Cheney’s torturers

Daniel Tencer at Raw Story offers a deconstruction of Cheney’s claims about CIA torture. Tencer spends considerable time debunking the former-Vice Presidents claim that the work of torture was done by professionals. It’s a stunning write-up and I recommend reading it in its entirety, but I’ll draw attention to x paragraphs:

“The procedures of the CIA program are designed to be safe,” Cheney told the conservative group. “They are in full compliance with the nation’s laws and treaty obligations. They’ve been carefully reviewed by the Department of Justice, and they are very carefully monitored. The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law. And the program has uncovered a wealth of information that has foiled attacks against the United States; information that has saved countless, innocent lives.”

Yet some of those “highly trained professionals” had little more than two weeks of training on the job.

“With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency’s arsenal,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

“It was a haphazard process, cobbled together in the months following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington by an agency that had never been in the interrogation business,” the AP report continued. “The result was a patchwork program in which rules kept shifting and the goals often were unclear.”

There appear to be two dominant images of torturers: they are sadists whose violence expresses their crooked urges or they are dispassionate professionals whose violence is instrumental, calculated to extract the most information at the cost to the victim of the least pain. Neither image is particularly helpful when it comes to explaining torture. The excesses of torture, it seems, are frequently called out of a torturer by the social-psychological context; this is an enduring lesson of Zimbardo’s prison experiment.

The image of torture as professionally conducted and well-regulated also appears to be wishful thinking. In Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali thoroughly refutes the possibility of the professional torturer, finding that torturers have yet to become scientific or professional. Human pain is difficult (and may be impossible) to increase incrimentally; victims bodies respond by responding less to violence; torturers respond to victims’ diminishing responses by intensifying their violence and haphazardly attacking victims’ bodies. In other words, regulations and the torture scripts written by civilian lawyers and officers break on the breaking body of torture victims. (Milgram’s lab is one of the few torture chambers where (the appearance of) pain was applied in an orderly, well-regulated fashion; yet to produce the indifferent torturer, Milgram had to physically separate the torturer from his or her victim.)

I guess Cheney’s not so falsfiable after all.