You know what torture is to me? Can I tell you what torture is to me? Torture to me is not all this waterboarding stuff. You know what torture is? Torture is trying to go to sleep every night with pictures in your head that your wife, your husband, your son, your daughter jumped from a top floor at the World Trade Center to his or her death rather than burn alive. That’s torture.
Torture to me is being a family member of somebody who died in 9/11, either in the Twin Towers, the field in Pennsylvania, or the Pentagon. It’s trying to go to bed every night thinking about what they experienced at that moment when the planes hit the towers. Torture, to me, is what you go through each and every day trying to go to sleep as you think about the last moments of the lives of your loved ones or family members on 9/11.
Torture is being a family member of an American beheaded on television by Al-Qaeda or ISIS or you name it — Islamic jihadists — and wondering what was going through their mind at that moment. Torture is then having that be the first thing on my mind when I wake up every day. That’s torture. And it’s every day. And it is every night. Torture is being the family member of a first responder on 9/11 as they gallantly, valiantly, courageously walked and ran into those Twin Towers looking for survivors, hoping to drag people out — and they never came out.
Torture every day is wondering what they went through.
I’ll tell you, there’s something else that’s torture to me, and that is knowing all of that, trying to go to sleep every night with those thoughts in my head — and then having to get up and listen to the news in this country: A CIA report, intelligence report from the Senate intel committee which blames Americans for this. I try to go to sleep every night and I can’t get the picture out of my head of my family member jumping out of those buildings or burning alive.
I get up and I get to listen to how we’re mistreating — by depriving them of sleep — the people who did it. Torture, to me, is the utter frustration involved in watching various elements of our government bend over backwards to be nice, to have empathy, to be respectful to the people who did this to people I loved or members of my family. That’s torture to me. What’s torture to me is to get up every day after having not been able to forget any of that and to listen to one American after another essentially find ways to blame the United States for what happened.
Source:http://www.thefederalistpapers.org