This is why I think that fighting torture is the second most important global task (after fighting climate change). All of you - all of us - who experienced unbearable pain, now imagine your pain but ten times worse, inflicted deliberately, on hours and days, over months and years, in combination with multiple other tortures, under sleep deprivation, in a state of learned helplessness.

As you read these lines, people are hanging from ceiling by hands handcuffed behind their back, being beaten all over the body until they lose consciousness, woken up and beaten over and over.

We have learned to ignore what is routinely happening in countries like SA, Egypt, NK, Turkey, China and many, many others. We use the newspeak "human rights abuse" to soften the sound of it, to avoid the emotional disturbance that comes with imagining the profesional, large scale, indiscriminate torture programs in countries that are our military allies and trade partners.