Essentially? People can
be dicks.It’s all…for much the
same reason things like rape, spousal abuse and child neglect continue: in the
short term it makes abusers feel good. It makes them feel powerful. It makes
them feel like they matter.As you’ve probably
gathered by now I really strongly believe that fiction matters. That it helps us to make sense of and articulate what is
right and what is wrong in the world around us.So I’m going to reach
for Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan
for a moment here and ask you to join me and Spider Jerusalem on a roof looking
down over a riot-‘It’s a show of power. How dare anybody ignore the authority of Civic
Center? How dare a bunch of freaks try and think for themselves? So let’s go
out and stomp on children, lunatics and incompetents, because by damn it makes
our balls feel big.
I can see a blatantly unarmed Transient man with half his
face hanging off, and three cops working him over anyway. One of them is
groping his own erection.
I’m sorry. Is that too harsh an observation for you? Does
that sound too much like the Truth?
Fuck you.
If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog’s
cock about Truth, this wouldn’t be happening.’That right there?
That’s why.
Because some people in
positions of authority are made to feel powerful
in the short term and because society in
general is prepared to look the other way.Because we tolerate it.
Because we allow our politicians and our newspapers
and our stories to parrot lies about torture’s effectiveness and tell ourselves
that victims deserve it.This isn’t really
something I talk about on the blog very often and by now (less than 300 words
in) you can probably see why.This makes me fucking
furious.And it is on us.
We do this. With our
rhetoric about being tough, with our
disparaging of human rights, with our apathy.We allow this to
continue. By looking the other way. By pretending some people and some parts of
the world don’t matter. By telling each other that some people are just so
horrible they deserve it.We support it with our
votes to ‘clean up the streets’ and our inability to believe that victims might
be telling the truth.Because politicians and generals and police chiefs
know that having a bunch of people from the margins of society beaten up plays
well with voters and because popular culture sends out a constant message that
torture ‘works’, that it’s edgy and cool and what real heroes do when
bureaucracy gets in the way. That message reaches
people with no experience, no training, no effective oversight and tells them
what they ‘should’ be doing.And their bosses look
the other way or actively encourage it because kicking the shit out of
‘terrorists’/druggies/’agitators’/’heretics’/’any racial, sexual or gendered
slur you wish to imagine’, sure makes it look like they’re doing something
productive.It’s ‘enhanced
interrogation’ honest and they’re pretty sure they’ve got the right person this
time.Information is not the
point.Cooperation is not the
point.Public safety is not
the point.Justice is not the point.
The point is power. The
point is that when we’re angry and afraid and feel helpless or threatened we
tend to want to lash out. Little things like right and wrong or effectiveness don’t come into it.Angry yet? I’m so
furious I could go out and hit someone.See what I mean?
And the flipside of
that is the apathy. Because wherever you are in the world this is happening around you.I have close to 3,000
followers at the time of writing. That’s amazing. It’s astonishing and humbling
that I’ve reached so many people from all over the world.Let me take a quick
little over view of the news I’ve collected this year.Taser
use in the USA . Systematic
mistreatment of immigrants in Britain. Rape of a black man by
police officers in France (that was ahead of the election I believe). An Indian minister
advocating the torture of rape suspects. The systematic
torture of a lawyer in custody in China. Another murder over
‘blasphemy’ in Pakistan. A queer tailor killed in a
Saudi jail. The
South African ‘coffin case’.I haven’t actually been
paying particular attention to the news this year and that’s nowhere near my
full list of relevant news reports.How many of these cases
or studies do you think most people are aware of? How many would they click and
read? How many would they throw their time and energy behind as something to
address and change in their society?This isn’t intended to
shame anybody or call them out. It’s part of the answer.We’re responsible for
this. It continues around the world because we vote for it, we pay for it, we
justify it and we look the other way.Reblogging for the other time zones.
Interrogation as Torture
Interrogation is probably the scenario that comes to most Western
people’s minds when torture is mentioned. The belief that torture can be used
during interrogation is heavily ingrained in Western pop culture whether the
story believes it ‘works’ or not.I’m going to go over some of the most common misconceptions
about what bringing torture to the interrogation table does and does not do.Tell the Truth
‘Care must be
exercised when making use of rebukes, invectives or torture as it will result
in his telling falsehoods and making a fool of you.’ Japanese Kempeitai
manual found in Burman 1943‘The use of force
often has the consequence that the person being interrogated under duress
confesses falsely because he is afraid and as a consequence agrees to
everything the interrogator wishes.’ Indonesian interrogation manual, East
Timor, 1983‘Intense pain is quite
likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from
distress.’ CIA Kubark
Counterintelligence Manual 1963I can’t prove conclusively that in the history of the world
torture has never ever once produced accurate information. Overwhelmingly often it
does not. There are several reasons why.Torture produces a
lot of lies. Both people with
information and people without
information have a good reason to lie under torture. And they both do. The
person with information does not want
to give it up. The person without
information needs to say something to make the torture stop.Humans are bad at
telling when someone is lying. When tested even people who think they’re
good at spotting lies can’t do it consistently. It can be almost impossible
to tell who is hiding something and who genuinely doesn’t know what’s going on.
A person under torture might have already
told the truth and started lying when the interrogator didn’t believe them.
Which is exactly what happened to Shelia Cassidy when she was tortured in Chile
in the 70s.Pain and stress
destroy the human memory. Experiments with willing volunteers have
repeatedly shown that stress, pain and lack of sleep make it difficult for
people to remember. A 2004 paper using US military survival school as the ‘high
stress situation’ which simulated capture and interment as a POW (C A Morgan et
al, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27, 265-279) found that between
51-68% of soldiers identified the wrong person as their interrogator.
Interrogations had lasted four hours with the interrogator shouting at and manhandling
the volunteers. The low stress group identified the wrong person 12-38% of the
time.Torture results in
loss of public trust. Most police and intelligence investigations live or
die on public support. People coming forward voluntarily with accurate
information. People reporting on suspects. In the long term torture actively
recruits for the opposing ‘side’. According to the IRA this is exactly what
happened in Northern Ireland when the British used torture. It also happened in
Aden and to a lesser extent Cyprus.Torture in short produces more lies than truth and in such a
mixture that it can be hard to tell which is which. Because of the pain it
causes torture can make it impossible for victims who want to tell the truth to actually do so accurately. And because of
the effect it has on communities it often makes it harder to gather accurate
information through more reliable sources.Accuracy in torture is so poor it is ‘in some cases less accurate than flipping a coin’. (No that isn’t
exaggeration, that’s a quote from D Rejali who literally wrote the book)The Ticking Bomb
The famous ‘ticking-bomb’ scenario is a fictional situation
(it literally came from a novel, written by a suspected torturer) where a
disaster (such as a bomb attack) is known to be approaching and in order to
save innocent lives the characters need more intel fast.So they start debating whether to use torture.
Depending on the story and the characters they sometimes do
torture. Usually if they do it gives them information they then use to save
lives.There’s another problem, aside from the total lack of accuracy
for information that comes from torture. Torture takes as long or longer than other
interrogation techniques.According to the CIA’s own records detainees were put through
several days of sleep deprivation
before interrogation. The Senate Torture Report (testimony from Ali Soufan)
estimated that their torture techniques took 30 days.According to British records and accounts from the IRA
during the Troubles a single torture session by ‘walling’ (sleep deprivation, white
noise and stress positions combined) could last between nine and forty three
hours.I’ve selected the following quotes to give an idea of the
time frame for short tortures used in
interrogation. Both are from Northern Ireland by Irish men detained by the
British. Emphasis is mine.‘One powerfully built
RUC detective would keep me pinned in a position while the other one would hold
my elbow then press back on my wrist. And that could last for an hour or
possibly two hours. And it’s excruciatingly painful, to the extent that I
remember after three or four days I
would simply go unconscious-’ Tommy McKearney‘When I was taken away
from Girdwood to be interned, I thought
I had been there for about eight days, but it was only three. I later realised I was only being allowed to sleep for
ten minutes at a time.’ Joe DochertyInterrogation always
takes time. And that time is measured in days not minutes.Sanitised Portrayals
‘NO useful information so far….He did vomit a
couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It’s been 10
hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing.’ Senate Torture
Report, from quoted emails SSCI 2014, 41-42For me this is one of the most noticeable differences
between torture in pop culture and torture in reality. Torture in films and
books is always sanitised.I don’t mean that it isn’t gory or isn’t gory ‘enough’.
Blood seems to be a cinematic staple and seeing the hero beaten and bloodied in
a dingy lit room has become standard in a certain sort of action story.What I’m talking about are the body fluids and products
we’re trained to think are less acceptable. Vomit. Urine. Mucus. Faeces.I can think of several movies where a ‘good-guy’ gets beaten
to a bloody pulp on screen. I can’t think of any where they piss themselves. But
losing control of bladder and bowel function seem to be pretty common in real
life. A lot of the eyewitness accounts I’ve read about systematic torture
mention the smell of urine and shit.Vomiting is something I don’t see mentioned as often in
survivor accounts but I think it’s very likely to occur frequently because a
lot of common methods of torture produce nausea.The ‘Tough’
Interrogator
‘It may be only later,
outside of that specific environment, that the torturer may question his or her
behaviour, and begin to experience psychological damage resulting from
involvement in torture and trauma. In these cases, the resulting psychological
symptoms are very similar to those of victims, including anxiety, intrusive
traumatic memories and impaired cognitive and social functioning.’ Psychologists
Mark Costanzo and Ellen Gerrity.‘Those techniques [CIA
‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques] are so harsh it’s emotionally distressing
to the people who are administering them.’ Dr James Mitchell, psychologist
involved in the CIA’s EIT program.‘We are where we are-
and we’re left popping our Prozac and taking our pills at night.’ Anonymous
torturer quoted in Cruel BritanniaThere’s a growing body of evidence that torture has a negative psychological effect on the
torturer.The evidence is for the most part anecdotal, based on
patterns emerging across interviews. Torturers, funnily enough, don’t show up
in droves for psychological studies. But there is a pattern. One of substance
abuse, addiction, PTSD and suicide.The cause of these symptoms in torturers is the same thing
that causes trauma in people who witness horrific things. It is well known that
seeing violent attacks on others can
cause trauma in witnesses.Humans are empathic creatures.
There is a measurable, automatic response in the
brain to seeing others in pain. We can not control it and we can not
stop it. Even when we are told that the
other person is anaesthetized our brains still respond to their perceived
pain.This, combined with the destruction of normal social
interaction and dehumanisation, appears in a very real sense to harm torturers.If you’re planning to use torture as part of an
interrogation scene it’s worth noting that some torturers do believe torture is a
useful way to get information, despite
the evidence. Some of them cling to the idea that they had to torture, that what they did was useful and saved lives. Some
of them seem to overplay the value of torture in order to justify their own
actions and jobs.None of that makes them immune to the effect of torturing
another human being.[Additional Sources-
‘Torture and Democracy’, Princeton, D Rejali (Only order
this if you’ll be at home to pick it up, at over 850 pages it’s a monster)‘Accuracy of eyewitness memory for person encountered during
exposure to highly intense stress’, The International Journal of Law and
Psychiatry C A Morgan, G Hazlett, A Doran, S Garrett, G Hoyt, P Thomas, M
Baranoksi, S M Southwick, 2004 (This team have actually done a series on high
stress situations and the effects on memory. Charles Morgan is the first author
on this set of papers.)‘Audacity to Believe’ Cleveland, S Cassidy
‘Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of
Interrogation.’ Harvard University Press, S O’Mara (Highly recommended, reasonably accessible for a layman)‘Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture.’ Portobello
Books, I Cobain (Very good history, although the author doesn’t seem to understand many of the techniques he writes about)‘What are you feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during
Empathy for Pain’, PLoS ONE, C Lamm, H C Nusbaum, A N Meltzoff, J Decety 2007
(The experiments in this paper include brain scans of people seeing photos of a
needle and a hand in various different positions, some of which would be
painful. There wasn’t much change in brain response if the volunteers were told
the hand couldn’t feel pain.)]
Violence, Abusers, and Protest
My grandfather was a generally peaceful man. He was a gardener, an EMT, a town selectman, and an all around fantastic person. He would give a friend – or a stranger – the shirt off his back if someone needed it. He also taught me some of the most important lessons I ever learned about violence, and why it needs to exist.
When I was five, my grandfather and grandmother discovered that my rear end and lower back were covered in purple striped bruises and wheals. They asked me why, and I told them that Tom, who was at that time my stepfather, had punished me. I don’t remember what he was punishing me for, but I remember the looks on their faces.
When my mother and stepfather arrived, my grandmother took my mother into the other room. Then my grandfather took my stepfather into the hallway. He was out of my eye line, but I saw through the crack in the door on the hinge side. He slammed my stepfather against the wall so hard that the sheet rock buckled, and told him in low terms that if he ever touched me again they would never find his body.
I absolutely believed that he would kill my stepfather, and I also believed that someone in the world thought my safety was worth killing for.
In the next few years, he gave me a few important tips and pointers for dealing with abusers and bullies. He taught me that if someone is bringing violence to you, give it back to them as harshly as you can so they know that the only response they get is pain. He taught me that guns are used as scare tactics, and if you aren’t willing to accept responsibility for mortally wounding someone, you should never own one. He told me that if I ever had a gun aimed at me, I should accept the possibility of being shot and rush the person, or run away in a zig-zag so they couldn’t pick me off. He taught me how to break someone’s knee, how to hold a knife, and how to tell if someone is holding a gun with intent to kill. He was absolutely right, and he was one of the most peaceful people I’ve ever met. He was never, to my knowledge, violent with anyone who didn’t threaten him or his family. Even those who had, he gave chances to, like my first stepfather.
When I was fourteen, a friend of mine was stalked by a mutual acquaintance. I was by far younger than anyone else in the social crowd; he was in his mid twenties, and the object of his “affection” was as well. Years before we had a term for “Nice Guy” bullshit, he did it all. He showed up at her house, he noted her comings and goings, he observed who she spent time with, and claimed that her niceness toward him was a sign that they were actually in a relationship.
This came to a head at a LARP event at the old NERO Ware site. He had been following her around, and felt that I was responsible for increased pressure from our mutual friends to leave her alone. He confronted me, her, and a handful of other friends in a private room and demanded that we stop saying nasty things about him. Two of our mutual friends countered and demanded that he leave the woman he was stalking alone.
Stalker-man threw a punch. Now, he said in the aftermath that he was aiming for the man who had confronted him, but he was looking at me when he did it. He had identified me as the agent of his problems and the person who had “turned everyone against him.” His eyes were on mine when the punch landed. He hit me hard enough to knock me clean off my feet and I slammed my head into a steel bedpost on the way down.
When I shook off the stunned confusion, I saw that two of our friends had tackled him. I learned that one had immediately grabbed him, and the other had rabbit-punched him in the face. I had a black eye around one eyebrow and inner socket, and he was bleeding from his lip.
At that time in my life, unbeknownst to anyone in the room, I was struggling with the fact that I had been molested repeatedly by someone who my mother had recently broken up with. He was gone, but I felt conflicted and worthless and in pain. I was still struggling, but I knew in that moment that I had a friend in the world who rabbit-punched a man for hitting me, and I felt a little more whole.
Later that year, I was bullied by a girl in my school. She took special joy in tormenting me during class, in attacking me in the hallways, in spreading lies and asserting things about me that were made up. She began following me to my locker, and while I watched the clock tick down, she would wait for me to open it and try to slam my hand in it. She succeeded a few times. I attempted to talk to counselors and teachers. No one did anything. Talking to them made it worse, since they turned and talked to her and she called me a “tattle” for doing it. I followed the system, and it didn’t work.
I remembered my friend socking someone in the face when he hit me. I recalled what my grandfather had taught me, and decided that the next time she tried, I would make sure it was the last. I slammed the door into her face, then shut her head in the base of my locker, warping the aluminum so badly that my locker no longer worked. She never bothered me again.
Violence is always a potential answer to a problem. I believe it should be a last answer – everything my grandfather taught me before his death last year had focused on that. He hadn’t built a bully or taught me to seek out violence; he taught me how to respond to it.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk recently about how, after the recent Nazi-punching incident, we are in more danger because they will escalate. That we will now see more violence and be under more threat because of it. I reject that. We are already under threat. We are already being attacked. We are being stripped of our rights, we are seeing our loved ones and our family reduced to “barely human” or equated with monsters because they are different.
To say that we are at more risk now than we were before a Nazi got punched in the face is to claim that abusers only hurt you if you fight back. Nazis didn’t need a reason to want to hurt people whom they have already called inhuman, base, monsters, thugs, retards, worthless, damaging to the gene pool, and worthy only of being removed from the world. They were already on board. The only difference that comes from fighting back is the intimate knowledge that we will not put up with their shit.
And I’m just fine with that.
Inspiration Haven 