Under no circumstances should soldiers take it on themselves to torture prisoners. End of Question. No discussion about what they did or the level of it’s wrongness “compared” to something someone else did.

Torture has it’s place, and it’s not something that needs to be done by government order. Some people would just benefit by being tortured slowly to death, and it should be done by the person they’ve wronged, and in hot blood. Put me in a position where someone does me harm, or does harm to someone I care about, and watch the fuck out. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying, I would not wait for a broken and liberalized justice system to allow my persecutor freedom while my injury remained unresolved.

I have no issue with a John Wayne Gacy being left to the not-so-tender mercies of the parents of his victims. Jeff Dahmer, either.

Alexander Dumas wrote “If a man had by unheard-of and excruciating tortures destroyed your father, your mother, your betrothed,–a being who, when torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes, in your breast,–do you think the reparation that society gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the guillotine between the base of the occiput and the trapezal muscles of the murderer, and allows him who has caused us years of moral sufferings to escape with a few moments of physical pain?”

The answer, of course, is no. Here’s hoping I never have any reason to test whether or not I would do as Edmond Dante’s did, and take dark vengeance on his opressors.