How would you like to have that job?
I mean, as a job, it has to come with all kinds of perks.
World travel.
Learn new cuss words.
Torture folks who's political ideas differ from your's.
I guess they wouldn't have to differ.
You get the idea.
Lots of money, lots of power over others.
You literally have their lives in your hands.
I'd have probably jumped at the chance when I was young, luckily I was never put in a postition to have to decide.
AUGUST 13, 2020
Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione
by BRETT WILKINS
In the pre-dawn darkness of Monday, August 10, 1970, Dan Mitrione’s bullet-ridden body was discovered in the back seat of a stolen Buick convertible in a quiet residential neighborhood of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital.
He had just turned 50, and he had recently started a new dream job, although it was thousands of miles from his home in Richmond, Indiana.
Who was Dan Mitrione, and what work was he doing in Uruguay that led him to such an early and violent end?
As the Cold War heated up, one of the ways in which the United States government fought communism abroad was through foreign assistance programs.
These were favorite vehicles for Central Intelligence Agency and other US meddling.
Dan Mitrione, a Navy veteran and former small-town police chief from Indiana, joined one such agency, the International Cooperation Administration, in 1960.
The following year, ICA was absorbed by the United States Agency for International Development, which in addition to its stated mission of administering assistance to developing nations, gained global notoriety for its role in helping brutal dictatorships repress, torture and murder innocent men, women and children around the world.
One of the most notorious Brazilian torture devices during Mitrione’s tenure was known as the refrigerator, a small square box barely big enough to hold a hunched-up human being.
The “fridge” was equipped with a heating and cooling unit, speakers and strobe lights; its use drove many men mad.
Under Mitrione, Brazilian police devised a new torture technique they called the “Statue of Liberty,” in which hooded prisoners were forced to stand on a sharp-edged sardine tin and hold heavy objects above their heads until they began collapsing from exhaustion, at which point powerful electric shocks would force them upright.
Now doesn't that sound like a dream job?
(Only psychopaths need apply.)
You have seen that 'statue of liberty' thing on the nightly news, haven't you?
So, the job comes with some modicum of fame, too.
Dan was the anti-Gene.
Gene Sharp spent his life helping people to understand how to get from here to there, and Dan killed people slowly, and sometimes, accidentally.
I guess you will have to choose sides in this one, dear reader, the positions are diametrically opposed.
If you are willing to torture people, the last thing you would want would be for them to be free to riddle your body with bullets.
Lucky for us, if not Dan, there is still some freedom in the world, if you take it.
Don't be their best cop.
Do what you do.
