Personality Disruption as Mental Torture: The CIA, Interrogational Abuse, and the U.S. Torture Act

This Article is a contribution to the torture debate. It argues that the abusive interrogation tactics used by the United States in what was then called the “global war on terrorism” are, unequivocally, torture under U.S. law. To some readers, this might sound like déjà vu all over again. Hasn’t this issue been picked over for nearly fifteen years? It has, but we think the legal analysis we offer has been mostly overlooked. We argue that the basic character of the CIA’s interrogation of so-called “high-value detainees” has been misunderstood: both lawyers and commentators have placed far too much emphasis on the dozen or so “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) short-listed in government “torture memos,” and far too little emphasis on other forms of physical violence, psychological stressors, environmental manipulations, and abusive conditions of confinement that are crucial to the question of whether the detainees were tortured. Furthermore, we dispute one of the standard narratives about the origins of the program: that it was the brainchild of civilian contractor psychologists because— in the CIA’s words—“[n]on-standard interrogation methodologies were not an area of expertise of CIA officers or of the US Government generally.” This narrative ignores the CIA’s role in devising these methods, in spite of the decades of prior CIA research and doctrine about forcing interrogation subjects into a state of extreme psychological debilitation, and about how to do so—by making them physically weak, intensely fearful and anxious, and helplessly dependent. By neglecting this history and focusing on the contractors and the EITs they devised, this narrative contributes to the misunderstanding that the torture debate is about EITs and nothing else. In effect, a “torture debate” about EITs and the torture memos neglects the purloined letter in front of our eyes: the abusive conditions the CIA inflicted on prisoners even when they were not subject to EITs, including abuses that the torture memos never bothered to discuss. Unpacking what this debate is really about turns out to be crucial to understanding that such interrogation methods are torture under existing U.S. law. The U.S. Torture Act includes a clause in its definition of mental torture that was intended to ban exactly the kind of interrogation methods the CIA had researched, out of concern that our Cold War adversaries were using them: mind-altering procedures “calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.” That is precisely the “non-standard interrogation methodology” the CIA employed after 9/11

“For Zion’s sake I will not hold my peace”: The Spiritual Travails of a Cochranite Woman

The Communal Societies Collection at Hamilton College recently acquired a title that is as remarkable, in terms of content, as it is rare: Olive Junkins’s The Dealings of a Few of the Church at York who Call themselves Christians, with Samuel Junkins and his Wife: Together with a Short Sketch of Her Own Christian Experience, Written by Her Own Hand [York, Maine?]: Printed for the author, 1825. It appears to be the only surviving contemporary monograph that can be deemed a primary Cochranite work, written by a woman who embraced most or all of the theological beliefs of Jacob Cochrane, and held to his views of a ‘“common stock” regarding “earthly stores.” Olive Junkins, who authored this pamphlet, was the spiritual wife of Cochranite Samuel Junkins, who in 1823 “attempted to establish a new organization under his control.

Norman Julius Zabusky OBITUARY

Norman Julius Zabusky, who laid the foundations for several critical advancements in nonlinear science and experimental mathematics, died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis on 5 February 2018 in Beersheba, Israel. He also made fundamental contributions to computational fluid dynamics and advocated the importance of visualization in science.Published versio

Do synaesthesia and mental imagery tap into similar cross-modal processes?

Synaesthesia has previously been linked with imagery abilities, although an understanding of a causal role for mental imagery in broader synaesthetic experiences remains elusive. This can be partly attributed to our relatively poor understanding of imagery in sensory domains beyond vision. Investigations into the neural and behavioural underpinnings of mental imagery have nevertheless identified an important role for imagery in perception, particularly in mediating cross-modal interactions. However, the phenomenology of synaesthesia gives rise to the assumption that associated cross-modal interactions may be encapsulated and specific to synaesthesia. As such, evidence for a link between imagery and perception may not generalize to synaesthesia. Here, we present results that challenge this idea: first, we found enhanced somatosensory imagery evoked by visual stimuli of body parts in mirror-touch synaesthetes, relative to other synaesthetes or controls. Moreover, this enhanced imagery generalized to tactile object properties not directly linked to their synaesthetic associations. Second, we report evidence that concurrent experience evoked in grapheme-colour synaesthesia was sufficient to trigger visual-to-tactile correspondences that are common to all. Together, these findings show that enhanced mental imagery is a consistent hallmark of synaesthesia, and suggest the intriguing possibility that imagery may facilitate the cross-modal interactions that underpin synaesthesic experiences. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Bridging senses: novel insights from synaesthesia'

Requirements for an Adaptive Multimedia Presentation System with Contextual Supplemental Support Media

Investigations into the requirements for a practical adaptive multimedia presentation system have led the writers to propose the use of a video segmentation process that provides contextual supplementary updates produced by users. Supplements consisting of tailored segments are dynamically inserted into previously stored material in response to questions from users. A proposal for the use of this technique is presented in the context of personalisation within a Virtual Learning Environment. During the investigation, a brief survey of advanced adaptive approaches revealed that adaptation may be enhanced by use of manually generated metadata, automated or semi-automated use of metadata by stored context dependent ontology hierarchies that describe the semantics of the learning domain. The use of neural networks or fuzzy logic filtering is a technique for future investigation. A prototype demonstrator is under construction

Mother Lucy’s Last Visit to Watervliet: Introduction

The Shaker Ministry considered certain texts to have a substantial sacred value and esteemed them as pearls that were not to be “cast before swine.” These were intended to be read only by the various society and family elders and eldresses and never shared with “the world’s people.” The Hamilton College Library recently acquired one such Shaker manuscript, probably dating to 1821 or shortly thereafter. It bears a caption title: “Mother’s Last Visit to Watervliet” and consists of nine unnumbered pages (filled) within a twenty-four page booklet. It is an important and early work, and was never published by the Shakers. It details the activities, meetings, counsels, and sayings of Mother Lucy Wright during the month preceding her death—from January 10, 1821 when she arrived at the Watervliet, New York Shaker society, to February 7, 1821 “when she expired a quarter before three O’clock.

William Scales\u27 1789 Mystery of the People Called Shakers : Introduction

William Scales is an elusive and intriguing figure in the history of early Shakerism. Scales was not a typical Shaker convert - he was a graduate of Harvard University, had been an itinerant Congregational minister, and had published two works prior to his conversion to Shakerism in 1782 or 1783. It is known that he wrote about Shakerism, both when he lived with Mother Ann Lee and the elders with her as well as afterwards, but until recently, it was presumed that none of his works about the Shakers had been published or survived in manuscript form. Scales\u27 The Mystery of the People Called Shakers Laid Open has recently come to light. It was published in the June 15, 1789 issue of the Boston Gazette and Country Journal and prominently featured on the first page. It is a remarkable work by an eccentric and controversial genius. It sheds new light on the early years of the Shaker Church - a period not well illuminated for there are few surviving primary sources which document the tumultuous first years following the opening of the Shaker gospel to the World

Benn Pitman\u27s Visit to the Shaker Settlement—Whitewater Village, O. : Introduction

What may be the most interesting and detailed outsider’s account of the White Water community also has a history of scholarly elusiveness. It was written by Benn Pitman (1822-1910), a pioneer in the field of phonography and phonetics, who played a leading role in the development of the science of stenography. Pitman visited the White Water Shakers in 1855, two years after he had immigrated to Cincinnati from Wiltshire, England. Following his visit, he wrote and published an article entitled “Visit to the Shaker Settlement — Whitewater Village, O.” in The Phonographic Magazine in 1855