In reading and watching various video clips about torture, I see a lot of the same misrepresentations repeated over and over. Here are two:
First, torture apologists--and even some anti-torture folks--often refer to the fact that a caterpillar was placed in a confined box with a detainee without also mentioning that the detainee had a fear of insects. Kind of a crucial detail.
Second, some have made the argument that since Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded so many times--something like 183 times in a month--he must have figured out that the waterboarding would not kill him, and that this fact somehow mitigates the badness of what was done to him. This argument, though, is based on a misunderstanding of what waterboarding does. Waterboarding does not necessarily convince you, on an intellectual level, that you are going to drown. Instead, it triggers the body's drowning response, which is a very visceral and traumatic experience. Indeed, even people who are voluntarily waterboarded in a totally controlled setting experience the full brunt of the body's drowning response. I've never heard of anyone who has undergone waterboarding and not concluded that it was obviously a form of torture. So the fact that Zubaydah was waterboarded over a hundred times doesn't mean that he was somehow spared the worst effects of waterboarding--it just means that he was horribly tortured over a hundred times.
(PS: Sorry for the lack of links. I'll retroactively add them in if I run into more examples.)
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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At a certain point torture become about making one live against one's will, keeping the body of the tortured alive. Clearly important in this regard is some doctor in the room monitoring the victim. I have not actually heard much in the US press about this aspect and what must be some egregious breach of the Hippocratic Oath (though I read short interview in the German newspaper Die Zeit about a month ago that brought it to my attention). In fact, the only mention of a doctor in the room I recall hearing about was from a torture apologist who made it seem like a positive thing, something to the effect of "well, there's always a doctor monitoring the situation." I suppose we're still embedded in this absurd "is torture really bad or not" debate.
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