{"id":1375,"date":"2020-01-07T09:52:56","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T14:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/in-print\/volume-108-issue-2-january-2020\/personality-disruption-as-mental-torture-the-cia-interrogational-abuse-and-the-u-s-torture-act\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:14:02","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:14:02","slug":"personality-disruption-as-mental-torture-the-cia-interrogational-abuse-and-the-u-s-torture-act","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/in-print\/volume-108\/volume-108-issue-2-january-2020\/personality-disruption-as-mental-torture-the-cia-interrogational-abuse-and-the-u-s-torture-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Personality Disruption as Mental Torture: The CIA, Interrogational Abuse, and the U.S. Torture Act"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cglobal war on terrorism\u201d are, unequivocally, torture under U.S. law. To some readers, this might sound like de\u00b4ja` vu all over again. Hasn\u2019t this issue been picked over for nearly fifteen years? It has, but we think the legal analysis we offer has been mostly overlooked.1 <\/span>We argue that the basic character of the CIA\u2019s interrogation of so-called \u201chigh-value detainees\u201d has been misunderstood: both lawyers and commentators have placed far too much emphasis on the dozen or so \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d (EITs) short-listed in government \u201ctorture memos,\u201d 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\u2014 in the CIA\u2019s words\u2014\u201c[n]on-standard interrogation methodologies were not an area of expertise of CIA officers or of the US Government generally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>This narrative ignores the CIA\u2019s 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\u2014by 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 \u201ctorture debate\u201d 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 \u201ccalculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.\u201d That is precisely the \u201cnon-standard interrogation methodology\u201d the CIA employed after 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Continue reading Personality Disruption as Mental Torture: The CIA, Interrogational Abuse, and the U.S. Torture Act.<\/span>(This link opens in a new tab)<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cglobal war on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":627,"featured_media":0,"parent":1360,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-1375","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/627"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1379,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1375\/revisions\/1379"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}