Wow. Brilliant observation. Well said.

This is the first time I heard the term "learned helplessness" and the moment I read it in connection with interrogations, I wondered how that can't be the perfect example of mental torture.

It's as if Cheney wanted to give the enemies of the USA all the ammunition they needed to laugh at all professions of the US "fighting for democracy, human rights and individual freedoms."

I want to draw your attention to the by now "about to be lost in the mists of history" dinner that Cheney gave for his close associates, before the attack on Iraq. To this féte he invited Victor Davis Hanson, reality denier par excellence.
Cheney had read Hanson's "Autumn of War" and was captivated by Hanson's argument that great leaders often have to make unpopular decisions, that are later vindicated by history.
And it was this topic that Hanson was asked to expound upon at the dinner.

Bush the Younger was going to prove himself a better man than Bush the Elder, and Cheney was his Richelieu. It didn't take much for Cheney to sidetrack W to a battle for the future of mankind scenario, that included taking and holding the Oil Centre. Most unpopular, but would be vindicated when people began to realize that oil is a finite resource.

Cheney was sufficiently aware of Peak Oil, having given speeches on the subject before illustrious assemblies, that I suspect he even welcomed its arrival. Vindication would come sooner, as people realized the need to be in Iraq - how else to explain, among many other strange decisions, the administrations absolutely clueless approach to mileage standards for car makers, which has now landed Detroit in a world of pain.

Hanson spoke with much gusto about Sherman's unpopular decision to torch the South, and how it enabled the rise of a "better South" from the ashes.

When you're already in the mindset that what you're doing is unpopular, but absolutely necessary to "save mankind" - then you don't care about a few Muslims being subjected to torture, do you?

Cheney and Rumsfeld, as well as Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith, were all mad as hatters, and we're paying the price.
Bush - he was just the village idiot, appointed to be King of the Carnival, not understanding he would be sacrificed when it was all over.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/58887?tid=relatedcl

Shoots the hell out of the "ticking time bomb" justification, doesn't it? The "enhanced" techniques we're learning about were designed to break prisoners over time, not to generate immediate results.

Meanwhile, proponents of the techniques have shifted their arguments to the notion that these methods worked -- and the media is giving the notion some credibility. Whether some useful information was gained or not, the idea that the ends justify the means -- international law be damned -- seems to be gaining traction.

Keep on it, Hilzoy.

Was it "learned helplessness" that led to the domestication of certain animal groups as well as to slavery?

In the days and months following 9/11, this country underwent a "learned helplessness" indoctrination - and at the hands of our government. They were relentless in their drumming up of the threat, with the "terror alert color code" changing almost minute by minute, with the constant haranguing about all these insidious threats from "them, those Islamofascists", and most of all "either you're for us or against us" rhetoric. Until finally most of the country went laid down and whimpered. . . while Bush & Co. delivered shock after shock to our eviscerated Constitution and demanded bloodgelt over and over again.

including depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation -- can be found and observed in human beings

And, Mr. Bradbury, did you find higher rates of suicide attempts or refusal to eat at places where these techniques were used? Can you foresee any reasons why these severly depressed individuals might become dangerous when released into a culture that recruits suicide bombers?

I think it's important to point out that this argument works only to the extent that torture can be distinguished from ordinary punishment or behavioral correction. If the argument proves that the incarceration of criminals or the domestication of animals or the grounding of tenth-graders is always torture, then it proves too much, because it plays into Republican arguments that liberals are diluting the meaning of the word torture.

I do think there's a distinction. In the above situations, at least ideally, the subject is deprived of control over its environment and then rewarded with increasing control in exchange for correct behavior. So the prisoner is rewarded with "good time" when he complies with the guards, and the tenth-grader gets to see her friends when she does her homework, and the pooch gets free run of the house after it does its business outside. The point isn't (or shouldn't be) to get them to just give up. The point is to channel their natural desire for freedom toward constructive ends. Intentionally inducing someone to give up on the possibility of freedom is severe mental harm. Even for a rat.

The species Homo Sapiens still has a long climb ahead of it on the evolution ladder. . .

I think you underestimate the power of bad-faith argument. All that's necessary to describe the imposition of learned helplessness as something other than "prolonged mental harm" is to argue that the learned helplessness eventually goes away after some period of time, and that, however long it may be, the definition of "prolonged" is slightly longer than that.

Maybe this is just my own learned helplessness talking.

While we ae on the subject of torture, what kind of perverty stands around watching while a sentient being drowns? What kind of sadist shocks a dog while the dog whimpers? Yeah, yeah this supposedly was worth the pain and suffering because we humans, createdm we claim, in the image of God, but lacking empathy, learned about learned helplessness. Which anyone with half a brain could have learned about by studying elementary school students in a typical classroom.

Toad and Matt are right, methinks: arguing that teaching helplessness proves a method is torture proves too much.

It doesn't abandon the moral argument that torture is wrong, to start opposing it from the fact that it isn't effective. But that creates a far better practical foundation; it gives torture opponents far more traction than to argue whether a penitentiary that teaches prisoners they have no hope for anything but tasteless nourishment unless they follow otherwise pointless rules -- cuz that, too, is 'learned helplessness'.

Seligman's insight is that someone who has been taught that they are helpless, wholly in the power of their captor, will often give up -- and then do (or tolerate) whatever it is their captor wants them to do, whether that is a penitentiary that requires prisoners to be silent while being marched to eat, or the Bush administration demanding 'proof' that Saddam was giving orders to bin Laden.

The point is that BOTH forms of compliance are essentially meaningless -- the penitentiary arguably has a valid purpose, because max security prisoners are dangerous as hell, so anything that makes them safer to manage has some merit. But the particular goal (silence in line) is only indirectly a safety measure; it's primarily about the principle that compliance in small things (keep your mouth shut) helps compliance in larger things (don't gut the guy next to you with a shank).

This doesn't work as an interrogation technique, because getting reliable information that a guy does NOT want to tell you isn't like bending him to your will by force, even through teaching him (or her) how helpless they are as your prisoner.

Make distinctions that matter.

Maybe we should torture some scientists to find out how the lack of empathy for suffering relates to the capacity to become a torturer.

I agree with wonkie. Torturing animals in the name of science and then using those "skills" on humans- most people who do this end up locked away in jail.

Is eight years a "prolonged" amount of time because under the Bush Administration, and directly after 9/11, I began to notice "procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality" of me and everyone I knew and loved every time the Hysteria Code color was changed, every time the President and his men (or Sec. of State) would speak in public, and every time FOXNEWS broadcast anytime of the day!

And, it was the same eight years I knew at all times Osama bin Laden was living in some cave in Central Asia - not much disruption over there! -Kevo

"From where I sit, it fits the statutory definition of torture perfectly."

A pity that 'where I sit' is not a jury box...

ex animo-
Jo

One of the most primal fears we have is of drowning. It's a fear that reaches to core of the human psyche and to repeatedly simulate this on a person is about as cruel and unusual as can be. It is the very epitome of psychological torture.

wonkie postulates "Maybe we should torture some scientists to find out how the lack of empathy for suffering relates to the capacity to become a torturer."

Unnecessary - studies have already been done. Torturers and bullies don't lack "empathy", they apparently have more sensitivity to the sufferings of others than is the norm.

The trouble is, observing suffering lights up the pleasure centers of their brains.

I think Hilzoy has also pointed out the dog that didn't bark, in the memos, before.

That is, if this tortore does not produce profound
psychological harm, then the memo writers should
be quoting reports on the present healthy mental states of both
Abu Zubaydah and KSM.

They are doing no such thing.

Matt said: "I think you underestimate the power of bad-faith argument. All that's necessary to describe the imposition of learned helplessness as something other than "prolonged mental harm" is to argue that the learned helplessness eventually goes away after some period of time, and that, however long it may be, the definition of "prolonged" is slightly longer than that."

Yes, that would be bad faith. But Hilzoy provides no information about how "prolonged" is defined in this context or how long the mental harm she describes persists, or typically persists. The law seems hopelessly vague.

what is remarkable to me is that most of the press continues to write stories that distinguish harsh techniques from torture. WTF. Part corruption, part incest. All bull

The people who are arguing above that torture to produce learned helplessness is OK are, I think, a little bit confused about the term. It's not about co-operation merely with respect to the behavior (telling about about terrorist activities) that the interrogators supposedly want, it's about complete dependence on the interrogators. Conventional conditioning (even in humans) is pretty much the opposite of learned helplessness: do what the conditioner tells you to do, and you get a reward; do what the conditioner tells you not to do, and you get a punishment or the withholding of a reward. Within the rules, the conditionee has apparent control.

Learned helplessness, on the other hand, comes from situations where doing what the torturer tells you to do doesn't get the torture to stop (those other 182 waterboardings in the same month), and not doing what the torturer tells you to do doesn't make the torture any worse, because it's already unendurable. So the subject just loses volition completely.

The concept of 'learned helplessness' isn't that new

We used to call it breaking someone.

Isn't telling somebody something that you know to be true, an act of volition?

I mean -- a prisoner knows some piece of information, like a PIN. The interrogator wants to know it. The prisoner refuses to tell him.

If the interrogator uses a program intended to induce 'learned helplessness', as paul just observed: the prisoner "loses volition completely".

So how can he give a piece of information that the interrogator doesn't already know? That is, isn't he just trying to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear?

This is kind of a big deal in the interrogation biz, cuz very little useful intelligence can be as plain and verifiable as a PIN (if only because such discrete pieces of intelligence can be changed easily and have short-shelf lives anyway).

If you want a guy to tell you something he knows and you don't, doesn't he HAVE to choose to tell you?

So if you destroy his ability to choose (even inadvertently, cuz he thinks he's bragging, or proving you wrong, or something), don't you pretty much destroy the possibility of getting anything you don't already know out of him?

Thank you, paul, for making a very important point.

If we want to get cooperation and information from these prisoners, the LAST thing we want from them is learned helplessness! Why the hell would you want to put someone in a condition where they know no matter what they do their circumstances aren't going to change? What would prompt them to give us anything in that state?

Not only are they torturers, they've got no clue how to get what they want. Making us safe, my ass.

Now I remember why I quickly got out of psychology in college - the experimentation stuff gave me the creeps. Really, what kind of person would design an experiment to mistreat animals that way, let alone try to apply the results to humans? Just reading this was making me ill.

I hope Seligman and the rest of his scummy little otherwise-unemplolyable academic gang had fun doing all the torturing of the defenseless and the innocent they did, to prove that "torture is bad."

Sometimes, Hilzoy, you academics really "don't get it." That is an example of some of the most useless aqcademic studies possible. No wonder some people want to bomb certain "laboratories."

The concept of learned helplessness explains a lot more than just the effects of torture. How about the response to chronic poverty?

"Extending the ramifications of these findings to humans, Seligman and his colleagues found that human motivation to initiate responses is also undermined by a lack of control over one's surroundings. Further research has shown that learned helplessness disrupts normal development and learning and leads to emotional disturbances, especially depression."

Sounds like life growing up in some of our inner city neighborhoods.

All torturers (and fuck these watered down terms and piss poor justifications; it's all the same!) are no better than Michael Vick, and should be tried and sentenced in the same light.

I can just see Dick Cheney gritting his teeth at the trial, and smirkingly uttering something like this:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and curse the Marines; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to. "