Terrorists Vs Dogs
The Goal of Torture is to Crush Individuals' Spirits until they are nothing more than shells of humans
When you read accounts of people who have been tortured, you find that it's not really about getting information. This is backed up by the latest CIA report, which reveals that torture techniques were outsourced in 2002 to two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, well-versed in studies of "learned helplessness," which most of us would recognize by a more familiar word, "despair." In addition to patriotism, the two may have also been motivated by the $81 million they were paid to help establish a premier program of torture. For utilitarians who believe that shoving food up the anuses of "foreign enemies" may be a good thing if it serves US interests, the report shows that the torture did not produce any significant "intelligence."
Terrorists Vs Dogs
The Goal of Torture is to Crush Individuals' Spirits until they are nothing more than shells of humans
When you read accounts of people who have been tortured, you find that it's not really about getting information. This is backed up by the latest CIA report, which reveals that torture techniques were outsourced in 2002 to two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, well-versed in studies of "learned helplessness," which most of us would recognize by a more familiar word, "despair." In addition to patriotism, the two deeply religious Mormons may also have been motivated by the $81 million they were paid to help establish a premier program of torture. For utilitarians who believe that shoving food up the anuses of "foreign enemies" may be a good thing if it serves US interests, the report shows that the torture did not produce any significant "intelligence."
Here is the Wikipedia explanation of "learned helplessness":
"In learned helplessness studies, an animal is repeatedly exposed to an aversive stimulus which it cannot escape. Eventually, the animal stops trying to avoid the stimulus and behaves as if it is helpless to change the situation. When opportunities to escape become available, learned helplessness means the animal does not take any action."
So, the goal of torture is not to gather information, but to utterly destroy the spirit of the prisoner. People who have been tortured in this way never recover. The techniques go far beyond subjecting people to unendurable pain (as most of us might imagine). The accounts of tortured prisoners I have read describe shells of people unrecognizable to their families years after their release. As you would expect, many were tortured mistakenly, and never had any valuable information or played any military role in their lands. (According to the Times, 26 of the people who were tortured were taken by mistake. Still, they usually endured torture from 3 to 6 months before being released. Obviously, many more prisoners were innocent of fomenting any armed resistance to the US or its allies.)
As the Wikipedia page explains, the technique for inducing "learned helplessness" was developed by torturing dogs that were subjected to increased electric shocks until they no longer even tried to avoid them. Since many Americans appear to value the lives of dogs over the lives of "terrorists," I hope that at least this aspect in the development of the system will outrage them. The tortured dogs "learned to be helpless and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression." The word "chronic," as used here, is medical jargon for "the dogs never recovered" from being subjected to prolonged, systematic shocks they could not avoid. By the way, the Wikipedia page never introduces any ethical consideration or objection. This was done, after all, to promote science so who are we to complain?
On a related issue, I believe that reducing livestock to merchandise and systematically torturing cows, pigs and chickens in order to produce greater profits (through what is known as factory farming) is inevitably related to treating humans in similar ways. Livestock make up the most vulnerable members of our societies. So do "terrorists," even though the intent of the label is to render such humans outside of society and unrecognizable as human beings.We must oppose our governments and our corporations, and determine to care about vulnerable animals and humans (even when we're taught that they're nothing more than "meat" or "terrorists"); we must oppose those who are dedicated to creating and perpetuating systems of torture and killing, and learn to recognize the justifications they use in an attempt to make such cruelty and violence acceptable through language such as "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Side Note:
"Contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a critical role in establishing the torture program in 2002. The two are identified in the report by the pseudonyms Swigert and Dunbar. A company they formed to contract their services to the CIA was worth more than $180m, and by the time of the contract’s 2009 cancellation, they had received $81m in payouts."
http://www.nytimes.com/...