On Tuesday, one of those detainees, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was sent to Guantánamo in 2002 and remains there to this day, is poised to offer a powerful rejoinder. Three years into his detention — years during which he was isolated, tortured, beaten, sexually abused and humiliated — Slahi wrote a 466-page, 122,000-word account of what had happened to him up to that point.
His manuscript was immediately classified, and it took years of litigation and negotiation by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force the military to declassify a redacted version. Even with the redactions, “Guantánamo Diary” is an extraordinary document — “A vision of hell, beyond Orwell, beyond Kafka,” as John le Carré aptly describes it in a back cover blurb — that every American should read.
.. But the quote that sticks with me most is something that one of his guards told him, something that could stand as a fitting epitaph for Guantánamo itself: “I know I can go to hell for what I did to you.”
Trying to Cure Depression, but Inspiring Torture
Seligman inferred that the canines that went on to escape shocks had realized something important—not all shocks are equal, and it doesn’t hurt to keep trying to get away. Those that didn’t likely went through a different reasoning process: Nothing I do here helps, so why even bother trying?
.. Humans, the group posited, differed from other animals in one significant respect: when they find themselves helpless, they explicitly ask why that is the case. The answer, in turn, can differ along three different lines: whether the electric shock, so to speak, is seen as permanent or transient, pervasive or limited, and personal or incidental. Seligman called these differences our explanatory style. Some people were naturally inclined to believe that bad things will keep happening to us and that they are our fault. Some were naturally inclined toward the opposite—bad things are happening now, but they’ll stop and they’re not our fault. The former were those who were prone to depression; the latter were those who tended to bounce back. Seligman believed that humans, like dogs, could be taught to become more resilient, a phenomenon he called learned optimism.
.. And, importantly, training people to change their explanatory habits—to more narrow, external, and transient—seemed to help them overcome existing depression and, in some cases, prevent its onset even when other risk factors were high.
.. This work, according to Seligman, who, in 1998, became president of the American Psychological Association, is his legacy. “I have spent my life trying to cure learned helplessness,” he told me.
But then came the torture report. And when he heard what his research had been used to justify, he was both shocked and mystified. He told me that he was “grieved that good science, which has helped many people overcome depression, may have been used for such a bad purpose as torture.” Not only that, but its very use, he felt, was contrary to the core of his findings. He is no scholar of interrogation, he says, but as he understands it, “the point of interrogation is to get at the truth and to have the person believe that telling the truth will lead to good treatment.” Does learned helplessness actually achieve that end?
.. A person in a state of learned helplessness is someone who is passive, someone who has abandoned all active will and desire. He can tell the truth, yes, but why? Lying or saying whatever it is that the torturer wants to hear is just as likely to attain the same result. A person without motivation is not a person who can be induced to tell deep truths: the incentive simply isn’t there.
Two Brothers Suspected in Killings Were Known to French Intelligence Services
Chérif’s interest in radical Islam, it was said at the 2008 trial, was rooted in his fury over the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, particularly the mistreatment of Muslims held at Abu Ghraib prison.
London Review of Books: David Bromwich writes about torture
In effecting this rupture of morale, Tony Blair had an importance second only to Cheney. After 2001, Blair’s words carried a weight with respectable opinion in the US unrivalled by any American politician. His demeanour lent to the campaign for war a presumption of humility that Cheney could never have supplied. His pledge of fidelity to the ‘sense of justice that makes moral the love of liberty’ was a much-needed supplement to the Cheney imperative of ‘working the dark side’; and the combination of Blair and Cheney seems to have relieved George W. Bush of any last residue of doubt that he was right to set the entire Middle East on the path of war. Two wise and experienced politicians, so different yet speaking now in a single voice: how could they be wrong?
.. As Sam Husseini noticed in a commentary for the website Common Dreams, a main purpose of the torture was achieved whether the things the prisoners said were true or not. Bush and Cheney in early 2002 were hell-bent on a war against Iraq; essential to the case for war was the production of quotable sentences (truth or lie would do equally well) concerning the links between al-Qaida and Iraq, and the possession of WMD by Iraq. A groan of assent of the relevant kind was extorted from the prisoner Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, as footnote 857 of the report clearly says. Additional materials seem to have been drawn from other prisoners, and in that sense the use of torture was a success. The stainless Colin Powell would cite al-Libi’s confession in his presentation to the UN in February 2003.
.. Much of Brennan’s utility to Obama came from his status as an insider to the torture arrangements. If Obama called in Brennan the former agent in large part to protect himself from the agency, Brennan on his side must have been wary of still-active agents. There were things they could divulge about him if they chose. The silence regarding torture until now was a predictable consequence of this web of mutual fears.
.. A whole subset of the argument on torture has asked whether it works – whether any confession extracted by such means can supply a useful lead or serve as reliable evidence at a trial. With the same propriety, one might ask whether slavery works. It is said that people have always tortured. Indeed they have, and so, too, have people always had an appetite for slavery. But the judgment of slavery in the 21st century is very different from what it was in the 19th; and before 2001, the same had come to be true of torture: it was understood as an atrocious practice which no one should defend and no one should want to get away with.