What little research has been done shows that committing torturous acts on detainees substantially affects the torturers. Consequently, these torturers, many of whom are military personnel, do not receive the adequate support or resources to cope. This is an immense disservice considering the heavy psychological and physical burdens torture puts on the torturers. While supporters of torture believed that these techniques would yield useful information, most experts believe that coercive methods are more likely to produce information that the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop.
S law, are being violated or withheld, or will be violated or withheld if he fails to cooperate. Some techniques were salvaged from past sources. However, the original intention of the SERE techniques was to build stamina and tolerance to resist torture. This is in direct opposition in implementing these techniques in recent interrogations where the intention is to make detainees give information.
Torture is justified by altering the way people view the detainees. One view, theoretically divides people into two categories: human and inhuman.
In viewing detainees as inhuman it also establishes a detachment so the torturers can avoid acknowledging the pain, physical and mental, that detainees suffer. Recently, pictures of tortured prisoners from Abu Ghraib provide an extreme example of the result of viewing detainees as inhuman. Another theory explains how the torturer becomes deindividualised. There are generally two types of torturers. Some torturers at Guantanamo Bay and other U. However, their reasons to torture may not always result from a noble place.
Sometimes they choose to torture out of boredom from being isolated in detention facilities for too long, anger at detainees for terrorist actions, or competition for brutality. Once the work changes or ends, symptoms subside. After some time has passed after the work ends, a torturer may develop PTSD from their actions. Generally, PTSD is seen in returning soldiers. Often, these torturers self-medicate with alcohol or other substances, commit suicide, or have other co-occurring mental health issues.
Other difficulties in coping with PTSD from being a torturer are the reluctance to talk about their experiences. This includes going to psychotherapy or getting medication.
In other words, during states of empathy, people do not experience a merging of the self with the psychological state of another. We continue to experience a boundary between self and other. T his leaves us with the cognitive space for the rational evaluation of alternatives that are not possible when one is experiencing the actual stressor. No matter how great our capacity to identify with others, there are elements missing because we are not directly experiencing the sensory and motor components of a stressor.
We lack the capacity to fully feel our way into the state of another person who is being subjected to predator stress, and experiencing an extreme loss of control over his or her own bodily integrity. This space is known as the empathy gap. The empathy gap was explored in a brilliant set of experiments by Loran Nordgren at Northwestern University in Illinois and colleagues in on what constitutes torture.
The first experiment concerns the effects of solitary confinement. The researchers induced social pain — what individuals feel when they are excluded from participating in a social activity or when their capacity to engage in social affiliation is blunted by others. They used an online ball-toss game, ostensibly with two other players but in reality entirely preprogrammed.
Participants were enrolled in one of three conditions. In the no-pain condition, the ball was tossed to them on one-third of the occasions, corresponding to full engagement and full equality in the game. Control subjects did not play the game at all.
Then the researchers led everyone through a second study that was apparently unrelated to the first. Subjects were given a description of solitary confinement practices in US jails and asked to estimate the severity of pain that these practices induce.
Participants were a group of part-time MBA students, holding down full-time employment and required to attend classes from 6pm to 9pm. A group of this type offers a great advantage. Half the students were asked to judge the severity of sleep deprivation as a tool for interrogation at the start of the class.
The other half were asked to judge it at the end of the class, after their own fatigue was at a very high level. The researchers found that the fatigued group regarded sleep deprivation as a much more painful technique than the non-fatigued group did. In a third experiment, participants placed their non-dominant arm in iced water while completing a questionnaire regarding the severity of the pain and the ethics of using cold as a form of torture.
Control subjects put their arm in room-temperature water while they completed the questionnaire. A third group placed an arm in cold water for 10 minutes while completing an irrelevant task and then completed the questionnaire without having their arm in water.
In short, the researchers found the empathy gap. Exposure to cold 10 minutes before answering the questions left an empathy gap too, challenging the notion that people who have experienced the pain of interrogation in the past — for example, interrogators exposed to pain during training — are in a better position than others to assess the ethics of their tactics. In the final experiment, one group of subjects had to stand outdoors without a jacket for three minutes, at just above freezing point.
A second group put a hand in warm water, and a third in ice-cold water. Each group was then required to judge a vignette about cold punishment at a private school. The researchers found that the cold-weather and iced-water groups gave higher estimates of the pain and were much less likely to support cold manipulations as a form of punishment.
Those who talk about torture do not have the responsibility for conducting the torture itself. Judges will not leave the safe confines of their court to personally waterboard a captive. Politicians will not leave the safe confines of their legislative offices to keep a captive awake for days at a time. The Torture Memos, created to advise the CIA and the US president on so-called enhanced torture techniques, includes an extended discussion of waterboarding and shows just how vast the empathy gap can become.
The memos note that the waterboard produces the involuntary perception of drowning, and that the procedure may be repeated but is to be limited to 20 minutes in any one application. One can do all sorts of basic arithmetic to calculate how much water, at what flow rate, needs to be applied to the face of a person to induce the experience of drowning.
However, one point is not drawn out in the memos: that the detainee is being subjected to the sensation of drowning for 20 minutes. There is literature on the near-death experience of drowning, from which we know it happens quickly, that the person loses consciousness and then either dies or is rescued and recovered.
Here, no such relief is possible. A person is subjected for 20 minutes to an extended, reflexive near-death experience, one over which they have no control and in the course of which they are expected also to engage in the guided retrieval of specific items of information from their long-term memories. The position being adopted is entirely one of a third party focused on its own actions.
There is a deliberate confusion here of what the person who is imposing waterboarding feels with what the person being waterboarded actually feels. C an we chart this kind of confusion in the brain? In a study, John King at University College London and colleagues used a video game in which participants either shot a humanoid alien assailant, gave aid to a human in the form of a bandage, shot the wounded human, or gave aid to the attacking alien.
The game included a virtual, three-dimensional environment consisting of identical square rooms. Each room contained either a human casualty or the alien assailant. The participant had to pick up the tool at the door and use it appropriately.
This tool was either a bandage to give aid or a gun that could be shot at whomever was in the room. Participants rated the shooting of the human casualty as relatively disturbing but shooting the alien assailant as not disturbing. However, assisting the wounded human was seen as approximately as disturbing as shooting the alien assailant. The overall pattern of the data was surprising: the same neural circuit amygdala: medial prefrontal cortex was activated during context-appropriate behaviour, whether helping the wounded human or shooting the alien assailant.
This suggests that, for the brain at least, there is a common origin for the expression of appropriate behaviour, depending on the context.
This finding leads to a more subtle view than we might originally have suspected: that we have a system in the brain with the specific role of understanding the behavioural context within which we find ourselves and then behaving appropriately to that context. It is inevitable a relationship will develop over time between the interrogator and the person being interrogated. The question is the extent to which this relationship is desirable or undesirable.
It could be prevented by potentially using interrogators who have low empathic abilities or by constantly rotating interrogators, so that they do not build up a relationship with the person who is being interrogated.
The problem here, of course, is that this strategy misses what is vital about human interaction, namely, the enduring predisposition that humans have for affiliation to each other and our capacity to engage with others as human beings and to like them as individuals.
And this in turn will diminish the effectiveness of the interrogation. It will even make it easier for the person being interrogated to game the interviewer, for example, giving lots of differing stories and answers to the questions. In turn, this makes detecting reliable information much harder. And significantly, the most empathic interrogators are also the most vulnerable to terrible psychic damage after the fact.
A natural question is why this moral and psychic injury arises in soldiers who, after all, have the job of killing others. One response might be that the training, ethos and honour code of the solider is to kill those who might kill him.
By contrast, a deliberate assault upon the defenceless as occurs during torture violates everything that a soldier is ordinarily called upon to do. Egregious violations of such rules and expectations give rise to expressions of disgust, perhaps in this case, principally directed at the self. This might explain why, when torture is institutionalised, it becomes the possession of a self-regarding, self-supporting, self-perpetuating and self-selecting group, housed in secret ministries and secret police forces.
Under these conditions, social supports and rewards are available to buffer the extremes of behaviour that emerge, and the acts are perpetrated away from public view. When torture happens in a democracy, there is no secret society of fellow torturers from whom to draw succor, social support, and reward. Engaging in physical and emotional assaults upon the defenceless and eliciting worthless confessions and dubious intelligence is a degrading, humiliating, and pointless experience. Published by Harvard University Press.
Used by permission. All rights reserved. Human evolution. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do. Philip Ball. Cognition and intelligence.
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