How U.S. Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds | Hacker News Reader

How U.S. Torture Left Legacy of Damaged Minds

nytimes.com

114 pointsendswapper32 comments

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.

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

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?

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.

So freedom in the sense of free to choose whose set of rules to live by?

You speak as if the damage is past-tense. It's still being done! The U.S. may have ended the policy of openly torturing people, but they're still proudly assassinating people in foreign countries with drones. This is a practice that's really going to bite the U.S. in the ass one day. Sooner or later, some other nation or terrorist group is going to start killing people they don't like on U.S. soil with drones, and the U.S. will have no moral high ground from which to complain!

> The U.S. may have ended the policy of openly torturing people, but they're still proudly assassinating people in foreign countries with drones.

That's a bit different. Arguably, that's taking place in a state of war. Also, what makes you think our complaining actually requires moral high ground? Complaints are made from a high ground made of power, not morality.

Drone strikes are taking place in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, where there is no official war with the U.S.. Their success rate is terrible[1]. They miss their intended target most of the time[2]. Thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, have been killed[3].

I'm not sure what you meant by saying complaints are made from a high ground of power. Plenty of powerless people in Yemen and Pakistan have complained are are complaining. Perhaps you meant that complaints are actually listened to and addressed when made from a position of power? This is true. However, sometimes complaints can be made from a position of weakness and be listened to when made from a moral high ground and massively supported by the public. e.g. Gandhi's passive resistance movement.

My entire point is that, when other actors are able to strike targets on U.S. soil with drones, power is the only thing that the U.S. will have to stop them, and it might not be adequate. Drones are going to be very difficult to control in a few years. The U.S. has opened a Pandora's box by using them in such fashion. Heck, the U.S. government has behaved so outrageously over the last decade that U.S. citizens are likely to blame their own government when drone strikes happen on U.S. soil!

[1]http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/15/90-of-people...

[2]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-obam...

[3]https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/dron...

> Heck, the U.S. government has behaved so outrageously over the last decade that U.S. citizens are likely to blame their own government when drone strikes happen on U.S. soil!

Nah. We respect Hanlon's Dodge. Our government is a tool of the shadow government. It's a dirty mark on Americans just like the Jihad is a dirty mark on Muslims. Balkanize all the things!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...

"The U.S. may have ended the policy of openly torturing people"

It's not even an open secret that when you go to jail in the US, you are likely to get raped, seriously injured, or perhaps even killed. Prisoners in ordinary American prisons are routinely thrown in to solitary confinement, denied medical care, and treated in many other horrifying ways that amount to torture.

So the torture still goes on, and pretty much in the open.

That most people don't think of American prison as having systematized torture -- or, worse, that the prisoners deserve it because they're guilty (despite ample evidence that innocent people are sent to prison all the time, and many are in for victimless crimes, and that no one deserves torture no matter how guilty they are) speaks volumes.

Then there are the CIA (and who knows which other of the dozens of secret agencies the US government has, or some military ones) that still probably torture people just as much or even more in secret. They're just a bit more publicity-shy about it now -- at least until the next major terrorist attack or war, when they'll be happy to shed the velvet glove to once again show the iron fist.

And then there's what the media refers to as "police brutality", which is also just another Orwellian term for torture. And it's pretty routine if you happen to have the wrong color of skin and/or be of the wrong socioeconomic status, be in the wrong neighborhood, and/or don't kiss up to the police.

Again, it's widely acknowledge this happens, but somehow people can still claim that the US doesn't systematically torture people, or only happens in extraordinary circumstances like during the War on Terror, at some far away "black sites". But it clearly does, routinely, inside the US -- and this is yet another sorry, terrifying, and despicable example of it.

There's a very good book called Torture and Democracy, in which the author goes into some detail (with a great deal of support; the book has a stellar bibliography) as to the organizational, cultural, and broader social impacts of torture as a state policy. I think he also helps to contextualize this recent scandal with the reality that torture has been endemic in the US for over a century and a half, in policing and corrections alone.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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].

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?

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?

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

In Christianity, the devil lies. God tortures.

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").

Disgusting.

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