Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- I Downgrading rights and expanding power during post-9/11 panic
- II The ticking bomb as moral fantasy and moral fraud
- III The evils of torture
- 5 A communicative conception of torture
- 6 Human dignity, humiliation, and torture
- 7 Mental torture: a critique of erasures in US law
- IV Complicity in torture
- Main index
- Index of legal authorities
- References
7 - Mental torture: a critique of erasures in US law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- I Downgrading rights and expanding power during post-9/11 panic
- II The ticking bomb as moral fantasy and moral fraud
- III The evils of torture
- 5 A communicative conception of torture
- 6 Human dignity, humiliation, and torture
- 7 Mental torture: a critique of erasures in US law
- IV Complicity in torture
- Main index
- Index of legal authorities
- References
Summary
Introduction
As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.
John McCain’s bones may have been broken, but his spirit never was.
Torture can be psychological as well as physical. Prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, humiliation and sexual degradation, close confinement in coffin-like boxes, and threats to you or those you love all produce horrific mental suffering. The forms it takes are hardly mysterious, and we can describe them in everyday language as well as psychiatric categories: despair, loneliness, disorientation, terror, depression, confusion, claustrophobia, anxiety, and loss of personality. Mental suffering may take the form of clinically recognized psychiatric conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it need not.
Both US and international law recognize that torture can be psychological as well as physical. The UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) defines torture as “severe pain or suffering, whether mental or physical,”3 and the US torture statute likewise recognizes that “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” intentionally inflicted by government agents constitutes torture, a crime that carries sentences from twenty years to life.4 The similarity is no coincidence: the statute represents Congress’ implementation in 1994 of CAT, as required by Article 4 of the convention. The convention and the US torture statute also specify mens rea and circumstance in their definitions of the crime of torture, but the “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” formula is the definitional core of what it is that torturers inflict on their victims.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Torture, Power, and Law , pp. 153 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
and , Eds., The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), p. 1166.Google Scholar
, Speech at the Republican National Convention (Sept. 2, 2008), New York Times, Sept. 3, 2008
, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), pp. 100–2.Google Scholar
and , “Torture, Terrorism and the State: A Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 23 (2006), 355–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Defusing the Ticking Bomb Scenario: Why We Must Say No to Torture, Always” (2007), p. 11
, Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis (University of Chicago Press, 2012);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Why Not Torture Terrorists? Moral, Practical, and Legal Aspects of the “Ticking Bomb” Justification for Torture (Oxford University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Torture in Dreamland,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 37 (2006), 231–9.Google Scholar
, Understanding Torture: Law, Violence, and Political Identity (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010);CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “‘Torture Lite’: A Response,” Ethics and International Affairs, 23 (2009), 63–7;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “What’s Wrong with Torture?”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33 (2005), 1–33;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Myth of ‘Torture Lite,’” Ethics and International Affairs, 23 (2009), 47–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (New York: Norton, 2010);Google Scholar
, The Absolute Violation: Why Torture Must Be Prohibited (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008);Google Scholar
, Torture and the Military Profession (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
with , How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008);Google Scholar
and , The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda (2004);
, “US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites,” New York Review of Books (Apr. 9, 2009)
, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, for , Counsel to the President (Aug. 1, 2002), in , Ed., The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New York Review of Books, 2009), pp. 41,Google Scholar
, Deputy Attorney General, US Department of Justice (Dec. 30, 2004), in Cole, Torture Memos, pp. 128,
, “Playing by Our Own Rules: How U.S. Marginalization of International Human Rights Law Led to Torture,” Harvard Human Rights Journal, 20 (2007), pp. 89–140.Google Scholar
, “Documenting the Neurobiology of Psychological Torture: Conceptual and Neuropsychological Observations,” in , Ed., The Trauma of Psychological Torture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), pp. 163–72,Google Scholar
and , Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. 92–109;Google Scholar
, Senior Deputy General Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency (May 10, 2005),
, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).Google Scholar
, The Hippocratic Myth: Why Doctors Are Under Pressure to Ration Care, Practice Politics, and Compromise Their Promise to Heal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 129–32.Google Scholar
, “Rorschach and Awe,” Vanity Fair (July 17, 2007) ()
, “The Experiment,” New Yorker (July 11, 2005) ()
, 110th Congress, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody (Committee Print, 2008).
, “Tactic Used After It Was Banned: Detainees at Guantanamo Were Moved Often, Documents Say,” Washington Post (Aug. 8, 2008)
, “Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official: Trial Overseer Cites ‘Abusive’ Methods Against 9/11 Suspect,” Washington Post (Jan. 14, 2009)
, “Hellhole,” New Yorker (Mar. 30, 2009)
, “Target-Selection Norms, Torture Norms, and Growing US Permissiveness,” in and , Eds., The Changing Character of War (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 464–83,CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , and , “Prolonged Mental Harm: The Torturous Reasoning Behind a New Standard for Psychological Abuse,” Harvard Human Rights Journal, 20 (2007), 263–92.Google Scholar
and , “In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse,” New York Times (Mar. 19, 2006)
, Spirituality and the Ethics of Torture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “A Multivariate Contextual Analysis of Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatments: Implications for an Evidence-Based Definition of Torture,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 79 (2009), 135–45,CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, , and , “Torture vs Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment: Is the Distinction Real or Apparent?”, Archives of General Psychiatry, 64 (2007), 277–85,CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, “Concepts of Intention in German Criminal Law,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 24 (2004), 99–127,CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 115–16.Google Scholar
, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (, Ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1998), pp. 189–90Google Scholar
, The American Law of Slavery 1810–1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar
, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);Google Scholar
and , Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use,” New York Times, Apr. 22, 2009
, editorial, “Torture-Lite: It’s Wrong, and It Might Work,” Washington Post (May 27, 2011)
, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 115–16.Google Scholar
, “Too Close to the Rack and the Screw: Constitutional Constraints on Torture in the War on Terror,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, 6 (2003), 278–325,Google Scholar
, “Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House,” Columbia Law Review, 105 (2005), 1681–1750,Google Scholar