Last Saturday morning, patrolman from Ozark Police Department found 16 year old Mace Hutchinson lying below an I-65 overpass screaming in pain. It was the kind of scene a cop dreads, a kid, possibly injured, lying prone in the street--there was no telling what kind of violence he might wreak.
The officers reacted according to their training; they commanded the potential juvie perp to stand. He responded with an act that in today's America--an America in which we are locked in a life and death battle with the forces of Islamunistofacism--is tantamount to treason. You see, young Mace did not comply with an order given my an authority figure.
So the officers tased him.
He did not comply.
Then, they tased him again.
He did not comply.
So they tased him again, and again, and again.
After the nineteenth tasing, the officers concluded that there may be a reason for his non-compliance. Perhaps, he had cleverly removed his nervous system, or worse yet, he was an improvised explosive device disguised to look like a teenager. One suspects they may have argued about whether to beat him with their batons or blow him up, but in the end, they sent him to a hospital to be treated for the broken spine he received after his fall from the overpass.
Now, it's the defeatists and bleeding hearts who are screaming. They don't understand that in today's war-time America, an act of non-compliance is an act of treason. Summary judgement and torture are not only allowed, but required when one fails to obey a command.
Maybe we should tase the complainers.
Elsewhere: A summary judgement and execution.
Posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot at 12:03 AM
[Bl.]Allowing law enforcement officials to wield tasers seems to have some drawbacks in a society that turns a blind eye to the most egregious practice of torture - supposedly in its' own 'defence'. Americans voted for this? Democracy is a wonderful thing I suppose.
Re:Torture Nation USA (fuck yeah)
« Reply #1 on: 2008-07-31 21:01:11 »
Quote:
[Bl.]Allowing law enforcement officials to wield tasers seems to have some drawbacks in a society that turns a blind eye to the most egregious practice of torture - supposedly in its' own 'defence'. Americans voted for this? Democracy is a wonderful thing I suppose.
[Fritz]I just immediately thought of this image; possibly a sad commentary on me, but hey punk ...."I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? Harry Callahan:Dirty Harry (1971)
Re:Torture Nation USA (fuck yeah)
« Reply #2 on: 2008-07-31 22:29:08 »
I've begun to wonder if there isn't something endemic to American cultural psychology to incline us towards torture. Or is it just a general human condition? Certainly we don't get reliable intelligence this way so why do we do it? Is it just some pugnacious will to dominate someone that we pander to it? To me it seems an admission of weakness more than anything. That yes, we are so completely bankrupt in every which way that giving in to sadistic whims now seems understandable, even noble. I never thought it so imaginable in my own society, and now its become almost ordinary, with too few conversations in between. How did we get here?
Re:Torture Nation USA (fuck yeah)
« Reply #3 on: 2008-07-31 23:35:35 »
Quote:
[MoEnzyme]<snip>How did we get here?
[Fritz]MoEnzyme I am currently poised at a level of disillusionment I hear echoed in your post; No intent on pomposity, Nietzsche just called it in so many ways
Source: The Dawn Author: Nietzsche A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does. —§236
<snip> I've begun to wonder if there isn't something endemic to American cultural psychology to incline us towards torture. Or is it just a general human condition?</snip>
[Blunderov] I think there are a few studies which show that ordinary people, of no matter what nationality, given the right circumstances, will perform acts that would normally be unthinkable to them.
In my view what has been so very egregious about the USA having fallen into this abyss is that American ideals were (supposedly) the high moral ground of the world; the torchbearers of the enlightenment. But now, by descending to the depravity of torture, America has set the example for every petty little sadist with a tin badge from Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison to Scotland Yard. I don't think that this genie will ever be stuffed back into it's bottle again. The USA has done a monstrous harm to the world.
The Psychology of Torture Past Incidents Show Abusers Think Ends Justify the Means By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A14
The U.S. troops who abused Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were most likely not pathological sadists but ordinary people who felt they were doing the dirty work needed to win the war, experts in the history and psychology of torture say.
Torturers usually believe they are carrying out the will of their societies -- and feel betrayed when the public professes outrage after the abuses come to light, said a range of historians, activists and psychologists. This mentality has played out in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, in the conflict in Northern Ireland, during the Holocaust and within the Chicago Police Department.
"When torture takes place, people believe they are on the high moral ground, that the nation is under threat and they are the front line protecting the nation, and people will be grateful for what they are doing," said John Conroy, author of "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People," which examined torture in several settings.
What happened at Abu Ghraib, Conroy and other experts said, probably grew out of a shift in American priorities after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the subordination of human rights to victory in the war against terrorism.
Large numbers of Americans have asserted since the attacks that the war against terrorism is a new kind of battle that must be fought with new methods, including coercive techniques. Significant portions of the public in opinion polls, military strategists, law experts, and even ethicists and the clergy have endorsed using torture to gain information that could avert terrorist attacks.
Experts have justified torture based on pragmatism, military history and theories of a just war. But coercive measures should be reserved for extreme cases, these experts say, not the situation at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi detainees were not terrorist leaders.
Human rights activists said such arguments stand on a slippery slope: Once captors are given license to torture, the abuse of large numbers of prisoners usually becomes standard operating procedure.
Post-9/11 Climate
"Since 9/11, the Defense Department has openly adopted stress and duress techniques," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "We have learned from the Army that there is a 72-point matrix of stress that the Pentagon has adopted to guide interrogators. It outlines different forms of coercion that can be applied. It includes everything from different amounts of sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation, to sensory overload, stripping, hooding, binding detainees in various positions -- essentially everything we have seen in these pictures short of the sexual humiliation."
The Bush administration has said U.S. forces do not use torture. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called the abusers "un-American" and asserted that the guards were acting on their own. But according to the military investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, guards said they were told to prepare Iraqis for interrogation, and military intelligence personnel commended the abusers for making detainees compliant.
One witness told a military investigation that interrogators had asked guards to "loosen this guy up for us." Another said the abuse was "to get these people to talk." A third said that male detainees "were made to wear female underwear, which I think was to somehow break them down."
While Americans have been shocked by the reports from Baghdad, one poll in October 2001 found that 45 percent of Americans were willing to use torture "if it were necessary to combat terrorism." Much of this support rested on hypothetical scenarios in which a terrorist had knowledge about an attack planned on the United States, and torture was seen as the only way to extract information that could save thousands of lives.
Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, a self-described pragmatist, said he believes the United States currently employs torture in some circumstances and will continue to do so. A public debate, he said, would ensure that top leaders, not servicemen and women, decide when it is appropriate.
"If someone asked me to draft the statute, I would say, 'Try buying them off, then use threats, then truth serum, and then if you came to a last recourse, nonlethal pain, a sterilized needle under the nail to produce excruciating pain,' " he said. "You would need a judge signing off on that. By making it open, we wouldn't be able to hide behind the hypocrisy."
Dershowitz said the judge might refuse to sign the order, creating a check that does not now exist.
Arthur Caplan, an ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rev. John P. Langan, a Jesuit priest and philosopher at Georgetown University, both said they believe torture can be used in some circumstances.
"I can imagine a few situations at the extreme where you might resort to torture," Caplan said. Langan said he began endorsing coercive techniques such as sleep deprivation and lengthy interrogations after the 1983 attack on U.S. Marines in Beirut, which killed 241 people.
Retired Marine Lt. Col. William Cowan, a commentator for Fox News, said in an article in the Atlantic Monthly that during the Vietnam War, he attached alligator clips to a prisoner's genitals and threatened him with electrocution. He said in an interview that torture produced valuable information.
"Three weeks after 9/11, if there had been another [attack] and we had found out Zacarias Moussaoui knew information that we did not get out of him, there would have been an absolute public outcry," he said. "There would have been rage; the government would have been blamed."
Torture should be used only with prisoners known to have crucial information, Cowan said. Depending on the situation, soldiers could use emotional or physical torture. In many cases, he said, fear alone would be sufficient. But for top al Qaeda suspects, such as Abu Zubaida, an al Qaeda leader arrested in Pakistan in 2002, Cowan recommended more.
"If it's Abu Zubaida, you start out being tough -- physical pain and emotional pain," he said. "You're putting him under physical duress outside the bounds of what the United Nations accepts."
Without public debate, he said, torture would still be used, even if top leaders never explicitly call for it. "The Pentagon wants success," Cowan said. "Rumsfeld wants to see numbers. There is a pressure to produce results."
Historical Context
It was a small group of military police who carried out the horrific abuses in a distant country. The torturers were not sadists, but perfectly normal people. The torturers believed their unpleasant work would save lives.
Those statements do not refer to the U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib. The first sentence describes a German battalion that methodically tortured and killed thousands of Jews during World War II. The second describes a Stanford University psychology experiment that carefully screened out abnormal people and found that normal people given extraordinary power quickly turn sadistic. The third describes torturers in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, British officers in Northern Ireland and some police officials in Chicago.
"At the bottom of this behavior is not out-group hate, it's in-group love," said Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College who studies group dynamics. "It's doing what you think is dirty work, but someone's got to do it for our side."
Blaming individual soldiers only took the system off the hook, said Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford psychology experiment: "In my study, we put good people into a bad barrel, they came out bad apples," he said.
Christopher Browning, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland," said that although there are obvious differences between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and during the Holocaust, there are similarities.
"Our government from the top has sent innumerable signals that placed combating the 'war on terror' above any concern for the Geneva convention," he said by e-mail, adding that "the chickens have come home to roost."
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were similar to abuses in many other conflicts, said Conroy, author of an examination of torture in the Israeli-Palestinian and Northern Ireland conflicts and in the Chicago Police Department.
After the Israeli government gave permission to use torture in "ticking bomb" scenarios, the technique became widely applied to large numbers of Palestinian prisoners. Conroy said that the problem is that investigators rarely know who has valuable information.
In Chicago's South Side, Conroy said, police used electric shocks to interrogate murder suspects from 1973 to 1991. As in the case of military torturers, he said, the torture was justified in the belief that it would save lives.
But even on its own terms, Conroy said, torture may cost more lives than it saves. After the British used torture against a dozen Irish Republican Army prisoners in 1971, Conroy said, the news caused widespread anger.
"People started walking through the doors of the IRA begging to join," he said. "In the year after the torture was exposed, the number of deaths rose by 268 percent."
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East.
He is a columnist in Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org; and the editor of Mental Health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
There is one place in which one's privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed - one's body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The torturer invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture.
In a way, the torture victim's own body is rendered his worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the sufferer to mutate, his identity to fragment, his ideals and principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the tormentor, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a treasonous, poisoned territory.
It fosters a humiliating dependency of the abused on the perpetrator. Bodily needs denied - sleep, toilet, food, water - are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct causes of his degradation and dehumanization. As he sees it, he is rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies around him but by his own flesh.
The concept of "body" can easily be extended to "family", or "home". Torture is often applied to kin and kith, compatriots, or colleagues. This intends to disrupt the continuity of "surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others", as the CIA put it in one of its manuals. A sense of cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both one's biological body and one's "social body", the victim's psyche is strained to the point of dissociation.
Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalytic treatment":
"As the gap between the 'I' and the 'me' deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The subject that, under torture, was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense of interiority, intimacy, and privacy. Time is experienced now, in the present only, and perspective - that which allows for a sense of relativity - is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams attack the mind and invade the body as if the protective skin that normally contains our thoughts, gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about, and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you, was lost."
Torture robs the victim of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation. The self ("I") is shattered. The tortured have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel alien - unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.
Torture splinters early childhood grandiose narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other - the inflicter of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation are reversed.
Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The torturer invades the victim's body, pervades his psyche, and possesses his mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the prey bonds with the predator. "Traumatic bonding", akin to the Stockholm syndrome, is about hope and the search for meaning in the brutal and indifferent and nightmarish universe of the torture cell.
The abuser becomes the black hole at the center of the victim's surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the sufferer's universal need for solace. The victim tries to "control" his tormentor by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to the monster's presumably dormant humanity and empathy.
This bonding is especially strong when the torturer and the tortured form a dyad and "collaborate" in the rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when the victim is coerced into selecting the torture implements and the types of torment to be inflicted, or to choose between two evils).
The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture in a seminar titled "The Psychology of Torture" (1989):
"Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture entails all the isolation and extreme solitude of privacy with none of the usual security embodied therein ... Torture entails at the same time all the self exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience. (The presence of an all powerful other with whom to merge, without the security of the other's benign intentions.)
A further obscenity of torture is the inversion it makes of intimate human relationships. The interrogation is a form of social encounter in which the normal rules of communicating, of relating, of intimacy are manipulated. Dependency needs are elicited by the interrogator, but not so they may be met as in close relationships, but to weaken and confuse. Independence that is offered in return for 'betrayal' is a lie. Silence is intentionally misinterpreted either as confirmation of information or as guilt for 'complicity'.
Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display of the fiction of power."
Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness - the victim regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, projective identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The victim constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization, hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic episodes.
Sometimes the victim comes to crave pain - very much as self-mutilators do - because it is a proof and a reminder of his individuated existence otherwise blurred by the incessant torture. Pain shields the sufferer from disintegration and capitulation. It preserves the veracity of his unthinkable and unspeakable experiences.
This dual process of the victim's alienation and addiction to anguish complements the perpetrator's view of his quarry as "inhuman", or "subhuman". The torturer assumes the position of the sole authority, the exclusive fount of meaning and interpretation, the source of both evil and good.
Torture is about reprogramming the victim to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the abuser. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. The abused also swallows whole and assimilates the torturer's negative view of him and often, as a result, is rendered suicidal, self-destructive, or self-defeating. Thus, torture has no cut-off date. The sounds, the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate long after the episode has ended - both in nightmares and in waking moments. The victim's ability to trust other people - i.e., to assume that their motives are at least rational, if not necessarily benign - has been irrevocably undermined. Social institutions are perceived as precariously poised on the verge of an ominous, Kafkaesque mutation. Nothing is either safe, or credible anymore.
Victims typically react by undulating between emotional numbing and increased arousal: insomnia, irritability, restlessness, and attention deficits. Recollections of the traumatic events intrude in the form of dreams, night terrors, flashbacks, and distressing associations.
The tortured develop compulsive rituals to fend off obsessive thoughts. Other psychological sequelae reported include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal, inability to maintain long-term relationships, or even mere intimacy, phobias, ideas of reference and superstitions, delusions, hallucinations, psychotic microepisodes, and emotional flatness.
Depression and anxiety are very common. These are forms and manifestations of self-directed aggression. The sufferer rages at his own victimhood and resulting multiple dysfunction. He feels shamed by his new disabilities and responsible, or even guilty, somehow, for his predicament and the dire consequences borne by his nearest and dearest. His sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled.
In a nutshell, torture victims suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their strong feelings of anxiety, guilt, and shame are also typical of victims of childhood abuse, domestic violence, and rape. They feel anxious because the perpetrator's behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable - or mechanically and inhumanly regular.
They feel guilty and disgraced because, to restore a semblance of order to their shattered world and a modicum of dominion over their chaotic life, they need to transform themselves into the cause of their own degradation and the accomplices of their tormentors.
The CIA, in its "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983" (reprinted in the April 1997 issue of Harper's Magazine), summed up the theory of coercion thus:
"The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations."
Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its victims feel helpless and powerless. This loss of control over one's life and body is manifested physically in impotence, attention deficits, and insomnia. This is often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture victims encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other "objective" proof of their ordeal. Language cannot communicate such an intensely private experience as pain.
Spitz makes the following observation:
"Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language... All our interior states of consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an object in the external world ... This affirms our capacity to move beyond the boundaries of our body into the external, sharable world. This is the space in which we interact and communicate with our environment. But when we explore the interior state of physical pain we find that there is no object 'out there' - no external, referential content. Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is. And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards. It draws us into the boundaries of our body."
Bystanders resent the tortured because they make them feel guilty and ashamed for having done nothing to prevent the atrocity. The victims threaten their sense of security and their much-needed belief in predictability, justice, and rule of law. The victims, on their part, do not believe that it is possible to effectively communicate to "outsiders" what they have been through. The torture chambers are "another galaxy". This is how Auschwitz was described by the author K. Zetnik in his testimony in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
Kenneth Pope in "Torture", a chapter he wrote for the "Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender", quotes Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman:
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."
But, more often, continued attempts to repress fearful memories result in psychosomatic illnesses (conversion). The victim wishes to forget the torture, to avoid re-experiencing the often life threatening abuse and to shield his human environment from the horrors. In conjunction with the victim's pervasive distrust, this is frequently interpreted as hypervigilance, or even paranoia. It seems that the victims can't win. Torture is forever.
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