One of the most prominent features of the purported "war on terror" has been its debasement of professional standards, an evisceration by perceived exigency. It is a serious subject that requires thoughtful treatment. For now, however, here is the most recent example:

The U.S. military issued medical guidelines Tuesday for the treatment of prisoners, formally directing doctors at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere to force-feed hunger strikers whose lives are in danger and granting doctors a limited role in interrogations.

The guidelines, which the military said formalize existing rules and policies, drew criticism from a human rights group that said the military should not interfere with detainees who use hunger strikes as a protest and should bar experts in psychology from having any role during interrogations.

Furthermore, note the memorialization of this astounding practice, couching in carefully framed bureaucratic language:

Under the guidelines, psychiatrists and psychologists trained as "behavioral science consultants" may observe interrogations and advise interrogators but are barred from direct participation. The consultants also are prohibited from using any health information about a detainee in a way that would "result in inhumane treatment."

So, psychiatrists may observe, advise, but not directly participate. Translation: psychiatrists and psychologists, as trained behavioral science consultants, may remain and watch after advising interrogators that urinating on a Koran in front of the detainee might be a good way to procure cooperation. After all, such advice doesn't involve the sharing of health information about the detainee that would result in inhumane treatment. The interrogator, not the consultant, performs the actual act of urination so as to shield the consultant from direct participation.

Such conduct would be consistent with other new detainee policies in the process of being adopted by the Pentagon:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

Thus, detainee policies continue to empower the Pentagon to psychologically torture detainees, exploiting the public's failure to understand that, according to Alfred McCoy, psychological torture is frequently much more injurious than the physical variety:

For over 2,000 years, from ancient Athens through the Inquisition, interrogators found that the infliction of physical pain often produced heightened resistance or unreliable information -- the strong defied pain while the weak blurted out whatever was necessary to stop it. By contrast, the CIA's psychological torture paradigm used two new methods, sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted pain," both of which were aimed at causing victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and so to capitulate more readily to their torturers. A week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, General Geoffrey Miller, U.S. prison commander in Iraq (and formerly in Guantanamo), offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees," the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our interrogations."

Under field conditions since the start of the Afghan War, Agency and allied interrogators have often added to their no-touch repertoire physical methods reminiscent of the Inquisition's trademark tortures -- strappado, question de l'eau, "crippling stork," and "masks of mockery." At the CIA's center near Kabul in 2002, for instance, American interrogators forced prisoners "to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled," an effect similar to the strappado. Instead of the Inquisition's iron-framed "crippling stork" to contort the victim's body, CIA interrogators made their victims assume similar "stress positions" without any external mechanism, aiming again for the psychological effect of self-induced pain.

Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, the CIA's "no touch" torture actually leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and -- something seldom noted -- their interrogators. Victims often need long treatment to recover from a trauma many experts consider more crippling than physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating acts of cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. When applied in actual operations, the CIA's psychological procedures have frequently led to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations are often horrific and only occasionally effective.

Of course, the doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists who force feed detainees and assist during interrogations will some day, one presumes, return home here. Consider this question: would you want them providing medical care to yourself and your family? Finally, the number of hunger strikers at Guantanamo has been reduced from 89 to 17, with 4 of them being force fed. One can only imagine how the military did it.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Culture, American Empire, Guantanamo, Sadomasochism