And for those who promote torture, it is difficult to get to it really. With all the obfuscations, cover-ups, destruction of evidence, changing of constitutional rights, and the encouragement of a culture of revenge, it is difficult to hear exactly what the promoters of torture say. What they say is caught up in legalities, courts, such that it will take a long time to unravel and make clear a country wide position and hold accountable those who have led us down this road.

It is appropriate that the APA follow what the psychiatrists (AMA) and other mental health professional organizations have already declared.

Lastly, I have read or heard the voice of one of the torturers declare with a degree self satisfaction, that they now have the tools to incapacitate a human being within 24 hours; they mean they can detach all the wiring, pull apart the connections between heart, soul, and mind and make them subserviently passive, paranoid, and crazy in that short period of time. They become as if they were passive fearful children.

“…..and all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put humpty-dumpty together again.”

And it is very, very difficult, slow moving work to get a human being who has such evil behavior done to them, to ever get them to trust their human counterparts again.

And that is only on the micro level, on the macro level, through psych-ops we are torturing the soul of the Arab, the soul of the Islamics. We are ridiculing them, dehumanizing them as “ragheads” with a stupid religion, with a stupid way of life, with no sense of humor, as anti-woman, anti western, and on and on.

And on some level, perhaps, a degree of further enlightenment may be desired, but we in the west, with are modern secular material consumer societies are in no position to point fingers.

I’m almost done with an article for TMV on the School of the Americas, here in the USA, where torture is taught as though it’s a cooking class. And an interview with a colleague on Cypress…who helps people who are now freed, but who were victims of torture while being held. Many of them have immigrated from the former Yugoslavia. I’ve had to pace myself in writing this article above, and these other two. There is, as I know you know, something that hurts, and something that fatigues the psyche to dangle that far into the abyss to try to report back something useful.

Dear Jilly; I don’t know that we have ever been able to utterly depend on the infrastructures/ organizations to proclaim their ethics with such clarity it breaks those who are spellbound into “going along’ with inhumane matters … In history, there is example after example of people remaining silent while in full knowledge of some ongoing horrific.

However, in the current culture, where some of the most central groups we have at least half-relied on, appear now to be principle groups but without principles…. it is for us, ….as it was before, during, and after…. up to us to be the voices. When we can. Where ever we can. However we can.

You do it with your poetry and your love, Domajot with her writing and deep caring also. We all have our way. Some of us, more than one way. I know from reading both your and Domajot’s words over time that you know it is our time to use all the ways we’ve been gifted with, with as much clarity and heart as possible. And you both do. Keep going. I can see you.

My grandmother Katerin used to say about ‘fighting for right’: “Any idiot can unravel a sweater in a minute… but to knit it back up into a better, more beautiful shape… takes three things:
Vision.
Patience.
Much knit-one, purl-one,
knit-one, purl-one
knit-one, purl-one
knit-one, purl-one…. ”
Dr.e

After the tears and smoking the forbidden cigarette, I started to think about this more deeply.
As a result, I was left with some questions.

Reading some of the parallel discussions within the medical profession, including those about assisting in carrying out the death penalty, there do arise areas where right is not so clearly separted from wrong.

In regard to torture, the first problem seems to lie in the inability to clearly identiry the wall where an attempt to influence ends and torture begins.
Certainly, there is no lack of clarity when the topic is the extreme, like waterboarding or physical abuse. But where does denying use of the Koran, for example, fit in? Can advice on the less severe meaures be legitimately seen as preventing the more extreme measures?

Do you and your coleagues name specific techniques to which you object or is any assistance/advice that helps influence detainess to give information off limits?

If I were a healer of either the body or the mind, this would be my nightmare scenario:
A detainee has been badly hurt (mind, body or both)
and I’m called on to revive him. I know full well, that as soon as the detainee is fit, the abuse will resume. Is the ethical choce to ease the suffering even if it’s for a brief respite or is it to refuse any participation at all? Is the impulse to administer a pain killer wherever or whenever thete is pain legitimate?

Please don’t feel obliged to answer if it takes too much time or effort.
This is a topic I’ve been puzzling over for a long time, and the more I think about it, the more important it seems to me to tackle the iffy areas.
If we are to succeed in banishing torture, we need to be clear about what exactly it consists of.
The other way to go would be to just concentrate on specific techniques, but that leaves the door open for the inroduction of substitue techniques, which are equally abhorrent.

Any thoughts?