Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Face It

Abu Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times over four or five days, and Mitchell and Jessen [two CIA contractors on site] concluded that the prisoner was broken, the former U.S. official said. "They became convinced that he was cooperating. There was unanimity within the team."

CIA officials at the Counterterrorist Center were not convinced. "Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent," the former official said. "Headquarters said it would be on the team's back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, 'You've lost your spine.' " ...

The two men threatened to quit if the waterboarding continued and insisted that officials from Langley come to Thailand to watch the procedure, the former official said. After a CIA delegation arrived, Abu Zubaida was strapped down one more time. As water poured over his cloth-covered mouth, he gasped for breath. "They all watched, and then they all agreed to stop," the former official said.

The nice way of looking at this episode is that the officials from Langley immediately recognized Zubaida's water-boarding as useless torture. The not-so-nice way is that they authorized it 83 times, and demanded 30 more days of it, before they took the trouble to see it firsthand. Apparently, one look was enough to change their minds. Too bad they didn't try that a bit earlier.

According to Warrick and Finn, an Obama administration task force is about to submit protocol recommendations for future interrogations. Here's Human Nature's proposal: No technique shall be applied until the authorizing official has witnessed it, at least on video.

I'm not ruling out water-boarding. But before you tell your pals around the water cooler that it's a vital interrogation tool or that the bastards deserve it, check out one of the demonstrations posted on the Internet, such as the waterboarding of Slate and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens. You can also read David J. Morris' firsthand account of a water-boarding, published here six months ago.

The same goes for any other violent or lethal practice you countenance from the comfort of your desk. Capital punishment? Watch an execution. Eating meat? Check out a slaughterhouse. Abortion? Peruse the video library or, if the pregnancy is yours, look at an ultrasound. And don't think that opposing these practices insulates you from the same responsibility. If you think capital punishment is never warranted, acquaint yourself with the handiwork of a few murderers. Before you defund international family-planning agencies, meet some malnourished children.

You're entitled to your opinion. But you're not entitled to your ignorance. Go educate yourself. It's worth leaving the comfort of your desk, even if you work at Langley.

Exposing Executioners

If we expose the people who tortured terrorism detainees, whom will we go after next? The people who execute death-row prisoners?

The scenario makes sense. Executioners, like water-boarders, act under government orders. Executioners, unlike water-boarders, aim to kill. They do kill, by the dozens. And public support for the death penalty has been declining. It's not hard to envision a world in which we look back on capital punishment the way we now look back on torture.

Facing the prospect of exposure, if you were an executioner today, what would you do?

Washington state's executioners have made their decision: They're quitting. Here's the April 2 report from the Seattle Times:

Four people who have volunteered to administer lethal injections to death-row inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla quit their positions this week, apparently worried that their identities could become public as a result of an ongoing court case to decide whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The four resigned Tuesday, which was the deadline Thurston County Superior Court Judge Chris Wickham had set for the team's records—detailing the members' credentials, qualifications and experience in administering lethal drugs—to be submitted for his review. The state is now without a lethal-injection team. ... "Walla Walla is a small town, so it's not hard to figure out (someone's identity) based on their qualifications," [a state official] said. "They don't want picketers showing up on their front lawns, and they don't want offenders knowing who they are."

In a follow-up story on April 15, the Times reported that a state senator has "introduced a bill that would forbid the release of names and other identifying information of execution team members." But the president of the Washington Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty isn't backing down. He says, "[T]he public has a right to know whether members of an execution team are qualified to do [their] job."

Is execution as bad as water-boarding? Are executioners as culpable as torturers? Even if they aren't, should their identities be known?

And here's the harder question: Would you give the same answer about people who perform abortions? Do you think it's unfair that threats of exposure and picketing have led many doctors to quit doing abortions?

In the fury of a moral backlash, naming names and holding people accountable feels like the right thing to do. But before you go down that road, remember that the choice of targets won't always be yours.

Torture School

The difference between SERE and the Bush interrogation program is the difference between S&M and rape. There is no consent. There are no mutually understood boundaries. There are no magic words. People who can't tell the difference between rape and S&M go to jail. What happens to people who can't tell the difference between torture and training?

More here.

Torture, Mind, and Body

Does torture inflict lasting psychological harm?

Yesterday we examined the CIA's reasons for involving psychologists in the Bush torture—sorry, I meant detainee interrogation program. The psychologist's job was to figure out how to inflict unbearable anguish on prisoners without requiring violence, or at least without leaving visible scars.

But what about mental scars?

In the Los Angeles Times, Sarah Gantz and Ben Meyerson look into the controversy:

The conclusion in recently released Justice Department memos that CIA interrogation techniques would not cause prolonged mental harm is disputed by some doctors and psychologists, who say that the mental damage incurred from the practices is significant and undeniable. ... Interrogation techniques undoubtedly have lasting effects, [professor Nina Thomas of NYU] said, such as paranoia, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and "the destruction of people's personalities." ... "Some of these [techniques] clearly have a very real physical component," said Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. He cited waterboarding. ... A prisoner deprived of sleep may be overwhelmed with memories of torture when they become tired years later, Keller said. The same is true, he said, for the stomach growls of those tortured by starvation.

I'll go a step further. The problem isn't just that the techniques are physical. The problem is that the mind itself is physical. I just got back from a conference at Cambridge University sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. In a series of seminars with neuroscientists and philosophers—among them, Chris Frith of University College London, Alva Noe of the University of California-Berkeley, and Fraser Watts of Cambridge—we explored how physiology, mental activity, and environmental conditions transform one another. You can't torture the mind without altering the brain. And since the brain is part of the body—in fact, the part of the body that most influences all the others—the marks you leave are pervasive. You can alter any physical process in which the mind is involved: sleep, eating, conversation, love, going out in public, or all of the above.

The U.S. military knows this. Its brochure for service members with post-traumatic stress disorder states:

PTSD is a condition that develops after someone has experienced a life-threatening situation, such as combat. In PTSD, the event must have involved actual or threatened death or serious injury and caused an emotional reaction involving intense fear, hopelessness, or horror. ... People who have PTSD have experiences from all three of these categories ["Re-experience the event over and over again," "Avoid people, places, or feelings that remind you of the event," and "Feel ‘keyed up' or on-edge all the time"] that stay with them most of the time and interfere with their ability to live their life or do their job.

I look forward to watching Bush's lawyers explain before Congress—and maybe the International Criminal Court—why this diagnosis doesn't apply to water-boarded detainees.

Psychology and Torture

When you need to torture a detainee, make sure you send in the right kind of expert: a psychologist.

In Saturday's Washington Post, Joby Warrick and Peter Finn report that the latest batch of Bush administration torture memos "show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation." In particular:

An Aug. 1, 2002, memo said the CIA relied on its "on-site psychologists" for help in designing an interrogation program for Abu Zubaida and ultimately came up with a list of 10 methods drawn from a U.S. military training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. That program, used to help prepare pilots to endure torture in the event they are captured, is loosely based on techniques that were used by the Communist Chinese to torture American prisoners of war. ... The CIA psychologists had personal experience with SERE and helped convince CIA officials that harsh tactics would coerce confessions from Abu Zubaida without inflicting permanent harm.

Note the reversal of purpose. SERE was developed to study torture methods so that our pilots could withstand them. But we came to understand these methods so well, and were so impressed by their efficacy, that we began applying them to our own detainees. Torture as a science led to torture as a technology. This often happens with expertise: We acquire it for one purpose but soon adapt it to another. In this case, the opposite purpose.

Warrick and Finn continue:

Waterboarding was touted as particularly useful because it was "reported to be almost 100 percent effective in producing cooperation," the memo said. The agency then used a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaida to find his vulnerable points. One of them, it turns out, was a severe aversion to bugs. "He appears to have a fear of insects," states the memo, which describes a plan to place a caterpillar or similar creature inside a tiny wooden crate in which Abu Zubaida was confined. CIA officials say the plan was never carried out.

Again, notice how easily expertise is turned upside down. Clinical psychology is customized to the patient. A therapist doesn't settle for general principles; she explores your particular fears. The point is to help you. But identifying fears is a skill, and it can just as easily be turned against you.

Interrogators were also told they could "exploit the detainee's fear of being seen naked" by women, according to the Post's Jeffrey Smith. Whatever you fear, we'll supply.

Most of the uproar over the torture memos focuses on the violence they condoned. But the purpose of interrogative torture isn't violence. It's cooperation. Cooperation is a mental act. I could slam your head against a wall, but that might get messy, and it might end up being difficult to explain to the Red Cross. I'd rather bypass your body and go straight to the organ that's refusing to cooperate: your brain. That's where the psychologist comes in. He tells me how to inflict unbearable anguish on you without requiring violence, or at least without leaving visible scars.

Even where violence is concerned, the targeted channel is psychological. Here's former CIA Director Michael Hayden explaining yesterday on Fox News Sunday why he opposed the release of the torture memos:

What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al-Qaida terrorist. That's very valuable information. Now, it doesn't mean we would always go to those outer limits, but it describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond. To me, that's very useful for our enemies, even if, as a policy matter, this president at this time had decided not to use one, any, or all of those techniques.

In other words, the CIA wants detainees to live in terror of what we might do to them. Physically, we may have policies that bar us from hurting or maiming them in this or that way. But psychologically, we mustn't let them know this. We want to build a landscape of possible horrors in their imagination that's worse than the real thing.

Torture is mental. That's why the CIA used psychologists—and why investigations of the Bush torture program must go beyond the violence we actually applied.

Obama and Stem Cells, Continued

I say it's moral. So do two thinkers from opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, Daniel Callahan, a cofounder of the center, points out that supporters of stem-cell research have been wrong

to conflate opposition to stem cell research and a variety of other actions by the Bush administration. That administration was guilty of manipulating, or suppressing, scientific information on a wide range of issues, including global warming and sex education. I call that behavior patently anti-science as well as a misuse of government power. But its stem cell opposition did not encompass any distortion of the science of such research. That is not how it argued its case.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Yuval Levin, a former executive director of Bush's bioethics council, argues that

science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. ... To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities—economic, political and ethical—in making decisions is the very definition of policymakers' duty.

One reason I like these two guys is that they're clear-eyed critics of spin and self-delusion, even when the spin and delusion are coming from their own allies. On the relationship between science and politics, I particularly recommend Levin's new book, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. He's right that Obama's decision doesn't moot or end the debate about using embryos. So let's honor that debate by continuing it.

Levin quotes President Kennedy, who said that many modern problems require

very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of 'passionate movements' which have stirred this country so often in the past. Now they deal with questions which are beyond the comprehension of most men.

Against this "technocratic temptation," Levin argues for democratic oversight. In principle, I agree. But the comments I've received from readers about Obama's stem-cell decision worry me. Many people on both sides seem ill-informed or self-deluded about basic scientific questions. Liberals are denying the simple fact that human embryos are the beginnings of people. Conservatives are pretending that adult stem cells are more powerful than embryonic ones. If ordinary people want to govern science policy, they need to educate themselves so they can govern well.

(By the way: To all of you who protested that torture is different from stem-cell harvesting: Of course it is. That's the nature of comparisons: The things being compared differ in many respects. The similarity in this case is that on both issues, moral objections are being dismissed as interference in a purely technical question of saving lives. That, not the merits of stem-cell research, was the point of the article.)

Second, Levin writes that in announcing his decision on Monday, Obama "argued that to deny free rein to stem cell science is to ignore and reject the promise of science as such." The president "pledged that his administration would ‘make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,'" and his executive order "omits any mention of ethical debate."

I think what happened Monday is more complicated than that. Based on the spin that came out of the administration over the weekend, I expected Obama to make exactly the argument Levin describes. But he didn't. Among other things, Obama said:

Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view. But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans ... have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research. That the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.

And:

I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.

Levin is right about Obama invoking facts over ideology. But that was in the context of Obama's memorandum on scientific issues generally.

It looks to me as though the administration hasn't resolved how it's going to treat these issues. The mentality Levin describes—burying moral objections and portraying embryo research as just another case of Bush's "war on science"—pervades most of the spin coming out of the White House and its feeder institution, the Center for American Progress. That's why the White House paired the stem-cell order with the announcement on restoring scientific integrity. But for some reason, Obama himself isn't entirely playing along. His remarks on Monday sounded a lot like what he has said about abortion and other social issues: acknowledging moral disagreement while striving for consensus or at least compromise. I think the administration is unresolved, and we should encourage it to acknowledge and grapple with the moral questions.

Third, Levin describes the moral question this way:

If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections, government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems.

I cringe at this interpretation of the Declaration. Levin believes that equality means a 5-day-old embryo has the same right to life as a 5-year-old girl. I just can't buy that. I'm a gradualist. I value the 5-day-old embryo because it's on its way to becoming the 5-year-old girl. But it's not there yet. It hasn't acquired the sentience and cognition that characterize a full-fledged human being.

The Declaration says we're created with an unalienable right to liberty as well as life. But that hasn't stopped us from regulating liberties in proportion to maturity, as we do, for example, with curfews and driving. Why can't we exercise the same discretion with respect to life? Yes, life is a more basic right. But maybe that just means that instead of drawing lines after birth, as we do with liberty, we should confine our line-drawing about life to the period before birth.

Slippery slopes run both ways. Let's call that Human Nature's second law. If we don't draw moral lines against the exploitation of embryos, we may end up obliterating respect for human life generally. But if we're so afraid of that prospect that we refuse to draw lines permitting the use of any embryos under any conditions, we may end up obliterating the moral difference between embryos and full-grown people. Liberals should think seriously about the first scenario. Conservatives should think just as seriously about the second.