Torture and Christians III: The commonalities between torture and sexual assault (and how the CIA practiced both)

TW:  Explicit descriptions of torture and rape, medical rape, torture apologism, violence against women, violence against men

This is part three of a four-part series. 
Part One
Part Two
Part Four
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“Let me begin by saying that God and international law share at least one thing in common. Sometimes it is difficult to find either of them when you need them most. When the Police Man, the first of the torturers to rape me, had finished his grisly work, he whispered in my ear, "Your God is dead." At the time, this seemed a reasonable conclusion. He made no mention of international law, because whatever that was, it was certainly irrelevant to my situation… I lived in a world created by my torturers. They had told me, as so many other tortured persons have been told, "Even if you survive what we have done to you and tell the world, no one will believe you. No one will care." That is the world I lived in: No one cared. No law, no God, no justice, no peace, no hope.   In one way, it is a world I continue to live in. I do so not by choice but because of the truth that once tortured, always tortured.”

- Sr. Dianna Ortiz[1]

“We can never let the world know what I have done to you."

–CIA Interrogators to detainees (Senate report, p. 11/pdf)

In my last post, I wrote about the role torture plays in creating a reality.  Regardless of its efficacy in obtaining real and valuable information—which is by no means a foregone conclusion—torture is meant to allow one to feel secure in the knowledge that the state is willing to do whatever is necessary to protect American lives.[2]  The narrative corresponds with the observations Elaine Scarry has put forward in her study The Body in Pain—that in torture, a fiction of power can be derived from the act.[3]  The tactic seems effective given a majority of individuals recently polled believe that the treatment amounted to torture and that the torture was justified despite evidence to the contrary.  Torture is an attempt to assert control and comfort for the government and populace who would use it.  This is the narrative promulgated by former Bush Administration officials, such as former Vice-President Richard Cheney and former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen, both of whom also argue that the Obama Administration’s discontinuing of the “enhanced” interrogation program is risking American lives.[4]  By the discontinuation of the former administration’s methods, any terrorist attack can now be read as an abdication of duty, regardless of whether torture could have thwarted the attack or not.  And that which was done during the running of the worst of the program is retroactively deemed justified.

It is the concept of control and domination that I will focus on in this post.  All Faithful Can is a blog project that sees its mission as exposing the toxicity of rape culture—particularly within the church.  My assertion is that the general support or indifference American Christians show toward torture parallel assumptions that undergird rape culture.  This post will as such detail what rape and torture have in common as well as make the case that detainees in U.S. custody experienced rape as part of the torture program CIA-funded psychiatrists designed.

Control and domination: the ends of rape and torture

There is a common myth that rape is about sexual gratification and attraction.  It is not simply a matter of men being out of control, for most rapes are planned.  The fact is that rape has more to do with control and domination of another person.  Patriarchal beliefs that are thrust upon us from an early age set up the social hierarchies in which we live.  In general, men are on top of this hierarchy.  As such rape is not only an issue of men “not being able to control themselves” or seeking sex, but a sense of entitlement to the body of another person.  To the extent that sexual contact has anything to do rape, it is in the context of the perpetrator’s desire to control and dominate the body of another person for their own ends and without the consent of the victim.  Rape is violence, sexualized.  It is the removal of the victim’s agency and bodily autonomy in particularly intimate ways.  It tells the victim they do not have the right to their own bodies or minds. 

Rape is also a violent form of oppression and is a mechanism by which individuals or groups gain, express and maintain their dominance and power over others. This is evident when rape is used as a tool of war, when men are raped in jail, or when rape occurs on the basis of someone's race, age, ability or sexuality. Rape is about the use and abuse of power to intimidate, degrade or control others with less status. The fact that women and children are raped more often than men is a manifestation of lesser power and inferior status in society.  Rape sends a message to the victim and to others of similar social standing, and that message is to conform to the reality the dominant group is putting forth or suffer the consequences.

Likewise, total domination is an important element of torture.  For the tortured person is stripped absolutely of control of his or her own flesh, upon which the state imposes its own narrative.[5]  Another torture victim also makes these points.  Jean Amery was a Jew captured by the Gestapo in Belgium in the 1940s.  He survived torturous interrogation, and lived to see liberation from Auschwitz.   He wrote:

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27-28.

The connections between rape and torture are not new or novel.  The connection has been visible for a long time.  The quote from Dianna Ortiz above shows the connection— torturers rape because rape is a form of torture.  Torturers create a reality in which they maintain control and dominance, to the point that not even God can be found in the torture chamber.  Amery again: 

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27-28.

Something we know about both rape and torture is that the event can have lasting effects.  Sadly, part of rape culture is the notion that after an appropriate amount of time, one should have gotten over the rape.  Similarly, the reputation of "enhanced interrogation techniques" is bolstered by the notion that since they are not scarring, then the damage is minimized.  Dianna Ortiz's work suggests otherwise, as does Amery:  

At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 27-28.

This is also the case with an anonymous detainee who went through the CIA torture program who recently spoke with The Guardian:

Jabuli prefers solitude indoors, having lost all safety once before. When he does go out he seeks crowded public spaces, so there will be witnesses if his tormentors reappear to kidnap him again. Ten years on, time and distance have not healed the damage that comes from torture.

“You live with the fear that the people who tortured you may come back to torture you again,” he said, “regardless of if you are in a safe country.”

Triggers are everywhere, even a decade later. Armored vans on the street make him think of the station where he was tortured. He fears intimacy, because he doesn’t want someone to see him having nightmares, or to watch him wake up crying. He worries he will not be “good enough to have a family”.

More than a decade ago, Jabuli endured seven months in a torture chamber in a central African country he asked the Guardian not to identify. (Jabuli is a pseudonym he recommended.) 

He was placed in “stress positions”: his elbows and ankles were bound to each other behind his back as he faced downward, resulting in a pain so consuming that he could barely breathe.

“We lost hope. We gave everything, every decision, to others, to decide for you. Everything you want, you let the other person decide,” Jabuli said.

Rape and torture feed the rapists' and torturers need for control and dominance (whether as a personal goal or an outcome ordered by the state).  Rape and torture both remove the victim's agency and bodily integrity by violation of consent.  Rape and torture stay with the victim long after the event, regardless of the invisibility of the trauma.

And rape and torture is what we paid nearly $81,000,000 for psychologists and doctors to perform on our prisoners.

State Sponsored Rape

 

To quote at length from the Senate Report (Finding #13, p.18 pdf):

The CIA contracted with two psychologists to develop, operate, and assess its interrogation operations. The psychologists' prior experience was at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa'ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.

On the CIA's behalf, the contract psychologists developed theories of interrogation based on "learned helplessness," and developed the list of enhanced interrogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees. The psychologists personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA's most significant detainees using these techniques. They also evaluated whether detainees' psychological state allowed for the continued use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, including some detainees whom they were themselves interrogating or had interrogated.

A couple of phrases are worth pulling out of the text, if for no other reason than to point out the absurdity of the situation.  The psychologists prior experience was with the SERE school, which used torture techniques that other governments used in order to elicit false information so that military personnel would know what to expect if they were captured and used for propaganda purposes.  Neither knew the culture of the people they would be interrogating, nor had a background in interrogation.  Yet they were well paid to provide a product.  They sought to prove a hypothesis:  that inculcating learned helplessness would leave the detainee complaint and willing to give information.  The idea behind our torture program was not to torture while simultaneously asking questions.  It was to torture in such a way as to condition detainees into long-lasting compliance.  Once again, enhanced interrogation is not lesser torture, or "torture lite"; it is "clean" torture as opposed to "scarring" torture designed to leave no physical marks even as it leaves traumatic stress that will remain with the tortured forever. 

And the U.S. torture program included anal rape.  Definitions are contested grounds, but to choose a definition in use by part of the U.S. Government, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” 

Within the report, we are told that in an effort to program the detainees into learned helplessness, "at least five CIA detainees were subjected to "rectal rehydration" or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity (p.11/pdf)."  Further, the "Chief of Interrogations also ordered the rectal rehydration of KSM without a determination of medical need, a procedure that the chief of interrogations would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator's "total control over the detainee (p.108/pdf).'"  It is noted that occasionally this was done with the use of excessive force, and in at least one case an effort was made to use the largest possible/available tube to rectally feed a detainee.  One is left with the impression that the use of this tube was not due to a medical consideration (n.584, p.126/pdf). 

I submit that the absence of consent--and the even lower bar of demonstrable medical necessity-- is enough enough to lead us to say definitively that psychologists and doctors in U.S. Government employ routinely raped some detainees.  All of the elements of the the definition of rape are met.    This is the program the United States Government claimed was necessary for our safety-- a program based on pain, sexual humiliation, and rape to the service of control and dominance.

(Note:  One of the threats CIA interrogators made to detainees was sexual abuse of family members.  The claim may seem credible to a detainee given what interrogators, doctors, and psychologists were willing to do to detainees (p.11/pdf.)

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[1] US-born Sister Dianna Ortiz is the cofounder and executive director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), an organization of torture survivors. In 1989, she was abducted, repeatedly rapes,  and tortured by members of the Guatemalan security forces who took orders from an American they called Alejandro. Sister Dianna is author of The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. Ortiz, Dianna. "Theology, International Law, and Torture." Theology Today 63, no. 3 (October 2006): 344-348.

[2] This view corresponds with what Darius Rejali calls the “national security model.” Darius Rejali Torture and Democracy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 46.

[3] Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1^st ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), Chapter one. 

[4] See, for instance, Mark Thiessen’s Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 2010), which ably condenses the entire torture narrative into the book’s subtitle.

[5] Since terrorists wear no uniform, may be among populations in sleeper cells, and are capable of killing thousands of civilians and/or military personnel in a matter of minutes, the narrative that coalesces around the GWOT is that the realities of a post-September 11 world highlight the necessity of having recourse to torture. 

 

Christians and Torture II: Defining Torture

Tw: torture, torture apologism, description of techniques

This is part two of a four-part series. 
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
___________________________________________________

In my last post, I wrote about the state of American Christianity - and the populace in general - among whom support for torture has been on an upward swing for the past fifteen years.  The reasons include the presence of an American antithesis which shuts out "the other" from American concepts of equality, human dignity, and the rule of law; and the idea that Christians place national security questions in a different ethical bracket from other moral questions, meaning that national security questions are subsumed into national realist/utilitarian frameworks instead of religious frameworks.
But there are other issues to bring up:  How do we define torture?  And what does torture do in terms of the story we tell about ourselves?  These questions matter because it is common to talk about American torture as “enhanced interrogation”, which is supposed to be less brutal than “real” torture.   Also, beyond the issue of whether or not torture “works”  there is the matter of what story we tell about ourselves and our use of torture to help justify its use.  These are the matters I will address below.

But first, what techniques were we using on prisoners?  There is an illustrated guide here (trigger warnings apply here, too.)  A list would include: denial of medical treatment; waterboarding; forced rectal feeding with no medical cause; numerous stress positions; confinement in small boxes; and enforced standing for days, sometimes on broken limbs; forced nudity and humiliation; sensory deprivation or overload; ice water baths; physical attacks; threatening violence—sexual and physical— against the person and their family members; and sleep deprivation, among others.

How do we define torture?

In an online video, a journalist for Playboy, Mike Guy, agreed to undergo waterboarding.  In fact, he placed a bet with a member of the filming crew that he could withstand the application of the technique for 15 seconds.  Before the application of the technique, he started a conversation with an individual, dressed in fatigues and hooded, who is identified as a U.S. military interrogator. Guy asked the interrogator if waterboarding is torture, to which the interrogator replies that “some consider it torture.”  When Guy asked how the interrogator would describe waterboarding, the interrogator says that it is the invocation of an existing fear­­­---the fear of drowning.  When the interrogator is asked to then define “torture,” he explains that he believes torture is along the lines of whipping, the shedding of blood, or actual physical pain.  The interrogator gives a meticulous description of what will happen physiologically to Guy in the course of the application of water.  We then see Guy being tied to a board with his feet elevated; he is given a weight to drop when the application becomes too much for Guy to take.  After the application (Guy loses his bet as he gives after five or six seconds), Guy describes his experience firsthand.  Very pointedly, he describes that the fact that the application was in a controlled setting did not matter in the course of the application.  He says that he could no longer rationally believe he was not in any danger.  Presumably minutes later, in conversation with the interrogator, Guy mentions that he has spent a lot of money on psychotherapy in the past…to which the interrogator quickly replied “be prepared to spend more.”[1]

The video brings focus to certain issues that inevitably must be dealt with when addressing torture.  Is the interrogator correct that torture is merely the realm of bodily pain?  Does one need to shed blood for a technique to be considered torture?  Does it matter if there are psychological repercussions to a technique years after the fact?  In order to elucidate what torture is, it will be necessary to address some problems of definition.  I will then briefly glance at the way legal definitions have been used; then I will proceed to broaden the category since torture is not simply a matter of what we do legally, but how we behave morally.

A complaint that is frequently made by commentators in debates on the use of torture is that the meaning of the word loses some precision on a practical level.  Torture is hard to quantify in relation (or as opposed) to other categories, such as inhuman or degrading treatment.  Edward Peters claims that the word loses its meaning with over-identification— that when means everything, it means nothing.[2]  Jean Bethke Elshtain puts the point well in her contribution to Torture:  A Collection[3]: 

“If everything from a shout to the severing of a body part is “torture,” the category is so indiscriminate as to not permit of those distinctions on which the law and moral philosophy rest.  If we include all forms of coercion and manipulation within “torture,” we move in the direction of indiscriminant moralism and legalism­—a kind of deontology run amok.  At the same time, we deprive law enforcement, domestic and international, of some of its necessary tools in an often violent and dangerous world.” 

Elshtain’s reflections juxtaposes two positions:  those who would seek to include in the definition of torture any kind of unpleasant experience while one is in custody versus those who and those who would be willing to forego moral restraint in war because it gives the enemy an unfair advantage.  The advantage to navigating between these two positions, which Elshtain does, is that there is much room to maneuver in the gray zone between an unpleasant experience and grievous bodily harm.  Elshtain was forgiving when it comes to psychological manipulation and pressure, and perhaps, “moderate physical pressure,” even if its use is regrettable.  By physical coercion, Elshtain means methods, dubbed “torture lite,” detailed in Mark Bowden’s essay “The Dark Art of Interrogation”: 

These [methods] include sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm.[4]

But this characterization of coercive techniques significantly underscores how successful the push to muddy the category of torture has been.  Yes, there does seem to be a significant difference between amputating body parts in order to elicit pain and subjecting someone to sleep deprivation.  These differences will be addressed below.  But Bowden, in his quote above, notes that even these “lite” torture methods deserve to be described as excruciating. 

An appropriate starting point for defining torture is the definition given by the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment since legal definitions are attempts to codify what is permissible in complex situations:

The term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.[5]

The Convention’s definition of torture begs to be interpreted, as does the Convention’s terms “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”   Human rights groups of course argue for expansive understandings of these terms, and seek to include as many unpleasant experiences as possible.

But it is important to note how the U.S. Government interpreted the term torture in light of national and international law and in the context of the Global War on Terror. John Yoo, who penned memoranda relating to the U.S. torture program while serving in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel defined torture thus:

We conclude that for an act to constitute torture…it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture…it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.[6]

This contrived interpretation leaves ample room for the significant elevation of interrogation techniques that cause intense suffering and pain, yet do not amount to organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death.  Such line-treading with torture leads one very easily into the territory of the cruel, inhuman, and degrading, which is also forbidden ground.[7]  Such interpretation also highlights the weaknesses of merely legal definitions, which are “carefully negotiated compromises that do not exhaust the questions of what torture is or how it operates.”[8]  Furthermore, such forgiving interpretations show the propensity for states to try to test the outward bounds of the moral and legal in the pursuit of national self-interest and security.  It also seems that torture “lite” may be a misnomer, especially in regards to the “coercive interrogation techniques” which were approved by the Bush Administration and mentioned in Bowden’s article.  It is more appropriate to talk about “clean” torture.

The practicing of clean torture (as opposed to scarring torture) is a marked effort to find techniques that are less likely to shock the conscience.  As Darius Rejali notes in his book Torture and Democracy, “a victim with scars to show to the media will get sympathy or at least attention, but victims without scars do not have much to authorize their complaints to a skeptical public.” [9] This would seem to be especially true of a public who sees the victim of such clean techniques as a terrorist (or just a suspected terrorist)—a person who uses violence outside of acceptable means, including the intentional targeting of noncombatants.  Clean torture denies that torture has occurred by rendering the signs of suffering invisible.  The point of clean torture is not to necessarily be easier on the tortured, but easier on the torturer and the public in whose name the practice is used, since the pain, suffering, and anguish can be denied or minimized.  Using clean torture allows those who support the use of such techniques to point to more horrible forms of torture being used globally, and say that their techniques are not the most immoral.  Proponents of clean torture may point to, say, the use of electric drills on a person’s limbs or suicide bombing, to show the supposed superiority and humaneness of the pain they inflict.  They may also use such comparisons to deny that sadism plays a part in their own use of techniques­­—and so clean torture becomes a denial of monstrosity.  Granted, there does appear to be a marked difference between waterboarding a person and amputating a person’s limbs one by one. 

And given the fact that waterboarding was an approved torture technique billed as less than “actual torture,” Darius Rejali notes that waterboarding is not simply a psychological torture but a physical one.  “When one’s head is stuck under water, the painful sensation of near asphyxiation and fiery distension of the bowels is just that…CIA waterboarding is no less a physical torture than the Inquisitional water torture.  Both procedures cause extreme and intense pain, and that is why interrogators, classical and modern, favor it.”[10]

But it should also be said that while these techniques may sound rather clinical in writing, the reality is hard to stomach. A number of CIA personnel witnesses the over 150 times Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded expressed discomfort and a desire to transfer--it even brought some to tears and sobs to watch (Senate Report, pg. 70/pdf). 

The stories we tell ourselves about torture

The similarities between clean and scarring torture do not lie solely in suffering and pain, but with the consideration of additional elements. To arrive at a more complete understanding of torture, we should consider that “torture is also the infliction of potentially escalating pain for purposes that include dominating the victim and ascribing responsibility to the victim for the pain incurred.”[11]  This is certainly the case in the U.S. torture program.  The psychiatrists who designed the program note that its purpose was to create a sense of learned helplessness in its victims (senate report, finding #13).  It should also be noted that:

“The report confirms that the C.I.A. used psychologists from outside the agency to help develop and assess its interrogation techniques. Two of them had experience at the U.S. Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE). “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator,” the report notes, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic.” experience.”

A longer list of shameful elements of the program, which point not only to moral bankruptcy but gross ineptitude, can be found here.

Total domination is an important element of torture.  It is a step further than the control a state may impose on the detained suspect or combatant.  For the tortured person is stripped absolutely of control of his or her own flesh, upon which the state imposes its own narrative.[12]  Since terrorists wear no uniform, may be among populations in sleeper cells, and are capable of killing thousands of civilians and/or military personnel in a matter of minutes, the narrative that coalesces around the GWOT is that the realities of a post-September 11 world highlight the necessity of having recourse to torture.  The ticking-time bomb scenarios feel more plausible, helped along by television shows such as 24 which use the ticking bomb scenario as a plot device and by pundits who use the ticking bomb scenario as a rhetorical bludgeon.  And it seems common sense that terrorists are trained to withstand more polite forms of interrogation. 

Regardless of its efficacy in obtaining real and valuable information, which is by no means a foregone conclusion, torture is meant to allow one to feel secure in the knowledge that the state is willing to do whatever is necessary to protect American lives.[13]  The narrative corresponds with the observations Elaine Scarry has put forward in her study The Body in Pain—that in torture, a fiction of power can be derived from the act.[14]  This is the narrative promulgated by former Bush Administration officials, such as former Vice-President Richard Cheney and former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen, both of whom also argue that the Obama Administration’s discontinuing of the “enhanced” interrogation program is risking American lives.[15]  By the discontinuation of the former administration’s methods, any terrorist attack can now be read as an abdication of duty, regardless of whether torture could have thwarted the attack or not.

The narrative seems to be successful. In addition to the 2009 Pew poll cited above, a poll in 2008 sponsored by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University found that nearly six-in-ten white evangelicals in the South support the use of torture often or sometimes.[16]  The results of the polls are similar, but what was fascinating about the 2008 Mercer poll is that it broke down the population into those who derive their opinion about torture from religious belief or common sense/life experience.  The poll found that “white evangelicals in the South are significantly more likely to rely on life experiences and common sense than Christian teachings or beliefs when thinking about the acceptability of torture.”[17]  Those who rely of common sense and life experience to derive their opinion about torture were significantly more likely to support torture than those who relied on religious beliefs.[18]  Common sense is largely formed by the norms of the society in which one lives; and we live in a society in which consumable media and governmental agencies put forth a narrative that we should be willing to do/allow anything that would guarantee our safety.  We see in our media examples of torture working, regardless of the evidence that says torture produces bad information.  Our fiction of control is comforting.  And our clinging to this fiction has the potential to make us monsters.

In the next post, I will detail some of the connections between the use of torture and sexual violence. 

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[1] "Playboy Journo Bets He Can Endure 15 Seconds Of Waterboarding (VIDEO)." The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/20/playboy-journo-bets-he-ca_n_189280.html (accessed March 18, 2010).

[2] Edward Peters, Torture (New York:  Basil Blackwell, 1985), 148-155, cited in William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), 21-22.

[3] Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Reflection on the Problem of “Dirty Hands,”” in Torture: A Collection,  new. ed., ed. Sanford Levinson (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 79.

[4] Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2003, 53.

[5] U.N. General Assembly, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Pt.1, Art. 1, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm [accessed March 24, 2010].

[6] U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A, by John Yoo, Memorandum, August 1 2002.

[7] John T. Parry, “Escalation and Necessity:  Defining Torture at Home and Abroad,” in Torture: A Collection,  new. ed., ed. Sanford Levinson (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 155.  Parry notes that, while coercive interrogation tactics may or may not be torture, they indeed fall under definitions of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

[8] John T. Parry, “Escalation and Necessity:  Defining Torture at Home and Abroad,” in Torture: A Collection,  new. ed., ed. Sanford Levinson (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 152.

[9] Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.

[10] Rejali notes that waterboarding is not simply a psychological torture but a physical one.  “When one’s head is stuck under water, the painful sensation of near asphyxiation and fiery distension of the bowels is just that…CIA waterboarding is no less a physical torture than the Inquisitional water torture.  Both procedures cause extreme and intense pain, and that is why interrogators, classical and modern, favor it.”  Rejali, 381-382.  In the video of the journalist cited above, the journalist does not mention physical pain, but this is probably due to the fact that he stopped the torture when he could not handle the psychological pressure. 

[11] Parry, 154.

[12] Parry, 154-156.

[13] This view corresponds with what Rejali calls the “national security model.” Rejali, 46.

[14] Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1^st ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), Chapter one. 

[15] See, for instance, Mark Thiessen’s Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Press, 2010), which ably condenses the entire torture narrative into the book’s subtitle.

[16] "New Poll of White Evangelicals Shows Faith, Golden Rule Influence Attitudes on Torture," Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, http://blog.faithinpubliclife.org/upload/2008/09/FPL%20Mercer%20Torture%20Poll%20Memo%20Final-no%20embargo.pdf (accessed September 11, 2008).  The numbers correspond quite well with the later 2009 Pew Poll.

[17] Ibid.

[18] According to the Mercer poll, the number of respondents who supported torture often/sometimes by relying on common sense and/or life experience was twenty-five percentage points higher than those who supported torture often/sometimes relying on religious teachings and/or beliefs.