This is a great post.

I am struck by two thoughts:

- "capacity for cruelty borne out of obedience"

- "manipulated by our government "

Predictably for me, it rings all sorts of alarm bells about government, its size, scope and reach into lives of citizens.

You think that Obama's government is (going to be) different, but I don't understand why.

This is a nicely written post with an interesting take, but I don't understand what prompted it.

Let us think twice and not be too eager to pelt stones at those who were young and full of desire to serve their nation.

Which young eager people are you talking about? The young eager soldiers who served in the U.S. military? Or the young eager contractors who worked for CACI and L-3 (Titan) and who may have done the actual interrogating?

I don't see how we have enough information to direct ire anywhere other than at people in positions of authority who would know what the law is. And none of those people are young.

Fantastic post!

This is a problem that is complex and nuanced, and you brought to light a new facet.

We've met the enemy and she is Lynndie England.

As individuals we're capable of being her.Or not.

As a country we're capable of seeing our enemy the way the IDF command sees Gazan civilians (which I've blogged about tonight.)Or not.

The most shocking thing for me during a visit to a fairly primitive museum in Dachau was not the harrowing details of how the camp was run but the yellowing photos pinned carelessly to a plaster board showing emaciated prisoners being marched to work, down the main street, past indifferent housewifes chatting in the line in front of the bakery.

In our private lives we can march for a charity or attend a lynching. As citizens we can headline
"Gotcha" when the UK torpedoes an Argentinian cruiser with 700 deaths , or equally, say "Don't cheer boys, those poor lads are dying" when the US sank a spanish cruiser in the Spankish/American war.

We're neither good nor bad. Any of us anywhere. But capable of being either at particular times.

A leader can persuade us not to throw that first stone and feel good about ourselves. Or he can throw it himself. And then what will we do?

There's a difference between punishment and procedure.

Let the courts do their job.

How about this.

I think that rummy and cheney and others in charge and those who wrote out these new manuals should GO TO PRISON FOR PERMITTING THE PAWNS to go to prison. The higher ups lied and said:

A few bad apples.

Yeah. A few bad apples like cheney and rummy.

For that alone, they should get life in prison.

Well done! I fear that Milgram's experiments, which have been replicated recently, and his book, Obedience to Authority, may also have been reverse-engineered for the purpose of influencing the behavior of these young persons you are concerned about.

I myself am concerned about their mental health. Torture destroys lives on both sides of the torture cell.

These are complicated questions, especially the ones related to those at the bottom of the totem pole. We know some people are capable of resisting authority. But we also know there was a climate of "enforced compliance" which surrounded those conscripted into interrogation roles and the torture process.

The lower level people are vital for debriefing what occurred. If there are prosecutions, I doubt the lower level folks will be indicted. If they were, I doubt any jury would convict, given the info you cite - and the expert witnesses who could testify.

For the principals, the lawyers, the psychologists involved, it's another story entirely. They are likely to be scrutinized, investigated, and it would not surprise me at all to see indictments. Certainly, many will suffer in the court of public opinion. We know that is already true for some of the lawyers. Likely for some of the psychologists.

Well done blog.

(I respect the intelligence and thoughtfulness of your post. I think you present a useful consideration. I can only submit my thoughts as assertions in this forum. I did want to submit my mere assertions because I think the issue in more about policy than practice. I think it is crucial to understand that it is a civilizational crisis that we are addressing here.)

There are two parts to the subject that you raise. One is the legal proceeding we colloquially refer to as the Nuremburg Trials. The other is the question of the moral acceptability of torture, the intentional infliction of pain for some principled objective.
I would like to sidestep the subject of Nuremburg with this concession. There is a good argument that it represents a common example of “to the victor belong the spoils.” The problem with the Nuremburg formulation of war crimes and crimes against humanity is “Who has standing to bring the complaint? Who speaks for humanity?” It is either a monumental legal fiction or some dubious overconfidence in an institution like the United Nations.

The other question, the moral acceptability of torture, is the more compelling. Not only is there a long history of the infliction of pain for some principled purpose but there is also a large library of the rationalizations for such activities. Significant discoveries in “empirical psychology” date from only the last century and a half. The rationalizations for torture mostly predate such discoveries by many centuries. Nevertheless this is not the same as saying that those rationalizations are moot or mere superstition. In fact without the “motivation” it is not properly torture in the sense that we are discussing it today. If one is pursuing some individual stimulation ala De Sade or some is driven by what we today would term pathology, neither is the torture we are considering here. To have torture there has to be present a “motivation” which is always the pursuit of some principle. Of course these rationalizations, these “motivations” are as much a psychological phenomenon as is the “capacity” to torture. My position is that these rationalizations are at base cultural and not psychological. The victim of torture can only be so identified within a structure of cultural values.

Torture is not ubiquitous. Humans, including children, can be cruel and insensitive. We all see this. What we don’t see is torture as a commonplace. There is a taboo like proscription against acts of torture that limits their use to certain circumstances. Those circumstances are culturally defined. One may torture some but not all. The historical rationalizations are based on a conceptualization of civilization as a battle between order and chaos. Someone whose behavior is outside the rubric of civilization’s order are appropriate targets for torture. This behavior may be madness and, as history tells us, torture was employed as a therapy intended to return the patient to well being. The behavior may be religious or philosophical heresy. There is a common misconception that torture was employed to force the heretic to recant. In fact the rationalizations were founded on the idea that it was an act of care, an attempt to help the heretic rediscover the truth of the civilization’s idea of order. It is because of this that the otherwise mild and companionate Augustine of Hippo accepted the application of physical pain to effect conversion even though he held that faith must be freely accepted. One can go even farther back in human history and find the use of torture to confirm such cultural values as chastity in females. What one finds in all of these rationalizations is a passion for an orderly civilization but not some individualized passion or psychological motivation. It is quite the opposite. The rationalizations are intensely intellectual and detailed, not unlike the Bybee memoranda.

At this point I need to insert a comment about the idea of undergraduates at Ivy League universities as “liberal, humanistic, educated American college students.” If there is one thing that characterizes the environment at such institutions it is that one questions authority at one’s own peril. The future for this population is bright and almost guaranteed if one will simply conform to the traditions of the institution. I can think of no more acquiescent and compliant a population than undergraduates at an Ivy League school. This was also my personal experience in my youth. The liberal activists were at San Francisco State University, not Stanford. In fact I would argue that the behavior of these subjects is a demonstration of my contention that it is the underlying motivation, namely the commitment to the cultural norms that enables the use of torture.

As I say I can only present my views here as assertions without much detail. I do contend that the problem of torture in the present context of the U.S. is a cultural crisis and not some problem of excessive scrupulousness or an issue of the prudential application of ethical reasoning. In a way this returns me to the other subject, the Nuremburg Trials. While the basis for these proceedings may be debatable, the inclination to wish to assert the inviolability of all individual human worth, those “unalienable rights” of our tradition, is what is in play today, in the U.S., over this matter. It is not so much a matter of right and wrong behavior as it is a matter of the evolution of a concept of human dignity.