Is US Torture Policy Linked To Americans Apathy To Severe Economic Abuse?

03-23-2011 • NakedCapitalism.com/

“From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer’s goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION,” Jessen wrote. “Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel ‘EVERYTHING’ is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind.” Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).” The article does not identify who was involved in the process to turn a defensive operation to protect American personnel from “illegal exploitation” into an effort to brutalize US prisoners and detainees. Jessen set about to reverse engineer the very same abuses he had tried to neuter via “stress inoculation.” And I suspect “reverse engineer” is far too charitable a description of what Jessen did; it implies the US was not out to advance the state of the art in prisoner abuse, merely identify and copy existing best practices. On another level, this revelation raises troubling questions about how programs like this relate to the coarsening of American society. Some readers will not doubt argue that trying to connect the dots between programs designed for use in combat settings and broad social trends is overreaching. Yet look at the themes Jessen stresses: control, dependency, compliance and cooperation. To use one pet example, why are people so apathetic in the wake of widespread abuses by banks, first the extortions that took place during the bailouts, and now the continued flouting of the law in mortgage servicing and foreclosures?