[Dialogue] What Torture Does to Torturers

[Carol Crow]

Are we naive enough to think Bush's agreement to the legislation will 
really stop the torture?  He and his associates will find some way to 
get around it.  Thanks, Harry, for the article.  It says a lot!

Carol
On Dec 19, 2005, at 10:53 AM, Harry Wainwright wrote:

>
> Colleagues, a sofering question. Peace, Harry
>  <unknown.gif>Published on Monday, December 19, 2005 by the Christian 
> Science Monitor
> What Torture Does to Torturers
> by Rushworth M. Kidder
>
> Last week, President Bush agreed to legislation banning cruel, 
> inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners in US custody. His 
> U-turn ended months of debate about the ethics of torture. Now come 
> revelations that the White House approved eavesdropping on American 
> citizens inside the United States without court-ordered warrants.
>
> These two information-gathering methods are markedly different: One 
> inflicts pain while the other invades privacy. But each has credible 
> national security arguments in its favor. Each raises profound human 
> rights objections. And each threatens to compromise the nation's moral 
> authority abroad.
>
> But there's another issue, largely unexplored, that speaks to a deeper 
> concern: the effect of such activity on the perpetrators. What is the 
> impact on those we ask to carry out those actions?
>
> Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments at Yale in the 1960s 
> shed light here. He recruited individuals to test (so they were told) 
> the role of punishment to promote learning. They were asked to follow 
> an experimenter's orders and administer increasingly powerful electric 
> shocks - up to 450 volts - whenever a "learner" gave the wrong answer.
>
> Unknown to those giving the shocks, the experiment was a fake. The 
> experimenter in a gray lab coat was a plant. The learner was an actor 
> mimicking anguish. No shocks were ever sent. The point was to see how 
> long the recruits would persist (though Mr. Milgram didn't use these 
> words) in torturing their victim in obedience to authority. The 
> sobering answer: a very long time.
>
> One of Milgram's recruits, William Menold, had just been discharged 
> from combat duty in the US Army. Growing increasingly concerned for 
> the learner he was zapping, he complained to the experimenter, who 
> told him to carry on and that he would accept full responsibility. Mr. 
> Menold recalls that he then "completely lost it, my reasoning power," 
> and became fully obedient. Milgram's biographer, Thomas Blass, notes 
> that Menold "described himself as an 'emotional wreck' and a 'basket 
> case' during the experiment and after he left the lab, realizing 'that 
> somebody could get me to do that stuff.'"
>
> Would Menold have been so emotionally battered if the experiment had 
> involved wiretaps rather than shocks? Hardly. But the two activities 
> are on the same scale, if at different ends. If anywhere along that 
> scale our nation makes citizens "do that stuff" to others, are we 
> dehumanizing those who do it? In taking advantage of undefended 
> victims, are we degrading our own personal integrity?
>
> Those aren't idle questions. Personal integrity isn't achieved through 
> inoculation. It's a process. Rooted in core ethical values, it shapes 
> itself, decision by decision, across a lifetime. It depends on 
> consistency, continuity, and repetition. Each lapse makes the next one 
> easier.
>
> If that's true for individuals, it's also true for organizations and 
> nations. When an individual merges unthinkingly "into an 
> organizational structure," warned Milgram, "a new creature replaces 
> autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, 
> freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of 
> authority."
>
> Government agencies, especially those defending the nation through 
> espionage and military action, depend on personal integrity. Yet they 
> create these "sanctions of authority." They can even require unethical 
> actions. When they do, however, they risk creating in the perpetrators 
> either an anguished guilt or an amoral numbness. A convicted 
> Watergate-related figure, Egil "Bud" Krogh, recalls what it was like 
> to sacrifice conscience for what he saw as President Nixon's 
> unquestionable authority. Whenever you do something like that, he says 
> poignantly, "a little bit of your soul slips through your fingers."
>
> That's not what democracy is about. None of us wants our public 
> servants turned into pliant emotional wrecks. And none of us wants the 
> nation cast in the role of the gray-coated Grand Experimenter, calmly 
> overriding individual ethics in the name of collective expediency. 
> With the torture debate over for now, it's time to begin the 
> conversation on the broader differences between moral and immoral 
> authority.
>
> Rushworth M. Kidder is president of the Institute for Global Ethics in 
> Camden, Maine, and the author of "Moral Courage."
>
> © 2005 Christian Science Monitor
>
> ###
>  
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