It's interesting. The Convention Against Torture was released for signatures in 1985, almost 25 years ago. When it came time to draft the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which was released for signatures in 2006, it is obvious that it was modeled on the CAT:

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/disappearance-convention.htm

Some of the language, especially anything that governments asserted was vague in the CAT (usually to justify violating it) was cleaned, in some cases the language has been totally rewritten.

But one of the clauses which was not changed even so much as a word, except to replace "torture" with "enforced disappearance" was this one. Article 1, section 2, reads, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance."

The U.S., it was disclosed recently by France, labored mightily in 2004 to try to talk the other nations into changing provisions of the new treaty. Apparently, nobody thought the language of that clause was "vague" enough to change one single word.

The U.S. has not signed it.

The Stanford Prison Experiment deserves mention (alway). If you give people a role to play, they will perform.

There are several kinds of torture, interrogation torture, confession torture, and administrative or mass torture. The Stanford Prison Experiment is properly linked usually to the latter, the pertinent example is Abu Ghraib or some of the "softening up" procedures at Guantánamo, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.

The tortures done to people like Abu Zubaydah or Ibn al Shaykh al Libi are interrogation tortures, and are much more systematic, clinical, and calculated. Many were designed by psychologists and lawyers specifically to destroy the human psyche without "testing positive" for torture in laws or forensic procedures.

In one case, the commanding officers used the SPE to send their soldiers to hell, in the other, they recruited hell's inhabitants directly to do their work. Nothing better can be said of those in the psychology profession who contributed to either of those efforts.

The role of the media in making torture seem reasonable is undeniable, and many here are mentioning it. From movies and Jack Bauer TV shows to constantly euphemistic language in the news and editorial columns, the media does, in fact make torture more palatable. That should be seen, though as the underlying cause of making torture palatable, not as the underlying cause of torture itself. Those are two different things, and the role of the media has been to make seem alright that which is dictated by the demands of a society that wants to be too safe, and denigrates human minds in its worship of electronic ones.

There is, of course, another side. The news media has been rightly excoriated, here and elsewhere, for their reluctance to bring the horror of torture, or even the rightful names, before the American public for review. But other sectors of the media have actively stopped efforts to do so by filmmakers. When a group I am active in showed the film Standard Operating Procedure or the film Torturing Democracy, the results afterward started always with shocked silence. When we went to see the movie Rendition in the theater, the audience acted stunned in a way I haven't seen since opening night for The Killing Fields.

A year ago and a half ago, I put up an analysis of what happened to all the films which could have changed the public's mind on torture. They simply weren't widely shown:

http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/2008/04/too-unpopular-to-talk-about.html

Movies, poems (Marc Falcoff's Poems from Guantánamo, for instance) testimony from victims (Henri Alleg's La Question and its support from Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre from a different era) are what "shock the public conscience" and cause the change. François Villon's La Ballade des Pendus and John Donne's No Man is an Island (together with copious amounts of lobbying by Mr. Donne) changed things. We Shall Overcome changed things. Art has more power than other human expression, even if it's documentary.

But a poem or a movie or a testament or a song that never gets read or seen or heard will change nothing. Starting torture happened because of a society in fear with deep disrespect for the human mind. Ending it requires that the media relinquish its grip and allow the full horror of torture to reach the American people. I've seen what happens when people are confronted with these works of art. It changes them.

With all due respect, you might have told people here that what you posted was not official Pakistan policy but rather from an Op-Ed column, and came after an argument that basically separated the Kandahari Taliban as those who would negotiate with the Kabul government and against extremists in their ranks, and basically made the case that President Obama's biggest mistake was that, "...he chose to continue a dangerous tradition of dealing with Pakistan clandestinely." But the column is well worth reading. Linked again at sig.