AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Report on Science and Human Rights

Fall/Winter 2004 Vol XXIV, No. 2

Torture: Science and the Law

Sarah Olmstead

On Monday 28 June, the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program convened a half-day forum entitled “Torture: Science and the Law,” in observation of the United Nation’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The panel took place just as the Iraq prisoner scandal was breaking news and a major focus of discussion. At the event, there were two panels of experts. The first discussed the legal requirements derived from international human rights and humanitarian law relating to the treatment of prisoners and the prevention of torture. The second panel dealt with scientific studies about torture, both on the psychological dynamics of understanding why an individual may use torture and the psychological and physical health effects of torture.

Panelists were unanimous in their condemnation of torture. Addressing torture’s utility as a means to an end, speakers pointed to its notorious unreliability in producing, in national security parlance, “actionable intelligence.”

“Conditions in which individuals are held in dark, dank, cramped spaces with sleep deprivation can result in anxiety, paranoia, and delusional thoughts - not the best circumstances for getting reliable information,” said Allen Keller, M.D., program director of the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture.

Additionally, permitting the use of torture undermines any moral high ground the offending nation might have had previously and, as SHR director Audrey Chapman pointed out in her remarks, results in “serious implications for [the] nation and for the international human rights system.”

Meredith Larson, of Amnesty International empahiszed that misconduct by the U.S., as a major world power, sets a dangerous precedent for the rest of the world. “Decisions and actions made by the U.S. influence other countries’ decisions and actions,” said Larson.

The panelists agreed the U.S. and the international community are already seeing the impact of the events at Abu Ghraib reflected in worldwide public opinion and political action. They also agreed that steps must be taken to ensure that human rights violations be dealt with in an open and transparent manner: wrongdoing must be admitted. Panelist Robert Goldman, co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University in Washington, D.C., went as far as saying the U.S. may have committed war crimes.

Panelist Martha Huggins, Professor of Human Relations at Tulane University, presented a series of informal indicators and political conditions under which torture is most likely to occur. Torture happens, she said, in times of fear, when governments invoke national security as an ideology. It’s also more likely in a climate of secrecy and when executive-level decisions make torture seem legitimate and responsibility for prisoner treatment is diffused. Huggins pointed to a reluctance by the U.S. to use “the ‘T’ word” when talking about the events at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere and said this “demonstrates a rhetorical pattern common to torture systems: Torture is seldom labeled ‘torture.’”

Panelists concluded that the United States had engaged in patterns of prisoner mistreatment that constitute torture in fighting the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Panelists also concurred that the mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Guantanamo Bay in the Caribbean and at other detention centers clearly violates a series of international pacts, from the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture.

For further information, see links at http://shr.aaas.org/news/