TORTURE

TORTURE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 19, 2009

“Americans have always been a people with marked genocidal proclivities: our systematic extermination of the Indian, the casual killing of American blacks during and after slavery, and our indifference to dropping an atomic bomb on a large civilian populace – we are, after all, the only people ever to have used such a weapon – reflect this attitude.”

Philip Slater, “The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point,” 1970,

“You can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners.”

Winston Churchill

“Would you rather do evil and be regarded as good, or do good but be regarded as evil?”

Plato

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made their minds up to be or do evil at all.”

Hannah Arendt, “Thinking” (1964)

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TORTURE AT THE MIND’S LIMIT

Our focus at the moment may be on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and interrogating techniques associated with torture in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but torture is quite indigenous to our society.

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a famous experiment at Stanford University, “Pathology of Imprisonment” (1972), in which he took a group of healthy young college men and randomly assigned half of them to act as prisoners, and the other half as guards in a makeshift jail in the basement of a university laboratory.

Within forty-eight hours each group was transformed with an extraordinary vicious cycle set in motion. The student guards degraded prisoners through verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, hours spent in stress positions, as well as repeating mindless physical and mental exercises. As the prisoners became increasingly dehumanized, the guards were found it increasingly easy to degrade them even further. They were no longer play-acting. They had become their sadistic roles.

Another researcher social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted a “Behavioral Study of Obedience” (1963) at Yale University. In this experiment, the subjects were forty males selected at random from newspaper advertisements. The subjects were paid $4.50 for their participation and told the payment was simply for coming to the laboratory. One naïve subject and victim (an accomplice of the experimenter) performed in each experiment. A pretext was devised that would justify the administration of electric shock by the naïve subject.

The subjects drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would be the teacher and who would be the learner in the experiment. The drawing was rigged so that the naïve subject was always the teacher and the accomplice always the learner. The two moved to an adjacent room where the learner was strapped into an “electric” chair apparatus.

The subject was told to administer a shock to the learner each time he gave a wrong response. Moreover, the subject was instructed to move the level higher on the shock generator each time the learner flashed the wrong answer. The teacher was advised to announce the increased voltage level before administering the shock. A series of prods were given the teacher or subject to ensure that he would constantly increase the voltage.

What were the results of the experiment?

The tension levels in the subjects grew extreme with the subjects sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, and digging their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment. Exceptional responses went the gambit from nervous laughter and smiling to uncontrollable seizures as they increased the voltage. One subject became so violently convulsive that it was necessary to halt the experiment. Still, only five out of the forty subjects refused to obey the experimenter’s command beyond the 300-volt level, four administered one further shock, two broke off at the 330-volt level, and one each at 345, 360, and 375 volts.

Milgram found the experiment not only confirmed obedience and conformity, but cruelty and destructiveness as well. The shocks like the screams of the actors were all fake who were pretending to be learners in the next room.

But the results were not bogus: 65 percent of subjects tested were willing to cause electric shocks they believed would cause unconsciousness in the learner, and possibly death. Milgram’s conclusion: “If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”

Who were the naïve participants in this experiment? Subjects ranged from one who had not finished elementary school, to those who had doctorates and other professional degrees. There were also postal clerks, high school teachers, salesmen, engineers and laborers.

Zimbardo’s research expanded the conclusions of Milgram’s study. Milgram’s experiments set out to explore how ordinary Germans became accomplices to mass murder. Zimbardo argues from the results of his study that we underestimate our vulnerability to the toxic effect of bad systems and other situational forces. He cautioned that we should be aware of our frailty realizing that any of us might collude in evil or equally oppose it. No one is intrinsically good or intrinsically evil, he adds, but vulnerable to either given the right circumstances.

THE MUNDANE CRUCIBLE OF TORTURE – A SURVIVOR’S STORY

Nearly forty years ago, a physician friend, who knew I was a writer, told me of a man who would be a good subject for a book. I interviewed this man for more than one hundred hours, but never wrote the book. The man’s name was Billy Yates, and I became very fond of him and subsequently a friend. He was six foot tall and weighed about 360, and was built like a fireplug with muscles to match.

Early in my acquaintance with Billy, he invited me to his home to meet his wife, Molly, who was older than he was, his daughter, and the couples’ four foster children. As I approached his house, I found him carrying a grand piano on his back into the house. If you can imagine that scene, it gave me a sense of his massive physical power.

Billy grew up in foster homes. His birth mother attempted to raise him to the age of five, and his little brother, three. She was a single parent and prostitute. On one occasion, she brought a customer home, and Billy and his brother were making too much noise, and the drunken customer went after the boys. Billy hid his brother in a closet and faced the man. It was a mistake. The man beat him to an inch of his life. He was taken to the hospital unconscious on life support. His little body suffered multiple fractures as well as a severe concussion. After more than a month in the hospital, he was returned to foster care through social services, while his little brother was adopted.

Often in foster care, he was not given enough to eat and grew so thin at one point that he was hospitalized suffering from malnutrition. As a consequence, he became somewhat obsessed with food once he was on his own, and grew to his enormous size. From five years on, he was passed from one foster family to another foster family, and eventually quit school after the sixth grade at the age of fourteen.

Once on his own, now fifteen, he got in with a gang that did petty crimes including breaking into warehouses and business offices and robbing the vending machines of their coin. The gang liked Billy because he was strong as an ox and could rip open the machines with his bear hands with the coins spilling out. Of course, he left his fingerprints, and so was eventually caught.

The judge said he was going to do Billy a favor – he was now eighteen – and send him to Raiford, the maximum-security prison in Florida.

I said to Billy, “Why did you get in with this gang?”

He answered, “They were the only ones who would accept me.”

One time when he was hitchhiking, he said, a minister and his wife picked him up and stopped at a motel. They both abused him. He was only sixteen. Thereafter he never trusted anyone in the adult world.

The horror stories he told about Raiford were as menacing as the stuff of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the interrogating techniques of prisoners held at Guantanamo. He was on a chain gang in the field while at Raiford, not working fast enough, and a guard came over and hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle. Billy picked the man up and threw him across the road, which resulted in a host of guards descending on and subduing him in his compromising state of being chained to other prisoners.

He ended up in the hospital infirmary, and from there was place in solitary confinement. “I was something of a bad ass, I guess,” he said, “but they had no right to treat me like an animal.” Even in solitary, he admitted, he got into trouble with the guards. He was not yet twenty.

One day a guard spit at him through the bars when Billy said something that angered him. Billy grabbed his shirt through the bars and cold cocked him, knocking the guard across the room, and unconscious.

For that he was chained to his bed, and hit with a fire hose until his body was covered with welts and bruises. “I ended up in the infirmary, again,” he said, and then confessed. “I guess I had a quick trigger when I was young.”

“Did you learn your lesson?”

“I guess not because I was hit with the fire hoses five or six more times.”

He said there were worse things that happened to other guys such as being confined to a room with the lights on all the time, day and night, deprived of sleep, chained to a chair naked with the temperature low enough to produce shivering, putting you on bread and water, filling the isolated room with noise that gritted on your nerves, or simply eliminating access to television, radio or mail, books or writing materials, or any association with other inmates.

“What disturbed me the most,” he said, “was to see people at Raiford that should have been in mental institutions. Why a judge would commit mentally ill people to such a place is beyond me. They needed treatment not punishment.”

“Guys like that who didn’t know no better were tied down naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication wasn’t working. For what? For as little as pissing their pants in the chow line. Hell, they even executed people like that who didn’t know whether they were coming or going.”

Billy did his time, married Molly, and led a reasonably productive life, and never returned to prison. One time, however, he got in a fight at a work, and his boss called the police. He threw police officers off him like confetti, but was eventually subdued by several officers, who kept hitting him with their nightsticks. For that altercation, he spent some time in jail.

“Did you end up in the hospital?”

He shook his head. “No, they were amateurs compared to prison guards.”

When I first met him, he was about thirty-years-old, very congenial and likable. He wanted to get into the military, but they would not have him. He did join the Masonic Lodge and took great pride in its membership. The camaraderie he found there he esteemed highly. He got into working with heavy equipment on road construction. It was in this period that we had the one hundred plus interviews.

The last time I saw Billy was when he was about forty-five, still working, still staying out of trouble, but having some medical problems. He had diabetes and eventually lost both his feet to the disease. Even so handicapped, he still was always glad to see me with a positive spin on current events, which he followed closely. In another life, he said, he would have loved to have been a police officer, and thought he would be a good one. He died of a heart attack not yet sixty in 1996. He loved his wife and children, and he loved America, a man who had three strikes against him before he ever got started.

ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO

I thought of Billy and Raiford and torture when I walked today, and about the American military personnel at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and their behavior in this context. I was not surprised at the abusive behavior of these young men and women, given my familiarity with the Zimbardo and Milgram studies.

I was surprised, however, at the inventiveness of the torture: sexual humiliation of a father with his son, pictures of naked Iraqi men forced to simulate sodomy, untold beatings and mock executions, kicks and electric shocks, the image of the wired-up hooded man teetering on a box, but above all, the clever even sophisticated array of practices whose goal was not simply physical pain but psychological degradation and terror. Susan Neiman notes in her book “Moral Clarity” (2008):

“The absence of shame in all these cases is critical, for shameless is not just a term of abuse. We have lost moral clarity.”

In a word, she is saying put people under indecent conditions, and most people will behave indecently.

Shamelessness isn’t new. The photos of torture at Abu Ghraib are similar to the postcards of lynching that were sold in the American South in the twentieth century. Shamelessness, or insensitivity to the abuse of fellow human beings points to a culture so debased as to be speeding towards its own ruin. If this episode has taught us anything, it is that society runs on its moral energy.

My wonder is how could low-ranking soldiers of little formal education be so diabolically creative. How could they know which forms of torture would cause the greatest cultural shock and pain to the prisoners? Imagine faking fellatio in a homophobic culture, or having a uniformed woman mock your naked genitals in a patriarchal way, or the use of trained dogs to terrify the prisoners who have a natural cultural fear of such animals.

The only conclusion I can make – which I cannot substantiate – is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his cohorts orchestrated this sophisticated torture by the use of intellectuals privy to the impact of such social psychological practices.

If good kids could turn sadistic, brutalizing guards under the best of conditions at Stanford, imagine what can happen to ordinary American kids thousands of miles from home, living and working in the hell called Abu Ghraib as prisoner guards.

Susan Neiman reports Zimbardo rejects the claim that the torture at Abu Ghraib was the work of a few bad apples. It was the barrel he insists that was rotten. Neiman goes further. She claims the torture dungeons at Abu Ghraib and the facilities at Guantanamo, and other military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq have been:

(1) Designed by the senior “architects” of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tenet;

(2) Justified by the lawyers who came up with the language and concepts that legalized torture in new ways and new means, citing Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, William Taft, and John Ashcroft;

(3) The foremen on the torture construction job were the military leaders of generals Miller, Sanchez, and Karpinski;

(4) The technicians or grunts in charge of carrying out the daily labor of coercive interrogation, abuse and torture were the soldiers in military intelligence, CIA operatives, civilian contractors, military interrogators, translators, medics, and military police, including Chip Frederick and his night shift buddies (“Moral Clarity,” p. 360)

Neiman points out the man sent to clean up operations after the scandal broke at Abu Ghraib was none other than the man in charge at Guantanamo.

THE NEED FOR DESENSITIZING TRAINING

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a military psychologist, set out to explain a puzzle in his book “On Killing” (1995), which bears on this discussion. Military studies show only 15 to 20 percent of soldiers in WWII actually fired their weapons in battle, even under conditions of the greatest danger. Grossman concluded that the psychic damage in wartime is primarily caused not by the fear of being killed, but the fear of becoming a killer.

The military noticed. So, starting with the Korean War, methods of desensitization or conditioning were introduced increasing the rate to 55 percent. Those methods were developed further increasing the rate in Vietnam to 95 percent. Grossman reports that in the second half of the twentieth century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.

Also noted, the farther you are from the person you kill, the easier it is to forget you are killing him. We know have flying unmanned robots in Afghanistan killing with immunity with someone back at headquarters manning a computer clicking a keyboard to release a missile. Grossman concludes: we are malleable with rather simple methods and common circumstances able to turn most of us into creatures who will torture and kill in obedience to our instructions.

WHAT ABOUT EVIL?

We have been a violent society since the Mayflower pilgrims. Violence is natural to us. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a Japanese observer is alleged to have said, “We have awaken a sleeping giant.” The attack, indeed, gave the nascent violence in the American spirit permission to be unleashed.

There are well-documented cases of the many criminal acts of the Nazis, but less so of the Japanese or the Soviet Union in World War Two. The atrocities of Joseph Stalin where as many as 100 million people perished are just now appearing. On the other hand, the rape of Nanking was the forgotten holocaust of that war by the Japanese, as was the Bataan Death March. In that 60-mile march in 1942 of some 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners only 54,000 made it alive.

Iris Chang wrote “The Rape of Nanking” (1997), and received the National Book Award for her work but, alas, only a young lady, she committed suicide. I’ve often wondered if the horrors of that research put her over the edge.

To the victors go the spoils while we never truly learn of the war crimes of our own society. We know of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo only superficially and incompletely, and even now, President Barak Obama is not releasing the pictures of Abu Ghraib, and so we will probably never know the full extent of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in that part of the world.

President Harry S. Truman is venerated today but he turned a blind’s eye towards mob murders of Negroes refusing to sign a bill into law outlawing lynching. Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson headed a group of religious leaders urging Truman to sign the anti-lynching bill, but he said the timing for a bill was politically inadvisable. Likewise, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was his decision. It was said to be necessary to save lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. The claim proved to be false, since the Japanese were willing to surrender, but thousands of people believed it was necessary, not because they were bloodthirsty or nihilistic, but because Japan needed to be punished for Pearl Harbor.

Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (1964) claims under the wrong circumstances most of us are capable of the wrong sort of actions.

These researchers cited here are not justifying torture or evil, but explaining it so that we understand how vulnerable we are to it. Milgram demonstrated how little is required to command obedience to orders that otherwise clash with our conscience, and Zimbardo demonstrated that evil as well as good is in our nascent temperament with the balance, unfortunately, somewhat a matter of circumstances.

Susan Neiman writes:

“If evil actions don’t require evil motives, good actions don’t require good ones. Forget humanity or dignity. Sheer self-interest should have driven the occupying forces to treat the Iraqi population especially well.”

She concludes:

“Evil, I have argued, should be applied not to persons, but to actions, and the application should be a reason to start thinking, not to stop. Knowing how easily we can be drawn into evil must lead us to look for ways to understand it.”

Torture is inhuman, immoral, and counterproductive. That said it has been practiced down through history, and no institution with more passion than the Roman Catholic Church with The Inquisition. It is hard to imagine today that a person practicing Judaism in twelfth century Spain had a choice to become Catholic or suffer the consequences; how someone could be charged with heresy and burned at the stake for challenging church authority, or for believing Jesus was man but not God. It is beyond the pale to understand why the Roman Church would have its own assassins to get rid of people considered a threat to the church. Yet, no institution has perfected torture more cruelly than has the church of that period, putting people on the rack and stretching their limbs until they repented or died is but one method commonly then practiced.

When torture as interrogative technique is justified on the basis of the Machiavelian principle that the ends justify the means, we have aborted our democratic principles. When torture is justified on the basis of national security, we have much in common with the Inquisition. The Roman Catholic Church of the twelfth and thirteen century would understand that rationale.

We want it both ways. We want protection from evil while supporting evil that we find protective. We don’t want to know how information is gained from imprisoned combatants, but we do want to feel more secure. Paranoia is a fool’s dance.

This was the theme of John Le Carre’s recent novel, “A Most Wanted Man” (2008). A half starved young Russian Muslim, the son of a criminal father, is tortured, imprisoned, then escapes and it chased like keystone cops by the British, German and American secret service, yet the man is innocent of any crime. The point of Le Carre’s novel is in these hysterical times torture is routinely considered a legitimate method of gaining information even when the subject has no such information to give.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who is also a Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote this a few years ago, “Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they’ll have quite a mess to clean up.” Indeed.

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