The chiral nature of the enhanced interrogation programme

Publication date: Available online 2 June 2018
Source:Aggression and Violent Behavior
Author(s): Myles Balfe
The United States suffered a catastrophic attack on September 11th 2001. The response to these killings, by the United States and its allies, was extremely forceful. As part of this response, US security institutions, and the health professionals who worked for them, developed an 'enhanced interrogation', or torture, programme to acquire intelligence from detainees in their custody. The enhanced interrogation programme has been described as a 'conflicted' phenomenon. This article considers in detail precisely why the enhanced interrogation programme, and the role of health professionals in it, can be said to be conflicted. The article identifies a number of reasons, including: the ambiguous and divided nature of the violence used in it; the dual roles that health professionals played in the enhanced interrogation initiative as healers and interrogators; professional division over the programme's ethics and effectiveness; the serious and negative impacts that the programme had on interrogators as well as detainees; and its split legacies. Underlying these individual reasons is the sense that the enhanced interrogation initiative was 'doubled', something that often pulled in two opposing dimensions simultaneously, and could be interpreted in divergent ways. The article concludes with a reiteration of the reasons why torture is ethically and effectively wrong.



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