Clinical care and complicity with torture

The UN Convention against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” by someone acting in an official capacity for purposes such as obtaining a confession or punishing or intimidating that person.1 It is unethical for healthcare professionals to participate in torture, including any use of medical knowledge or skill to facilitate torture or allow it to continue, or to be present during torture.2-7 Yet medical participation in torture has taken place throughout the world and was a prominent feature of the US interrogation practice in military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detention facilities in the years after the attacks of 11 September 2001.8-11 Little attention has been paid, however, to how a regime of torture affects the ability of health professionals to meet their obligations regarding routine clinical care for detainees. The 2016 release of previously classified portions of guideline from the CIA regarding medical practice in its secret detention facilities sheds light on that question. These show that the CIA instructed healthcare professions to subordinate their fundamental ethical obligations regarding professional standards of care to further the objectives of the torturers

The Jouissance of the Torturer in Zero Dark Thirty and the Enjoyment of the Unacceptable

Abstract: In the scene of torture we can see a paradox at work in which the torturer is both sanctioned by positive law and prohibited by oedipal law. This latter prohibition brings the perpetrator into the proximity of, what can be understood as a Lacanian mode of jouissance, an enjoyment that both defies and demands the law. This enjoyment can be seen in the film Zero-Dark-Thirty in which the torturers animate the tortured to, arguably, further their enjoyment and further their goal of/as torture. In these scenes it is the very unacceptability of the breach in oedipal law, coupled with the sanction of positive law – as a command to torture – that makes the act of torture so exciting

Psychological, social and welfare interventions for psychological health and well-being of torture survivors

This is the protocol for a review and there is no abstract. The objectives are as follows: Primary objective 1. To assess beneficial and adverse effects of psychological, social and welfare interventions versus no treatment for the reduction of psychological distress in torture survivors. Secondary objectives 2. To describe the quality and generalisability of the studies evaluating the effects of these treatment approaches on torture survivors, and specifically: • to provide an objective assessment of risk of bias in these studies; • to describe the specific populations evaluated in studies of torture survivors (including demographics, torture experiences and psychological status); • to describe the variety of interventions that have been evaluated in these populations; and • to describe the outcomes evaluated in these intervention studies

Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb

Torture used to be incompatible with American values. Our Bill of Rights forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and that has come to include all forms of corporal punishment except prison and death by methods purported to be painless. Americans and our government have historically condemned states that torture; we have granted asylum or refuge to those who fear it. The Senate ratified the Convention Against Torture, Congress enacted antitorture legislation, and judicial opinions spoke of the dastardly and totally inhuman act of torture.” Then came September 11

The UN Committee Against Torture: Human Rights Monitoring and the Legal Recognition of Cruelty

Focusing on the Committee Against Torture, this article argues that human rights monitoring can hide as much as it reveals. In particular, monitoring Should he understood as a "second order" process that displaces the discussion of the Causes and consequences of violence in favor of a focus on the systems that are supposed to monitor cruelty. In this process, measurements, monitoring, and prevention are in danger of becoming merged. As such, the ways in which the Committee Against Torture produces and assesses information serves simultaneously to create a depoliticized conception of violence and to reproduce political inequalities between states.</p

RWU Hosts Training on Evidence-Based Interrogation

Program for police detectives from Rhode Island and Massachusetts comes amid national debate about whether torture work

Caring for victims of torture: Lecture & reception with Professor Michael Grodin

A discussion with Professor Michael Grodin on caring for victims of torture

The Torture Debate and the Toleration of Torture

One of the questions raised by this important and thought-provoking collection of essays on torture is how and why the consensus that torture is wrong - a consensus enshrined in international law for decade - has become so fragile. As Scott Anderson writes in the introduction to this volume, "how did abusing and torturing prisoners suddenly become so popular?” The chapters in this volume offer insights into this question from the perspectives of history, psychology, law, philosophy, and sociology. This interdisciplinary approach highlights important and often overlooked aspects of the torture debate. Yet, the questions that the authors take to be important (for example, about whether the justification of torture should even be contemplated) reflect different and sometimes incompatible normative assumptions about what torture is and about what matters in the torture debate. These assumptions, I shall argue, are shaped by, and play a role in shaping, the moral, political, and social narratives that contribute to or resist the toleration of torture in the US and elsewhere. Thus, while the disparate nature of the contributions (perhaps inevitably) undermine the cohesiveness of the volume as a whole, it illuminates, even if it does not resolve, larger questions about the place and function of academic debate in the history and use of torture