Science and Torture

Torture is illegal and practiced by more than half of the nations of the world. The United Nations Convention Against Torture defines it as any “act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person . . . when such pain or suffering is inflicted by, or at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of, a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”¹ Despite this clarity, torturing nations often contrive laws or rationalizations that attempt to excuse the abuse of disarmed captives as warfare or as merely vigorous interrogation, so-called torture lite.

In its war on terror policies for “counterresistance” interrogations, the United States defined words like “severe” or “intentional” in Convention Against Torture in ways that it had rejected when invoked by other countries defending their mistreatment of prisoners. It also proposed that there is a legally meaningful distinction between “torture” and a more permissible “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”² Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, which was upheld by the US Supreme Court in the Hamdan decision, takes a different view. The Geneva Convention simply includes torture in a list of acts that “are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever”; these include “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture . . . outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”³ The Department of Justice created its definitions from dictionaries and legal precedents without referring to research showing the long-lasting psychiatric, neurologic, social, occupational, and physical sequelae of torture. In 2004, in response to criticism from human rights advocates, the government slightly amended its interrogation techniques⁴ and selectively cited 2 clinical studies, as noted by Başoğlu and colleagues.⁵ The recently enacted Military Commissions Act denies prisoners the right to invoke the provisions of the Geneva Convention and allows the president to interpret the requirements of international law.⁶

The distinction between torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is useless. Research, such as the extensive MK-ULTRA and MK-SEARCH studies in the United States, found that stressful interrogations have diminished intelligence value. Misinformation elicited by pain may lead to mistakenly grounded policies or sorties that needlessly expose soldiers to hostile fire. Harsh interrogations radicalize prisoners and the populations from which they come, degrade the self-image of the military, undermine national support for the government, make it difficult to recruit intelligence assets, and obtain information that is inadmissible at trial.⁷ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's own working group informed him of these research findings⁸ before he authorized harsh counterresistance interrogations.⁹

The distinction between torture and degrading treatment is also dangerous. Başoğlu and colleagues⁵ show that the severity of long-lasting adverse mental effects is unrelated to whether the torture or degrading treatment is physical or psychological and unrelated to objective measures of the severity of techniques. The wrongness of these inflicted harms is compounded by the fact that most abused prisoners, including those in the present war on terror, are innocent or ignorant of terrorist activities. Innocent or not, torture survivors rarely get the mental health treatment that they need. In addition, soldiers who participate in atrocities are themselves at increased risk of posttraumatic stress disorder.¹⁰

Although torture is done to an individual, it is aimed at a society. Like terrorism, it is destructive of civil societies. It is often aimed at political targets, journalists, academics, labor organizers, and voices of moral authority, with the goal of consolidating government power. The wish to promote civil societies is why the international community asserted that no appeal to national sovereignty could legalize torture.¹¹ Although the ideal of that assertion has not been realized, individual appeals for humane treatment by nations, professional societies, and human rights groups regularly secure better conditions of confinement or even release from prison. On a larger scale, when citizens can and do apply political pressure to their own torturing governments, those nations move in the direction of complying with international law.¹² The grounding for these appeals and thus the imperfectly realized aspiration of laws against torture are being eroded by the events in the war on terror.

Human rights–respecting nations must reestablish the authority of international law against torture. Medical societies, compromised by active or passive collaboration with harsh interrogations, must reclaim their moral authority to challenge torture domestically and abroad. The American Psychiatric Society has commendably dissociated itself from harsh interrogations. In the 18th century, Europe abandoned legal interrogational torture on the twin conclusions that it was an affront to human dignity and a poor way to acquire information. Empirical research such as the article by Başoğlu and colleagues can help us find that persuasive holding ground again.

Correspondence: Dr Miles, Center for Bioethics, University of Minnesota, N504 Boynton, 410 Church St, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (miles001@umn.edu).

Financial Disclosure: None reported.