has been written about frequent concussions possibly being a precursor to Alzheimer's Disease. That might take a bit of time to develop but is the torture any less the culprit because the effect happens later? Violent personal assaults are a basic cause of PTSD. That Americans can defend the torture practices used in the GW Bush administration is shameful. Depriving a brain of oxygen 183 times, sometimes twice daily for periods, is certainly one way to kill brain cells. It is laughable that an attempt to justify this treatment as means of getting helpful information from the subject is even attempted by ex VP Cheney and others. They have clearly not spoken to neurologists or neuro-psychologists.

If reasonably informed people stopped to examine some of the arguments that were used, it would be clear that more sadism and cruelty was being used than meaningful interrogation techniques regardless of whether they were referred to as torture or enhanced interrogation techniques. Regardless of what you call killing a person's brain, it should be seen as slowly killing a person. While I commend President Obama's wish to close down Guantanamo, I wonder what will become of these damaged people? Are they not some mother's children? We still talk, justifiably, about the cruelty to humans during the Holocaust. Can we look at ourselves in the world's mirrors and see ourselves differently than Hitler's goons? So we didn't make lampshades from human skin...we have stolen mental and physical health, and likely made some prisoners the equivalent of human vegetables.

How is it that Americans can severely punish cruelty to animals and not be outraged at what was done to our 'terrorist' prisoners who never even had a trial to find them guilty? I am not a bleeding heart liberal and am not under the illusion that most of the detainees were really innocent as altar boys. To his shame, Pat Buchanan recently said on MSNBC that all criminals put to death in Texas while Bush was governor were guilty because they had been adjudicated so. Later evidence found this was not always the case and that some innocents were put to death. The future has yet to reveal the atrocities the USA committed with the torture program, but history will have the full picture because people will put the picture puzzle pieces of it together as a record of the Bush-Cheney dictatorship.