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The separation of the decision makers from the worker bees is very simple. If you cannot understand it, please do not proceed to more difficult models of society. The decision maker is accountable. That's because they decide what to do, so they are accountable for the outcome. The worker is responsible. They did not decide what to do, they did, so their responsibility is to the output of their work. In torture, both are culpable. That is because we have the concept of disobeying an unlawful order. But it is also the case that those orders are difficult to disobey. You don't have to believe me, just go listen to the participants in Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure, or watch Taxi to the Dark Side or even The Greatest Silence, if you want a few nightmares. If you want more, go to that great PBS website and poke around:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/
You will find, if you watch any of the above, that the people in the sites that perform the tortures generally start out as normal people in abnormal circumstances. They are not picked for their sadistic abilities, they are, in general, ordered to do things. They are traumatized by what they do, at least interviews with them seem to indicate that, but it is considered unethical for torture treatment centers to treat torturers so we probably don't have good data on it. But judging from their admissions of what has happened to them, many have PTSD. As Zimbardo's theories predict, they can and do relate their torture behavior with flat affect, but they respond with emotion to cues from "normal life".
May I remind you folks that you, not I, proposed that Alice Miller, an expert in child psychology, not in torture, could explain all torture, while Darius Rejali, an expert in torture and not child psychology, could not assess underlying causes in his own specialty. You repeatedly told me that she understood the root causes, while he only cataloged the effects. From the minute I gave you his assessment of the underlying causes, the burden has been on you, not on I, to show that those were incorrect and that Alice Miller was.
So arguments that I have the burden of proof are for the birds. You two are promoting a cult of Alice Miller, that does not make me a "True Believer". It makes you believers in her classic reductionism.
Rejali is clear, the causes of torture are social, the people who do it are technicians. He has hundreds of pages, with thousands of footnotes, of proof of his thesis. Using his criteria, you can predict the types of torture that will be used, they types of outcomes a society is looking for, the effects of descent into torture on society itself. Alice Miller has a theory on abusers. She believes that torturers fit her model of abusers, so she expounds a theory on torture. But it doesn't have predictive value, it can't predict when a society will resort to torture, it can't predict the types of techniques that will get used, it doesn't predict the effects on society. In short, it isn't as good a theory as that of Rejali.
And as I mentioned very much previously to AKA Smith, detailed knowledge of what degradations, humiliations, and sexual abuses were committed under orders at Guantanamo by female interrogators on male prisoners is an important piece in the emergent puzzle of what may be happening with "female enemy combatants" in U.S. custody. That's important right now. It has bearing on the relations between nation states, and whether or not the U.S. falls into a new and more deadly war.
I'm going back to that question, it's a better use of my time.
