The Romans never used torture except on slaves, but then slaves were not regarded as men. Nor does it appear that a judge in the criminal court regards as a fellow human being a man whom they bring to him haggard, pale, defeated, eyes downcast, his beard long and dirty, covered with the vermin that gnawed at him in his cell. He gives himself the pleasure of applying the great and the little torture, in the presence of a doctor who takes his pulse, up to the point where he could be in danger of death, after which they start again; as they say, "It helps to pass an hour or two."
The grave magistrate has bought, for a certain amount of money, the right to carry out these experiments on his fellow-man, will tell his wife at dinner what happened that morning. The first time Madame was revolted; the second, she acquired a taste for it, for after all women are curious; and then the first thing she says to him when he comes home in his judicial robes is, "My little heart, haven't you had the question applied to anyone today?"
I feel like we are all turning into Madame Magistrate. Except that instead of judges, those asking that question are military psychologists.
As I mentioned in comments to Jeanne, who beat me to first mention of what's below, I feel like I should have seen this coming long ago.
The reports from U.S. detentions centers, from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantanamo, have from the beginning echoed the excesses inside U.S. military training bases - a drill sergeant near-lethally kicking a trainee at Fort Benning or Knox, the horrific 1993 battery and sexual humiliation of Air Force Academy cadet Elizabeth Saum, or the reports of cigarette burns to the genitalia of Marine trainees undergoing SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As someone familiar with these reports, I felt like an idiot when a SERE graduate, commenting on Juan Cole's site a few weeks back about abuse of the Koran, noticed how much the setup at Gitmo echoed what he experienced at Bragg.
Had I the resources and time, I'd have done what Jane Mayer has done, and chased down the actual, logistical connection between the two. In "The Experiment," in this week's New Yorker (not online yet), she confirms that the SERE training, used to help GI's resist what Joseph Lelyveld calls " coercive interrogation" should they be captured., is now being turned inside out -- with psychologists, as confirmed separately elsewhere, assisting interrogators:
According to the SERE affiliate and two other sources familiar with the program, after September 11th several psychologists versed in SERE techniques began advising interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Some of those psychologists essentially "tried to reverse-engineer " the SERE program, as the affiliate put it. "They took good knowledge and used it in a bad way," another of the sources said.
We've known some of the concrete signs of this before, of course - before Mayer and others made the explicit SERE connection:
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement that healthcare personnel had a duty to uphold the humane treatment of detainees.
The UN wants to investigate allegations of tortureBut he said medical professionals may have other roles at the prison camp. "Medical professionals trained in mental health disciplines could serve as behavioural science consultants in order to make assessments of the character, personality, social interactions, and other behavioural characteristics of interrogation subjects," he said. "They could also "advise authorized personnel performing lawful interrogations - not unlike civilian law enforcement practices here in the United States." But Mr Whitman said these specialists were assigned strictly for those purposes and not involved in direct patient care of detainees. "Behaviour science consultants may observe, but not conduct or direct, interrogations," he added.
Mayer interviews Dr. Darryl Matthews, brought in to address suicide attempts at Guantanamo who "has become a critic of conditions at the camp":
As psychiatrists, we know how to hurt people better than others. We can figure out what buttons to push. Like a surgeon with a scalpel, we have techniques and we know what the pressure points are.
Longer-term readers of this blog know why this is so unsurprising, and so dangerous. The use of careful, selectively inflicted trauma to enable military trainees to kill, to withstand warfare is a staple of all training from basic to AIT (and why I've been an advocate of trauma service for every single vet regardless of combat history --- a kind of deprogramming). Such training then intensified, using the experiences of actual political prisoners, to help them resist interrogation. When that body of knowledge is used <i>instead</i> to produce sophisticated levels of trauma and disorientation, in the hopes of producing (rather questionable) confessions, we've descended into a level of hell best described by Dante.
Or, perhaps, simply by Voltaire - from whom the first quote is, of course, drawn (his Philosophical Dictionary -- under "Torture").
Yes, I'm back at Voltaire.
As advertised, I've worked more on that revision (rather deliriously, addictively so, to be frank) than on the blog. I'm also in my last gasp of teaching for a while -- a perfectly delightful creative writing class (though it's the largest one I've ever taught) and that same humanities class I was teaching when I first started this blog. And you know what that means.
I have a new crop of students wrestling with Candide, this time in a summer class; they've listened attentively to, and had lots of comment about, accounts of the secret trials and torture of the men on whose behalf Voltaire campaigned, often beyond their deaths.
They've also giggled at Leonard Bernstein's take on the story (try it and see if you don't go home singing to yourself, "What a day! What a day for an auto-da-fe!") howled at the Simpsons-like caricatures on horrific events and Big Questions. It remains to be seen what they'll make of it all - or what we will.
Will we do as Voltaire eventually did, and become activists? Or will we be among the applauding crowds asking for more?
I''m out of time now, but I'll update this post with more links, and a few more Mayer excerpts, later tonight. Stay tuned.
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