Initial response to Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain"

My first thoughts on the book are summed up in one word: wow.
I have never thought of torture as anything other than a tool of power exercised over others to assure/reaffirm that power. Scarry's book however, looks at the way that torture destroys the world of the tortured. To this effect she writes, "Torture is in its largest outlines the invariable and simultaneous occurance of three phenomena which, if isolated into separate and sequential steps, would occur in the following order. First, pain is inflicted on a person in ever-intensifying ways. Second, the pain, continually amplified within the person's body, is also amplified in the sense that it is objectified, made visible to those outside the person's body. Third, the objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power, a translation made possible by the obsessive mediation of agency" "The idea that the need for information is the motive for physical cruelty arises from the tone and form of the questioning rather from its content: the questions, no matter how contemptuously irrelevant their content, are announced, delivered, as though they motivated the cruelty, as if the answers to them were crucial" (28).

I'm only thirty pages into the book but I am wondering how she views/explains/explores the relationship is between the tortured and the torturer. More (obviously) on this later. peace!