No problem with torture

[SHRED]

I was talking, at work, with a couple of coworkers who have no problem with the way we treated the Abu prisoners. Couldn't believe it. I tried to explain about how we should not set these kind of examples and that it endangers our troops but it was like talking to a wall.

Spooky.

[whistle]

1. Here is a read that may shed some light on the reactions from...

...your co-workers:

<clip>

The Psychology of Torture - By Sam Vaknin




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.

<much more>

<link> http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Vaknin21.html

[whistle]

3. Some more observations about what scholors have written....

...about torture and why it happens:

<snip>

Many perpetrate heinous acts out of a wish to conform. Torturing others is their way of demonstrating obsequious obeisance to authority, group affiliation, colleagueship, and adherence to the same ethical code of conduct and common values. They bask in the praise that is heaped on them by their superiors, fellow workers, associates, team mates, or collaborators. Their need to belong is so strong that it overpowers ethical, moral, or legal considerations.

Many offenders derive pleasure and satisfaction from sadistic acts of humiliation. To these, inflicting pain is fun. They lack empathy and so their victim's agonized reactions are merely cause for much hilarity.

Moreover, sadism is rooted in deviant sexuality. The torture inflicted by sadists is bound to involve perverted sex (rape, homosexual rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, fetishism, and other paraphilias). Aberrant sex, unlimited power, excruciating pain – these are the intoxicating ingredients of the sadistic variant of torture.

Still, torture rarely occurs where it does not have the sanction and blessing of the authorities, whether local or national. A permissive environment is sine qua non. The more abnormal the circumstances, the less normative the milieu, the further the scene of the crime is from public scrutiny – the more is egregious torture likely to occur. This is especially true in totalitarian societies where the use of physical force to discipline or eliminate dissent is an acceptable practice.

<link> http://samvak.tripod.com/torturepsychology.html

That last paragraph should clear up any questions as to whether or not these American guards committed these acts totally without authorities knowing about what was going on.

[whistle]

4. This topic has me really disturbed, here is another current...

...article that expresses the outrage that I am feeling from these torture stories coming out toward the Bush administration, the military and the cover-up by those at the top most involved. (Link is at the end)

After Abu Ghraib, psychologist asks: Is it our nature to torture?
By Philip G. Zimbardo

Torture, defined as the violation of the mind and body’s integrity by the systematic application of coercive force for political, religious or cultural objectives, may be sanctioned by the state or an agency as the means to achieve some ideological goal, such as fighting against enemies of national security.

It is often an intrinsic feature of extreme interrogation practices, as in Abu Ghraib prison. But torture is also utilized as a generic terror tactic to instill fear, vulnerability and humiliation in a population. Regardless of its ends, torture stigmatizes the victim, the torturer and its supporting agency.

I condemn all uses of torture, not only because of the suffering and moral degradation it causes, but also because it represents a corruption of the creative mind in the service of evil.

According to Amnesty International annual reports, torture and inhumane treatment of enemies of the state are widespread across many nations around the globe. Though authoritarian and totalitarian nations are more likely to engage in such practices, torture and other forms of state-supported violence have become tools of the trade, even in democratic nations in their war against subversives and terrorists who threaten national security. The United States supported and helped refine the technology of torture in many Latin and South American dictatorships whose anti-Communist stands meshed with our own.

However, the current exposé of systematic extreme interrogation, torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees by American Army Reserve military police in Abu Ghraib prison — and surely in most other of our military prisons — seems to be unique in our nation’s history: unique in revising legal support for the president to authorize these immoral practices; unique for the secretary of defense and a host of high military leaders to have sanctioned will-breaking of enemy noncombatants; unique in involving the CIA and civilian operatives directing untrained military police to engage in some of the most horrendous acts against humanity, the nation and the world has ever seen; and unique in involving both men and women functioning as fun-loving torturers for months on end.

My colleagues and I recently published findings from our interviews with Brazilian torturers and death squad executioners who spent years dispatching enemies of the fascist military junta that was controlling that nation and many others throughout the world. We wanted to discover what makes men into monsters capable of such acts of inhumanity. Did they need to rely on sadistic impulses and a history of sociopathic life experiences? Were these violence workers a breed apart from the rest of humanity, bad seeds that then produced bad flowers? Or was it conceivable that they could be programmed to carry out their deeds by means of some identifiable and replicable programs of induction into the corps of state-sanctioned violence workers? Could we identify and isolate a set of external situational variables that contributed to making torturers?

For the torturer, there is always a degree of personal relationship involved, essential for understanding what kind of torture to employ, what intensity of torture to dial up or down for a specific person at a specific time. With the wrong kind or too little, there may be no confession. With too much, the victim may die before confessing. Superiors and peers abundantly reward and praise those who select the “right” torture that yields the desired information.

During our study, we first learned that toturer recruits with sadistic tendencies are always screened out because their personal, sexual pleasure in the pain of victims interferes with the business of torture. Secondly, none of these torturers had any prior history of pathology. We discovered there were a series of social-psychological processes involved in the transformation from ordinary civil servants to torturers, lowering their threshold for committing atrocities. Advocacy and social rewards for violence were both the means and the message of the “learning curriculum” in this informal social-control setting. Group dynamics, camaraderie, secrecy, cohesion and feeling part of a chosen few in a macho culture were all important in empowering group support for a range of violent behaviors ordinarily condemned by society and their religion. The emergent norms of the special police units enabled formerly unimaginable behavior to become a daily practice of demeaning and destroying human beings.

A sense of urgency further contributes to actions without contemplation; victory depends on the speed with which security forces make captives confess vital information about enemy plans. Such a view obviously reinforced taking risks and making hasty judgments and justified errors of false arrests, torture and murder of innocent people.

Once torture is permitted to function in civil or military policing operations, extreme forms of abuse predictably follow and gain public censure only when they become notorious. In my analysis, blame for these deeds must go from the top down and must not be directed solely on those corrupted by the evil of a prison run amok suspended within a war based on lies and deceptions. We must always be on guard against taking the first step on torture’s slippery slope because even the best of us can be seduced into becoming perpetrators of evil under the wrong circumstances, and the descent into hell is swift.


Philip G. Zimbardo is an emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University and co-researcher of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a demonstration of the power social situations have to distort personal identities, values and morality, in which students played the roles of prisoners and guards.

From Science and Technology News, July/August 2004

<link> http://www.stnews.org/edit_after_abu_0704.html

[reorg]

2. happy American couple

enjoying the wee hours after a long night's hard work: