Poll: Yes or No---is Torturing Detainees EVER Justifiable?

Males are particularly socialized to cover over feelings of shame: the sense of being weak, powerless, helpless, impotent, or incompetent. Rather than experience these painful feelings, men usually go blank or get enraged. Hitler provides an example of the latter path. He experienced the defeat of Germany in 1918 as a humiliation, both for him personally and for Germany. His entire political career was built on the need to regain pride for himself and for his country, by transforming shame to rage and aggression (Scheff 1994, Chapter 5).

...My colleage, Mark Jurgensmeyer, told me "In doing my book on terrorism I was struck with how common (in his interviews with terrorists) the theme of humiliation was, and how the sense of loss of dignity, of selfhood was linked with violence. "A quest for pride," a leader of the Hamas movement called it."

Finally, the humiliation of Islam by the US is a frequent theme of Bin Laden. "So they come again to destroy what remains of (Iraq) and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors…For more than seven years the United States (has been) occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people… " Lewis 1998.

http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/20.html