Posted on 04/19/2009 7:43:42 PM PDT by forkinsocket
INSECTS have been conscripted as weapons of war, tools of terrorism and instruments of torture for thousands of years. So should we be surprised by the news that the C.I.A. considered using these creatures to instill fear in Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist suspect? Yes, and here’s why.
The earliest hypothesized uses of insects in human conflicts involved bees and wasps. During the Upper Paleolithic period, nests of stinging insects — evidently contained within baskets or pottery — were heaved into rocky caves or thorny stockades to drive an enemy into the open. Employing insects to destroy crops or transmit disease would not develop until modern times (unless we include Yahweh’s assaults on Pharaoh in Exodus). However, entomological torture continued to play a role throughout history.
The ancient Persians developed a gruesome practice called scaphism, which involved force-feeding a person milk and honey, lashing him to a boat or hollow tree trunk, and then allowing flies to infest the victim’s anus and increasingly gangrenous flesh. Siberian tribes simply tied a naked prisoner to a tree and allowed mosquitoes and other biting flies to deliver as many as 9,000 bites per minute — a rate sufficient to drain a person’s blood by half in about two hours. And the stories of Apaches staking captives on anthills to ensure lingering and painful deaths are not merely the stuff of Hollywood westerns.
The epitome of insectan torture was developed by a 19th-century emir of Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan. He threw political enemies into a bug pit, a deep hole covered with an iron grille and stocked with sheep ticks and assassin bugs.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Eric Carle! Aaaaagh! I’ll talk! Please take it away!
The gold is under my great grandfathers stone in the family plot!
That's not much of an argument when our enemy's main strategy is psychological torture, ie terrorism, as opposed to our use of various forms of discomfort, that cause no permanent injury or scarring, for the purpose of gaining life saving intelligence.
Personally I think we should use those South American bullet ants instead of caterpillars. Even those don't cause permanent injury.
Well,I have never been exposed to a BAD catepillar, just green wiggly ones that are harmless.
I did, however, have a scorpion crawl across my face one night when I was about 13 years old. My parents owned a bait shop/souvenier store outside a wildlife refuge with some great fishing opportunities.
It was a holiday weekend and parents kept the store open all night. We kids slept on cots in the back room (the cold beer storage was half underground, and we lived in SW Oklahoma, a place full of boulders, looked like a place in Idaho.
There was a light on, and I felt something crawling (tickling) my face in the middle of the night. I brushed it off my face, then sat up and saw a scorpion crawling on my bed, striking the bed with its hook. Had I smashed it with my hand, it would have hit me on the face.
These were big brown scorpions, and made one really sick when they hit you.
One of MANY bug stories. I had a brown recluse spider jump at me once when I pulled a dead plant from some mulch. It was a very aggressive spider, and I knew what it was.
A caterpillar is mild in my world. They make butterflies. I wouldn’t hurt one, but I think a frigging terrorist deserves some hurt.
We are thicker than fleas (spiders), so it would be hard to find us all.
“We are thicker than fleas (spiders), so it would be hard to find us all.”
I meant those identified by the new administration as such, the people who own guns, grow their own food, attend tea parties, are not happy with our change and hope (apologetic) new world leader, and think we need to stand up and defend our country.
Well, if we take that premise at face value and acknowledge the deterrence effect of worrying about what the other guy will do, THEY ARE ALREADY TORTURING US! BY THIS LOGIC, WE ARE DUTY BOUND TO TORTURE BACK lest they feel free to continue to torture with total impunity.
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Hmm, not a bad idea. Insect torture down through the ages... |
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I don’t know for how long one could scare a captive with a scary looking caterpillar until the ruse gets stale. Maybe for like a few days or a week. Most superstitious - North Africans, although they don’t so much burn witches as they are very preoccupied with evil eyes & magic spells. Least superstitious - Levant Arabs. Palis, Lebanese, Syrias. The average one doesn’t take it that much further than reading coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup.
Most of the gullibility revolves around conspiracy theories, worrying about freemasons & secret societies, obsessesion with gossip & rumor. I think that affects not only all Arabs, but all of the Middle East. Armenians have impressed me as some of the most fixated on conspiracy theories.
Thanks for the information......but reading coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup? They must have had some contact with the Rom in their travels.
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