Torture - A Bureaucratic Procedure

Torture is  commonplace amongst authoritarian governments but it has been mercifully rare in the Anglo Saxon world. Now we too are torturers.
Of course, individuals can be unspeakably cruel, but torture, like murder, is usually the prerogative of the State and quasi State organisations like the infamous Inquisition.
In England torture was dispensed with when Cromwell defeated the totalitarian Stuarts, a victory for liberty and the rule of law reinforced by the Glorious Revolution, separating us from the Continent where torture and Catholicism were the norm.
For three centuries we took pride in being free and in being civilised ( I know at times we did not live up to it). The English were not enslaved and militarised like the post-Revolutionary French or the Imperial Germans.
And the United States, for all its many faults, maintained the idea that the least government may be the best, that the law is a tool to defend the individual from the government, not a tool of government to conquer the people.
But with the decline of the autonomous family and the concentration of ownership in vast corporations and funds, the hierarchising and centralisation of economic power has led to the bureaucratisation of every day life. Justice has been replaced by population management, a simple function of human resource administration. Torture is the inevitable result of the callousness brought about by the habits of submission and sycophancy encouraged by life on the ladder of hierarchy.