6 ms·

How U.S. Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds

114 points by endswapper 10y ago

dandare 10y ago
The saddest part is that by torturing few the US triggered the torture of many many more. Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela and almost everybody else: why hold back when the US do it? When the good ones do it? Torture is mainstream, morally acceptable and maybe even efficient - why else would the western democracies do it? By torturing their foes the US damaged the whole world for decades, maybe centuries to come.
- ams6110 10y ago
  As even a casual review of history will reveal, torture is something that humans are prone to doing. It has always happened and probably always will. Other than giving up the moral high ground, I doubt what the US does or doesn't do in this regard has much impact on what despotic regimes do.
  - rdiddly 10y ago
    The idea isn't to reform the Despotic Regimes Club; the idea is to avoid JOINING the club. Or upon noticing you're in it, to leave it.
  - dandare 10y ago
    It's not black or white, many regimes (imagine Turkey) are more democratic than despotic and the question is not whether torture is the official government policy but rather whether a local policeman in remote village thinks it is an appropriate thing to do when investigating a mobile phone theft. 99% of torture happens in countries where it is officially illegal [my guess].
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Human norms evolve, they're not a fixed thing. Sometimes that evolution is a slow process, but change is nearly always a possibility. In the case of torture, have you noticed that torture is predominantly done by the police and military? Why do you think it is that torture is relatively rare in the general population but more common in the police and military?
Joyfield 10y ago
Disgusting.
kafkaesq 10y ago
And it isn't just the first-line victims who've been damaged -- it's all of us. Through either silent complicity -- or simply feeling too weak and impotent to resist. As Vaclav Havel said in his famous New Year's address to the nation, in early 1990: But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. ... We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  And then there's Mario Savio[1]: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    I didn't downvote your comment, but "unless you're free", that strikes me as too vague. What does that mean in practice? Is it just freedom from the old system?
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      In this case, I think "one genuine axis of control" would be a good place to start. Of course then you have to debate what constitutes genuine. But it's worth stating that we're not talking about "freedom to do whatever you want" which is the common straw response to declaring a moral right to freedom.
obmelvin 10y ago
I am absolutely shocked by this 'They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism suspects would be painful, shocking and far beyond what the country had ever accepted. But none of it, they concluded, would cause long lasting psychological harm.' How could one reasonably think that torture such as leaving someone suffocating at the bottom of a well would not leave lasting effects?
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  It's one of the signature features of the totalitarian apparatus -- cognitive dissonance. It's what enabled, for example, members of the Einsatzgruppen to believe that it was OK to shoot young children at the front of the ravines and pits, because they'd be "better off" without their mothers to raise them. Not exactly congruent to what the CIA's operatives have been doing. But still, there's that mechanism of the brain saying, "This isn't really hurting them, so it's OK if I participate in it."
readyToUff 10y ago
First off, I'll freely admin I only made it through about one page. I have two main thoughts on this subject. 1. I grew up with Catholicism. It isn't my moral system but it is a reference point. In the catholic moral equation there are two poles: God, and the devil. God is good, the devil is evil. What does the devil do? Torture. Torture is the lower bound of the moral equation, it is the worst thing you can do. 2. "We", I use the term we very loosely here, we support a system which tortures -- we pay taxes, accept the authority, defend the shores, etc, of an organization that tortures, and voluntarily associates with torturers. Given this, I've had a huge change in my political thinking over the last 5-10 years. We are bad guys. Maybe not the bad guys, but we are bad guys. It is wrong to assume reasonable people will support us. It is wrong to assume that reasonable people are our friends. It is wrong to assume that if people are educated, familiarized, empowered, etc. that they will support our continued existence. This has made me much more politically conservative in a lot of ways.
- psyc 10y ago
  In Christianity, the devil lies. God tortures.
- vacri 10y ago
  Don't fall into the trap of polarised good guys vs bad guys. It doesn't describe humans, and it is the kind of thinking that leads to accepting torture ("it's okay to do bad things to bad people").
cryoshon 10y ago
great, now the mouthpiece of the state department is finally coming out against torture, long after they cheerled for the entry into the war which provided a stage for such torture. bravo. the fact of the matter is that we're long overdue for prosecution of americans who supported, knew of, trained, or tortured others. obama cut them a free pass, which makes him complicit. heavyhanded sentences against the perpetrators (highest leadership included) will do much to rehabilitate america's ruined reputation. my prediction: moral cowardice among our government and citizens will continue because the effort of cleansing evil isn't understood to be worth the purity afterward.
ProudMexican 10y ago
Land of the free. Rectal feeding for national security, can't make that up.
rdiddly 10y ago
I suppose someone has to do the follow-on work, years later, reporting the actual consequences as they played out. Yet two things about this particular piece infuriate me: 1) Most of us probably could've foreseen, and did foresee, that there would be human consequences to this shitty evil program. Even those who didn't have a particularly vivid mental picture of that, could still tell it was a shitty evil program. So to have it reported as news now is like, "Wow, no shit?" 2) The ones doing the reporting in this case were complicit in supporting the Bush administration in these very efforts back then, so they're now deploring that in which they participated. When you do that, it is generally accompanied by an APOLOGY. Also see my very similar comment from 3 weeks ago on the Washington Post suddenly betraying Snowden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527065
louprado 10y ago
I originally thought that this article would be about the U.S. agents/tormenters and how it damages their mind. That torture would damage the mind of the tortured seemed too obvious. To digress, the idea that an American citizen could be ordered to act in deplorable manner is in itself deplorable. One would think that the most powerful, idealistic, and fortunate nation on earth wouldn't have to put its citizens in this situation and instead would take every opportunity be a global moral leader.
- iconjack 10y ago
  I thought the same. The claim in the first paragraph that experts "knew" torture would not cause long-lasting psychological harm is so absurd on the face of it, I lost interest in the article pretty fast.
rdtsc 10y ago
> Americans have long debated the legacy of post-Sept. 11 interrogation methods, It is depressing to live in a supposed civilized society where torture is a valid topic of debate. Often I don't, but here I agree with Slavoj Zizek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 He starts talking about Zero Dark Thirty movie, and then talks about how torture debate is normalized, and how there is something disturbing about that. He posits torture should be a topic like rape: nobody will take anyone seriously if they want to debate the benefits of rape. That person is automatically excluded from the conversation as a disgusting idiot. But here we are discussing and debating the benefits of torture. The hope is one day, torture will be the same, anyone who wants to even discuss its benefits is automatically a candidate for the looney bin.
- vacri 10y ago
  Not to mention that experts in the field of interrogation have openly stated that the 'ticking time bomb' situation simply never exists, and that's the one that's always used to defend torture.
sandworm101 10y ago
What scares me is how this program has so normalized torture. It's now talked of too casually in entertainment media (Archer). Waterboarding is even depicted in network pg-13 programing (Braindead. CBS). And don't get me started on how many series (recent Star Wars) depict torture not only as acceptable but effective. Star Wars is a good example as it has run for decades and we can see the evolving US attitude towards its use and depiction. I'm a little shocked that Disney hasn't dialed it down, but I guess it's what the kids want to see. This is something that damages people. It should not be taken lightly. The normalization of waterboarding by US SERE schools, where this all started, has produced countless PTSC cases in soldiers who never even saw a battlefield. Despite the reality of its use, torture should have no place in any training regime. You don't shoot a trainees so that they are "better prepared" for being shot. This is not something that can ever be done harmlessly.
gaius 10y ago
And yet, if one were to suggest on here not electing one of the main architects of this nightmare as POTUS, the cognitive dissonance would kick right back in...
LizardLarry 10y ago
U.S. Torture is the experience of living in a garbage dietary regime while exposed to a garbage stimuli regime and being stuffed full of garbage aesthetic and moral judgments that rationalize that the reason for your distress is your lack of ability to thrive in garbage. These people need to stop wasting our godamn time.

114 points by endswapper 10y ago

The saddest part is that by torturing few the US triggered the torture of many many more. Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela and almost everybody else: why hold back when the US do it? When the good ones do it? Torture is mainstream, morally acceptable and maybe even efficient - why else would the western democracies do it? By torturing their foes the US damaged the whole world for decades, maybe centuries to come.

ams6110 10y ago
As even a casual review of history will reveal, torture is something that humans are prone to doing. It has always happened and probably always will. Other than giving up the moral high ground, I doubt what the US does or doesn't do in this regard has much impact on what despotic regimes do.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  The idea isn't to reform the Despotic Regimes Club; the idea is to avoid JOINING the club. Or upon noticing you're in it, to leave it.
- dandare 10y ago
  It's not black or white, many regimes (imagine Turkey) are more democratic than despotic and the question is not whether torture is the official government policy but rather whether a local policeman in remote village thinks it is an appropriate thing to do when investigating a mobile phone theft. 99% of torture happens in countries where it is officially illegal [my guess].
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  Human norms evolve, they're not a fixed thing. Sometimes that evolution is a slow process, but change is nearly always a possibility. In the case of torture, have you noticed that torture is predominantly done by the police and military? Why do you think it is that torture is relatively rare in the general population but more common in the police and military?

Joyfield 10y ago

Disgusting.

kafkaesq 10y ago

And it isn't just the first-line victims who've been damaged -- it's all of us. Through either silent complicity -- or simply feeling too weak and impotent to resist. As Vaclav Havel said in his famous New Year's address to the nation, in early 1990: But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. ... We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

pmoriarty 10y ago
And then there's Mario Savio[1]: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  I didn't downvote your comment, but "unless you're free", that strikes me as too vague. What does that mean in practice? Is it just freedom from the old system?
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    In this case, I think "one genuine axis of control" would be a good place to start. Of course then you have to debate what constitutes genuine. But it's worth stating that we're not talking about "freedom to do whatever you want" which is the common straw response to declaring a moral right to freedom.

obmelvin 10y ago

I am absolutely shocked by this 'They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism suspects would be painful, shocking and far beyond what the country had ever accepted. But none of it, they concluded, would cause long lasting psychological harm.' How could one reasonably think that torture such as leaving someone suffocating at the bottom of a well would not leave lasting effects?

kafkaesq 10y ago
It's one of the signature features of the totalitarian apparatus -- cognitive dissonance. It's what enabled, for example, members of the Einsatzgruppen to believe that it was OK to shoot young children at the front of the ravines and pits, because they'd be "better off" without their mothers to raise them. Not exactly congruent to what the CIA's operatives have been doing. But still, there's that mechanism of the brain saying, "This isn't really hurting them, so it's OK if I participate in it."

readyToUff 10y ago

First off, I'll freely admin I only made it through about one page. I have two main thoughts on this subject. 1. I grew up with Catholicism. It isn't my moral system but it is a reference point. In the catholic moral equation there are two poles: God, and the devil. God is good, the devil is evil. What does the devil do? Torture. Torture is the lower bound of the moral equation, it is the worst thing you can do. 2. "We", I use the term we very loosely here, we support a system which tortures -- we pay taxes, accept the authority, defend the shores, etc, of an organization that tortures, and voluntarily associates with torturers. Given this, I've had a huge change in my political thinking over the last 5-10 years. We are bad guys. Maybe not the bad guys, but we are bad guys. It is wrong to assume reasonable people will support us. It is wrong to assume that reasonable people are our friends. It is wrong to assume that if people are educated, familiarized, empowered, etc. that they will support our continued existence. This has made me much more politically conservative in a lot of ways.

psyc 10y ago
In Christianity, the devil lies. God tortures.
vacri 10y ago
Don't fall into the trap of polarised good guys vs bad guys. It doesn't describe humans, and it is the kind of thinking that leads to accepting torture ("it's okay to do bad things to bad people").

cryoshon 10y ago

great, now the mouthpiece of the state department is finally coming out against torture, long after they cheerled for the entry into the war which provided a stage for such torture. bravo. the fact of the matter is that we're long overdue for prosecution of americans who supported, knew of, trained, or tortured others. obama cut them a free pass, which makes him complicit. heavyhanded sentences against the perpetrators (highest leadership included) will do much to rehabilitate america's ruined reputation. my prediction: moral cowardice among our government and citizens will continue because the effort of cleansing evil isn't understood to be worth the purity afterward.

ProudMexican 10y ago

Land of the free. Rectal feeding for national security, can't make that up.

rdiddly 10y ago

I suppose someone has to do the follow-on work, years later, reporting the actual consequences as they played out. Yet two things about this particular piece infuriate me: 1) Most of us probably could've foreseen, and did foresee, that there would be human consequences to this shitty evil program. Even those who didn't have a particularly vivid mental picture of that, could still tell it was a shitty evil program. So to have it reported as news now is like, "Wow, no shit?" 2) The ones doing the reporting in this case were complicit in supporting the Bush administration in these very efforts back then, so they're now deploring that in which they participated. When you do that, it is generally accompanied by an APOLOGY. Also see my very similar comment from 3 weeks ago on the Washington Post suddenly betraying Snowden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12527065

louprado 10y ago

I originally thought that this article would be about the U.S. agents/tormenters and how it damages their mind. That torture would damage the mind of the tortured seemed too obvious. To digress, the idea that an American citizen could be ordered to act in deplorable manner is in itself deplorable. One would think that the most powerful, idealistic, and fortunate nation on earth wouldn't have to put its citizens in this situation and instead would take every opportunity be a global moral leader.

iconjack 10y ago
I thought the same. The claim in the first paragraph that experts "knew" torture would not cause long-lasting psychological harm is so absurd on the face of it, I lost interest in the article pretty fast.

rdtsc 10y ago

> Americans have long debated the legacy of post-Sept. 11 interrogation methods, It is depressing to live in a supposed civilized society where torture is a valid topic of debate. Often I don't, but here I agree with Slavoj Zizek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0 He starts talking about Zero Dark Thirty movie, and then talks about how torture debate is normalized, and how there is something disturbing about that. He posits torture should be a topic like rape: nobody will take anyone seriously if they want to debate the benefits of rape. That person is automatically excluded from the conversation as a disgusting idiot. But here we are discussing and debating the benefits of torture. The hope is one day, torture will be the same, anyone who wants to even discuss its benefits is automatically a candidate for the looney bin.

vacri 10y ago
Not to mention that experts in the field of interrogation have openly stated that the 'ticking time bomb' situation simply never exists, and that's the one that's always used to defend torture.

sandworm101 10y ago

What scares me is how this program has so normalized torture. It's now talked of too casually in entertainment media (Archer). Waterboarding is even depicted in network pg-13 programing (Braindead. CBS). And don't get me started on how many series (recent Star Wars) depict torture not only as acceptable but effective. Star Wars is a good example as it has run for decades and we can see the evolving US attitude towards its use and depiction. I'm a little shocked that Disney hasn't dialed it down, but I guess it's what the kids want to see. This is something that damages people. It should not be taken lightly. The normalization of waterboarding by US SERE schools, where this all started, has produced countless PTSC cases in soldiers who never even saw a battlefield. Despite the reality of its use, torture should have no place in any training regime. You don't shoot a trainees so that they are "better prepared" for being shot. This is not something that can ever be done harmlessly.

gaius 10y ago

And yet, if one were to suggest on here not electing one of the main architects of this nightmare as POTUS, the cognitive dissonance would kick right back in...

LizardLarry 10y ago

U.S. Torture is the experience of living in a garbage dietary regime while exposed to a garbage stimuli regime and being stuffed full of garbage aesthetic and moral judgments that rationalize that the reason for your distress is your lack of ability to thrive in garbage. These people need to stop wasting our godamn time.