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 ...
Really. I'm going to cut back on milk and honey.
Thanks for posting this fascinating history. If the writer, though, is suggesting that this could invite tit for tat, he lost me. Terrorism is encouraged by weakness, not outrage.
The Ancients seem to have somehow missed the more serious forms of torture such as “Panties on Head” or “Loud Clap of Hands” or even the “Shout Loudly at You.” How could that be?
Hmmmmm ..... the NYT is trying to sell Papers ?
using change we can believe in ?
I read the NYT Headline . . . knew some details...but didn’t read the entire story...drew the wrong conclusion.
I imitated a BHO drone/voter.
But the Conclusion is Catepillars are NOT TORTURE. but DON”T TELL THE ENEMY or he will use it as information....(is that what the article said ?)
Now THAT kind of caterpillar would do some real damage!
Send the Gitmos to Washington DC... Just one look at Pelosi should get them talking. Then they can ban her for torture.
Gory GGG here
True, but folks at the New York Times live in "liberal land" where truth is only a function of "feelings"...
I read the entire article and still don’t know what the point is. Are insects scary? Yes, some of them.
I freak out over spiders, although I come into contact with them constantly (I am a gardener and love the outdoors). I just don’t think about them, even though I know they are nearby when I dig into the ground, etc.
As I type this I have a BIG raised spot on my arm where my brother pulled a tick off me a few days ago (left the head inserted, and I tried to tell him not to do that, to place a hot match head on it so it pulls its head out).
I certainly hate mosquitos (who wouldn’t).
But catepillars? Are these terrorists such pansies they are afraid of catepillars?
Like I said, I didn’t see the point of the article. Yes, we “tortured,” more like inconvienenced, some really evil terrorists. These people have tortured and killed a lot of people. I wouldn’t have any problem hurting evil people like this.
We’ll never win another war if we have to worry about hurting someone or their feelings. We are doomed, unable to defend ourselves.
Heck, even a dog will defend herself and her pups!!!
Wikipedia on scaphism, not quite what NYT says it is:
Scaphism, also known as the boats, was an ancient Persian method of execution designed to inflict torturous death. The name comes from the Greek word skaphe, meaning “scooped (or hollowed) out”.
The naked person was firmly fastened within a back-to-back pair of narrow rowing boats (or a hollowed-out tree trunk), with the head, hands, and feet protruding. The condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of developing severe diarrhea, and more honey would be rubbed on his body so as to attract insects to the exposed appendages. They would then be left to float on a stagnant pond or be exposed to the sun. The defenseless individual’s feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed and increasingly gangrenous flesh. The feeding would be repeated each day in some cases to prolong the torture, so that dehydration or starvation did not provide them with the release of death. Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock. Delirium would typically set in after a few days.
In other recorded versions, the insects did not eat the person; biting and stinging insects such as wasps, which were attracted by honey on the body, acted as the torture.
Death by scaphism was painful, humiliating, and protracted. Plutarch writes in his biography of Artaxerxes that Mithridates, sentenced to die in this manner for killing Cyrus the Younger, survived 17 days before dying.[1]
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From what I read, we allowed the suspect to see a caterpillar? or did we let the thing crawl on the suspect?
Unless it’s a hagmoth or a saddleback caterpillar I don’t see a problem.
The point of this article is beyond me.
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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