Thruston Ballard Morton Quotes
… the most uncouth … mental torture
Thruston Ballard Morton, 1907-1982, U. S. Congressman & U. S. Senator (Republican, KY), Chairman, Republican National Committee, Description of the TV Advertisements of the Democratic Party, 1964
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On a tour of America, Dickens visited Eastern State Penitentiary, a Pennsylvania prison opened in 1829 which was supposedly a “modern” reform in law enforcement. Rather than work gangs or mandatory factory work and filthy living conditions, this was the first “penitentiary” in America. The guilty convicts would be in a small clean but bare cell for all but 1 hour or less a day, and the only thing in the cell other than soap and a toothbrush was a Bible. The convict was supposed to spend his entire sentence reading the Bible and being penitent for his crimes. It destroyed most inmates mentally until the Supreme Court ruled in 1890 that total solitary confinement was unconstitutional.
At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.
Neilson had flown in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It was the first bombing of Tokyo in WWII. He was shot down and captured. He was tortured including the torture of ‘waterboarding.’ The Japanese who administered the torture and who allowed it were tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—the Tokyo War Crime Trials. They were convicted and punished. In the first decade of the 21st century the George W, Bush Administration argued that waterboarding was not necessarily torture despite the fact that Americans had tried and punished foreigners who engaged in the practice and even Americans who did. It was completely outlawed by military regulations but some Americans felt that it should be allowed by the CIA in dealing with terrorists.
Thruston Ballard Morton, was an American politician. A Republican, Morton represented Kentucky in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
