Okay- I just sloughed my way through Jay Bybee's Aug 1, 2002 Torture memo and Steven Bradbury's May 10, 2005 memo.
Since these memos have been able to pass for defensible legal opinions instead of immediate grounds for disbarment, it's clear we need a new Anti-torture law, that spells stuff out in plain English.
Executive orders are all well and good, but we need a law on the books that automatically puts interpretations like the memos linked above beyond the pale.
- Being a prisoner is vastly different from being a willing trainee. (Bradbury, at least does ask the question, but never seems to come to grips with the fact that the testimony of SERE graduates, and the statistics of the SERE program should not be the basis upon which he determines, what constitutes torture. Heck the program was designed to be simulated torture - to train those enrolled in resistance techniques. What made it a simulation was the fact that it was a training. That there was trust between the trainees and the military, (if not they wouldn't be in the military), and that it was for a very limited duration, after which the trainees either graduated or flunked, but it was over and done with. --- All vastly different from being a prisoner and having this stuff done to one.)
- There is no such thing as an objective pain scale. Mental and physical pain assessment is subjective, not objective. There's a reason hospitals ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10 and take what you say seriously.
- When techniques are truly coercive, they are dangerously close to torture and should not be defensible as policy if one takes the intent of the UN Conventions on Torture seriously. (Whether they would be potentially defensible in a court of law, is a different question than whether they are sound processes that should be systemically adopted.)
- Setting medical practitioners up as the arbiters of the process is unconscionable. This is an issue that needs to be addressed. If medical practitioners assigned to the military routinely allowed themselves to be drawn into this role, and/or were routinely ordered to do so, (and the answer seems to be yes), we have a problem in the military that needs some serious reflection and re-training.
AMA Code of Ethics
Section on Torture in the AMA Code of Ethics
New language more clearly expresses APA's no-torture, no-exceptions policy.
- Every technique discussed has the potential to be horrific in and of itself, but when these techniques are combined, and implemented over time by one's jailers and interrogators, how could this be anything but torture?
- Reading these memos makes me seriously wonder about the mental health of the individuals that wrote them and of anyone who finds them defensible.