Bibliographic record
Abstract
Almerindo E. Ojeda (ed.), The Trauma of Psychological Torture. Westport, CT, London: Praeger Publishers, 2008. WHATIS PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE? COULD IT BE AS SEVERE AS PHYSICAL torture? Often, non-specialists assume that the former is lite, perhaps not qualifying as at all. Almerindo Ojeda his contributors put that notion to rest as they explore the trauma of psychological from political, historical, psychiatric, legal, neurobiological perspectives in this very useful book. Ojeda begins the collection by explicating the complexities of defining psychological in his chapter, Is Psychological Torture? How much psychological must be induced before it qualifies as torture? Is there universal threshold of torturous pain (p. 1)? Is cruel unusual punishment distinct from if so, how? Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly forbids violence to life person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment torture as well as upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating degrading treatment. Despite the fact that the United States is a party to all four of the Geneva Conventions (signing the first in 1882), the Bush administration its lawyers engaged in endless parsing of the terms. When asked about Common Article 3's prohibitions, George W. Bush famously responded, and that Common Article 3 says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It's like--it's very vague. What does that mean, outrages upon human dignity? That's a statement that is wide open to interpretation (New York Times, President Bush's News Conference, September 15, 2006). We now know that administration lawyers such as Jay Bybee John Yoo, in contorted legal opinions, attempted to redefine legalize in order to avoid the strictures penalties established in international law (the Geneva Conventions the Convention Against Torture), as well as U.S. statutes. According to Ojeda, neither the qualitative (what is the nature of psychological pain?) nor quantitative (how much is required to qualify as torture?) questions need to be answered to define psychological torture. He begins by specifying a set of practices that are widely acknowledged to constitute such torture: isolation, psychological debilitation, spatial disorientation, sensory deprivation, sensory assault, induced desperation, threats, feral treatment, sexual humiliation, desecration, pharmaceutical manipulation. He then proposes to define psychological as this set of practices. These abusive methods, he asserts, are already precise can be quantified in terms of time other measures. The goals or intentions of this sort of treatment are irrelevant, he argues. This is a key point: there is no good torture or bad torture, the supposed virtue of the torturer or his claimed higher cause are beside the point. An interesting aspect of the book is that the authors seem to disagree on the origins of psychological torture. Ojeda, among others, discusses the roots of coercive interrogation in communist regimes, referencing the Stalinist show trials, while Alfred McCoy's chapter locates the origins of psychological in CIA programs of the 1950s 1960s that drew on Nazi research, British practices, CIA-funded Canadian science experiments (more on this below). Ojeda shows that the CIA's KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual of 1963 essentially codified the same techniques that had been denounced previously as abominations carried out by the USSR, such as induced debilitation exhaustion, cultivation of anxiety despair, alternating punishments rewards, demonstrating the omnipotence of the captor. The CIA added other methods from its own experiments diffused its model, through the KUBARK Manual, worldwide (especially in Latin America), via the Office of Public Safety, U. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".