The author Allen S. Keller, M.D., is the director of the Bellevue Hospital Center and belongs to the member’s advisory council on human rights. (p.558) He is well known for his advocacy on the various use of torture tactics used on Iraqi prisoners and other refuges. During a Congressional meeting Mr. Keller stated "To think that abusive methods, including the enhanced interrogation techniques [in which Keller included waterboarding], are harmless psychological ploys is contradictory to well established medical knowledge and clinical experience." (“CNN”, 2007)
In this paper, I summarize the article and identify relevant information and any changes that may have occurred since the publication of this article. I will also offer comments and aspects pertaining to material provided.
Article Summary
Keller (2008) wrote, documented and describes in great detail two cases on the use of torture concerning Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison and the physical and psychological consequences resulting from months of daily abuse at the hands of U.S military soldiers. Keller’s article suggests the importance of supervisory forensic psychological evaluations and by implementing such tools on prisoners can ensure physical and mental stability. Keller also documented the tool used in the examinations of said detainees as the Istanbul protocol. The goal is to provide empirical analysis of Abu Ghraib detainee’s long term effects due to mistreatment and abuse. The message and tone of the article is both politically and scientifically motivated.
After discussing the relevance of conducting physical and psychological examinations on the detainees, Keller (2008) seeks to prove that both detainees continue to suffer significant physical and psych...
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...e 49.4 (2006): 553-69. PsycINFO. Web. 1 June 2011.
References:
Marks, J. H. (2005, December 26). The silence of the doctors. The Nation, 26. Retrieved June 6, 2011, from PsycINFO.
Zurbriggen, Eileen L. "Sexualized torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison: Feminist psychological analyses." Feminism and Psychology 18. (3) Aug. (2008): 301-20. PsycINFO. Web. 1 June 2011. .
Torture is continuing under the Obama administration (2010, January 10). In Washinton Blog. Retrieved June 6, 2011, from http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/01/torture-is-continuing-under-obama.html
MediaMatters for america. (2010). On CNN, West asserted waterboarding is "not torture," claimed, "[Y]ou wake up feeling fine the next da (). In. (Ed.). , WA: Washington Times. Retrieved June 6, 2011, from http://mediamatters.org/research/200711020009
Szegedy-Maszak, Marianne. "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism." Writing and Reading for ACP Composition. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Custom, 2009. 210-12. Print.
In the article, “The Torture Myth,” Anne Applebaum explores the controversial topic of torture practices, focused primarily in The United States. The article was published on January 12, 2005, inspired by the dramatic increase of tensions between terrorist organizations and The United States. Applebaum explores three equality titillating concepts within the article. Applebaum's questions the actual effectiveness of using torture as a means of obtaining valuable information in urgent times. Applebaum explores the ways in which she feels that the United States’ torture policy ultimately produces negative effects upon the country. Applebaum's final question is if torture is not optimally successful, why so much of society believes it works efficiently.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a senior writer at U.S. News and World, published her article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," in 2004. She uses the article to briefly overview the scandal as a whole before diving into what can trigger sadistic behavior. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal took place in 2004, wherein American troops humiliated and tortured Iraqi detainees (Szegedy-Maszak 75). The main objective of Szegedy-Maszak’s article is to investigate the causation behind sadistic behavior, exclusively in the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. She effectively does so by gathering information and research from professional psychologists and professors of psychology, specifically Herbert Kelman and Robert Okin (Szegedy-Maszak 76). She finds
Kass, Leon. "Neither for Love nor Money: Why Doctors Must Not Kill." Public Interest. No. 94. (Winter 1989)
soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles west of Baghdad. The prisoners were stripped, made to wear bags over their heads, and sexually humiliated while the guards laughed and took photographs. This situation has a lot in common with the Stanford Prison Experiment. In both situations they’re very similar. For the prisoners at the Stanford Prison experiment to even use the bathroom they had to be blindfolded so they could not find any escape routes and know the way out. There was a hole in the wall at then end of the “court yard” that held a video recorder which would video tape everything that was going on. Including the pornographic and emotional abuse of the prisoners. There was also a rumored escape that a guard overheard the prisoners talking about. They roped their prisoners together and put bags over their heads and walked them all to a small room until the suspected people to break them out showed up. In the end it was all just a rumor. No one came to save the prisoners. The way that the guards fought back was making the prisoners do unethical and repulsive tasks. Their disgusting tasks ended up going as far as making the prisoners scrub the toilets with their own
Since 2000, a total of 15 have died in custody, according to the advocacy group’s records. Of those 15 of whom have passed while in custody many of those deaths were results of suicides of detainees who suffered serious mental health issues that were not properly addressed in custody. In Cleveland and Rousseau’s article Mental Health Impact of Detention they argue that the implications such as mandatory detention is associated with high levels of psychiatric symptoms, which increase with time in detention and tend to be aggravated frequently. In a study conducted in the United States, after a median detention of 5 months, 86% of detainees showed clinical levels of depression, 77% had clinical anxiety and 50% had clinical post-traumatic stress disorder. A few months later, the mental health of those who were still detained had continued to deteriorate. The curtailment of physical mobility through indefinite detentions alone is sufficient to cause depression but mental states are also aggravated by the fact that detainees have little ability to make international phone calls, access to their funds, and access to legal
Why Waterboarding is Torture The US Reservations of the UN Convention against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information from a person.” Waterboarding fits into this definition very well. In the “How to Do It” article, waterboarding is described as filling up the upper respiratory system with water, causing both physical and mental pain. This causes the person being tortured to feel like they are drowning without them actually dying from the drowning. For the person experiencing it, it may even be worse because the article states that “his suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown,” so it is never ending.
In “The Case For Torture” an article written by Michael Levin, he attempts to justify the use of torture as a means of saving lives. Throughout the article, Levin gives the reader many hypothetical examples in which he believes torture is the only method of resolution. Though I agree with Levin, to some degree, his essay relies heavily on the fears of people and exploits them to convince people into thinking pain is the only way. In certain aspects, I could agree entirely with Levin, but when one reads deeper into the article, many fallacies become apparent. These fallacies detract from the articles academic standing and arguably renders the entire case futile. Levin’s strategy of playing with the fears of people is genius, but, with more creditable details of the issue the article would have sustained the scrutiny of more educated individuals. The addition of more concrete information, would have given people something to cling to, inherently improving the articles creditability.
The Methodology used to gather information for this paper was found through various sources. The sources used are all verifiable and established informational resources including (but not limited to) the following; course textbooks, books, journals, and online databases.
The techniques used by the CIA and military in the wake of 2001 involved stress positions, strikes, sensory and sleep deprivation. These Enhanced Interrogation Techniques have been compared to torture and torture lite. While strikes, stress positions, and deprivation leave no lasting marks, they were found to constitute "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" in an investigation conducted by John Helgerson the Inspector General for the CIA (Jehl 2005).
the virtue of America). How can the United States tell other leader not to torture, but do the same thing they accuse dictators of doing? The United States as the leaders of free world was not living up to its own humanitarian standards. What the Bush administration was saying and what they were doing was completely opposite. Sontag reminds us that, “we are not talking about a rare case of, ticking time bomb situation, in which case torture could be justified”. It was general gathering of information Sontag also points to history to say the United State is not the first democracy to torture; “the Belgians in Congo, the French in Algeria both practices torture and other kinds of humiliation”. Again she is not justifying torture, but she is pointing out that it was done in the past by the western government not that long ago, during colonial
When most Americans think of the word “torture”, images of barbaric and savage individuals inflicting pain in repulsively innovative ways are what usually come to mind. Torture is what foreigners do, because, as Americans, we are too civilized and morally superior to engage in such behavior. In “Regarding the Torture of Others,” Susan Sontag argues that because American readers and the culture have become a sexually charged and violent entity concerned with having “fun,” the heinous photos depicting the torture of terrorists at Abu Ghraib is as much their fault, as it is the Bush administration’s. Though Sontag is effective in proving the administration’s liability, her extreme parallels of Americans to Nazis, fraternal organization practices and video games to the torture committed in Abu Ghraib make the essay and her argument overall ineffective.
“Men forced to undress and becomes in a rank. Some former prisoners report that beat them on genitals and a groin, forced to have oral sex and to suck off, beat the stun gun in erogenous places, stubs from cigarettes thrust into anuses. To detainees repeatedly threatened that they will be raped in the face of relatives, wives and daughters, and also their families threatened that, including and children too will be raped. Some men declared that proctal forced them bludgeons, and that they saw as governmental armies forced also children. One person declared that he saw rape of the boy in the face of the father. 40-year-old man saw as three officers of security service force the child.” [6]
All nurses work under a code of ethics. Ethics describe what nurses “should or “ought to do” when encountering opposing problems. Nurses also have to follow many laws that effect nursing practices. Guantanamo bay is a United States Naval base that hold terror suspects since January 2002. Force feeding of these detainees has been a major issue at Guantanamo Bay for ethical and legal reasons.
These people are crushed, collapsed, cauterized, contused, and overall, they are tortured. Torture is purposely harming another person for multiple reasons and it should never be used in any situation. Even though torture dates back to medieval times, it is not acceptable even if used as punishment. Whether to gain information, discover a disaster plan, stop future attacks, or anything else, using excess force and hurting another human being is awful. The effects on the victims and culprits of torture are too substantially great to ignore or to be outweighed by the ‘benefits’ of this type of aggression. Countless people have been murdered and many survivors still live with scars, horrid memories, mood disorders, bipolar tendencies, and many other health effects.