Question

Read the Rejali (p. 108) and Bloche (p. 111) essays on torture in the textbook in Chapter 4. Write a 2-page paper (not including the title/references) using APA formatting. Summarize what arguments were made, identifying and citing to the source. Respond to the arguments analyzing what you found persuasive and what you did not.

Answer 1

ANS: Darius Rejali points out, the development of torture techniques was not a chance of history but was necessary for democracies such as the United States. Rejali writes that "clean" (non scarring) "stealth techniques," are developed not by authoritarian governments as is commonly believed but rather have been the product of the main western democracies-England, France, and the United States. Indeed, one of the main reasons why these are primarily found in democracies is because of their history of monitoring of human rights, thus, requiring these democracies to use torture techniques that leave fewer marks and allows them to evade detection. As Rejali explains: Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection, and, to the extent that public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is the case that where we find democracies torture today we will also be more likely to find stealthy torture. Thus, Rejali forcefully illustrates that it was necessary for these states to develop less visible forms of torture to maintain their legitimacy. This further strengthens the central argument that not only is torture an ongoing issue for liberal states but rather there is a longstanding history of these techniques being constantly developed in order to evade detection by leaving fewer marks, further exhibiting a constant negotiation with excess violence. The question is the exact nature of this excess violence. Taking the case of the juridico medical complex, he suggested that the state constantly negotiates the boundaries of excess violence to ascertain what is permissible and the extent to which it can push them without explicitly appearing lawless. The threshold of that violence depends on a range of factors including the success of the rhetoric, the transparency of the act, the legal loopholes, the subjects of control, and the political climate of a particular moment.

Bloche initially started by calling torture immoral but went on to give reasons supporting torture, and then also pointing out it's loopholes and misuse. According to him the killing of Osama bin Laden has revived the old debate about whether torture works. Could it be that “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed during the George W. Bush administration helped find bin Laden’s now-famous courier and track him to the terrorist in chief’s now-infamous lair? Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and then administration officials say no. Former attorney general Michael Mukasey and former vice president D. Cheney say yes. The idea that waterboarding and other abuses may have been effective in getting information from detainees is repellant to many, including him. It’s contrary to the meme many have embraced: that torture doesn’t work because people being abused to the breaking point will say anything to get the brutality to stop—anything they think their accusers want to hear. But this position is at odds with some behavioral science according to Bloche. The architects of enhanced interrogation are doctors who built on a still-classified, research-based model that suggests how abuse can indeed work. He examined the science, studied the available paper trail and interviewed key actors, including several who helped develop the enhanced interrogation program and who haven’t spoken publicly before. This inquiry has made it possible to piece together the model that under-girds enhanced interrogation. This model holds that harsh methods can’t, by themselves, force terrorists to tell the truth. Brute force, it suggests, stiffens resistance. Rather, the role of abuse is to induce hopelessness and despair. That’s what sleep deprivation, stress positions and prolonged isolation were designed to do. Small gestures of contempt—facial slaps and frequent insults—drive home the message of futility. Even the rough stuff, such as “walling” and waterboarding, is meant to dispirit, not to coerce. Once a sense of hopelessness is instilled, the model holds, interrogators can shape behavior through small rewards. Bathroom breaks, reprieves from foul-tasting food and even the occasional kind word can coax broken men to comply with their abusers’ expectations. Certainly, interrogators using this approach have obtained false confessions. Chinese interrogators did so intentionally, for propaganda purposes, with American prisoners during the Korean War. McCain and other critics of “torture-lite” cite this precedent to argue that it can’t yield reliable information. But the same psychological sequence—induction of hopelessness, followed by rewards to shape compliance—can be used to get terrorism suspects to tell the truth, or so the architects of enhanced interrogation hypothesize. Critical to this model is the ability to assess suspects’ truthfulness in real time. To this end, CIA interrogators stressed speedy integration of intelligence from all sources. The idea was to frame questions to detect falsehoods; interrogators could then reward honesty and punish deceit. It’s been widely reported that the program was conceived by a former Air Force psychologist, James Mitchell, who had helped oversee the Pentagon’s program for training soldiers and airmen to resist torture if captured. That Mitchell became the CIA’s maestro of enhanced interrogation and personally water-boarded several prisoners was confirmed in 2009 through the release of previously classified documents. But how Mitchell got involved and why the agency embraced his methods remained a mystery. The key player was a clinical psychologist turned CIA official, Kirk Hubbard, Bloche learned through interviews with him and others. On the day 19 hijackers bent on mass murder made their place in history, Hubbard’s responsibilities at the agency included tracking developments in the behavioral sciences with an eye toward their tactical use. He and Mitchell knew each other through the network of psychologists who do national security work. Just retired from the Air Force, Mitchell figured he could translate what he knew about teaching resistance into a methodology for breaking it. Journalistic accounts have cast Mitchell as a rogue who won a CIA contract by dint of charisma. What’s gone unappreciated is his reliance on a research base. He had studied the medical and psychological literature on how Chinese interrogators extracted false confessions. And he was an admirer of Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who had developed the concept of “learned helplessness” and invoked it to explain depression. Mitchell, it appears, saw connections and seized upon them. The despair that Chinese interrogators tried to instill was akin to learned helplessness. Seligman’s induction of learned helplessness in laboratory animals, therefore, could point the way to prison regimens capable of inducing it in people. And—this was Mitchell’s biggest conceptual jump—the Chinese way of shaping behavior in prisoners who were reduced to learned helplessness held a broader lesson. To motivate a captive to comply, a Chinese interrogator established an aura of omnipotence. For weeks or months, the interrogator was his prisoner’s sole human connection, with monopoly power to praise, punish and reward. Rapport with the interrogator offered the only escape from despair. This opened possibilities for the sculpting of behavior and belief. For propaganda purposes, the Chinese sought sham confessions. But Mitchell saw that behavioral shaping could be used to pursue other goals, including the extraction of truth. Not only are counterterrorism operations shrouded in secrecy, but it’s impossible to prove or disprove claims that enhanced interrogation works better than other methods when prisoners are intent on saying nothing. Scientific study of this question would require random sorting of suspects into groups that receive either torture-lite or conventional forms of interrogation. To frame this inquiry is to show why it can’t be carried out: It would violate international law and research ethics. The CIA conducted no such study for this reason. So Bloche is left with the unsavory possibility that torture-lite works—and that it may have helped find bin Laden. It does no good to point out, as some human rights advocates have, that the detainees who yielded information about his courier did so after the abuse stopped. The model on which enhanced interrogation is based can account for this. The detainees’ cooperation could have ensued from hopelessness and despair, followed by interrogators’ adroit use of their power to punish and reward. This possibility poses the question of torture in a more unsettling fashion, by denying us the easy out that torture is both ineffective and wrong. According to Bloche we must choose between its repugnance to our values and its potential efficacy. To Bloche the choice is almost always obvious: Contempt for the law of nations would put us on a path toward a more brutish world. Conservatives are fond of saying, on behalf of martial sacrifice, that freedom isn’t free. Neither is basic decency.

Well both the essays brings out the use of torture. I am more persuaded by argument put forward by Bloche. He have very well summarized the loopholes torture possesses as well as it's power to bring out information. He also points out that contempt for the law of nations comes with a price. The world is brutal and it will become more cruel as time advances. But I would like to point out that torture is also the method that is used on the powerless to bring out false confessions and spread false propagandas. This makes it very dangerous.