The statute of the US Code that governs torture actually seems well written to me: "… an act … specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering upon another person." It goes on to define "severe mental pain or suffering" as "prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from" [among other things] "procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality."
TITLE 18 § 2340. Definitions
As used in this chapter —[1] “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;[2] “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from —
[A] the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;[B] the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;[C] the threat of imminent death; or[D] the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and[3] “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.
The authors of these procedures have a clear understanding of how to produce Psychological Trauma, and these techniques appear designed ["calculated"] to do just that. On the other hand, the authors of this Memo [John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Jennifer Koester] either don’t understand or are trying to rationalize away what causes people to develop chronic mental illness after an event. I suspect from the way the Memo is written that it’s both [don’t understand and rationalizing away]. I’ve transcribed the DoJ’s full comments on a separate "pop-up" page [The Bybee Two Memo’s comments on “severe mental pain and suffering”…] for you perusal.
People are not traumatized by thinking. People are traumatized by sudden, unexpected danger situations and the concomitant emotional response. The felt anxiety mobilizes "fight or flight" mechanisms [reflexes]. If those mechanisms fail to resolve the danger, the internal panic and physiologic nervous discharge rapidly escalate and can begin to interfere with rational thought. Initially, the anxiety was useful, calling up emergency coping skills. But at very high levels, the anxiety itself becomes the problem instead of the actual danger itself. A regular example is the situation where people on the roof of a burning building jump to their deaths rather than await the firemen’s ladder. We all saw people jumping in the hopeless situation of 9/11, but it happens regularly at times where help is available and, in fact, visibly on the way. Like the RPM dial on your car’s dashboard, there’s a red zone for anxiety. In the red, people often dissociate, a term that means lose the ability to use their minds coherently. The mind just tunes out, and that tuning out amounts to a psychological death – the stuff of P.T.S.D.
Throughout the Memo, Yoo works with the standard of what "a reasonable person" would experience or think about with a given procedure. Abu Zubaydah was not "a reasonable person." He was a wounded, probably brain damaged, Arab in Thailand being interrogated by Americans – his enemy – as I said, day after day. Yoo talks repeatedly about how this "reasonable person" might "interpret" or "construe" what was being done to him or what might yet be done to him. People in high states of anxiety don’t think like Yoo’s characters. In fact, they don’t much think at all – they just react. His hypotheticals are themselves based on the impact of the procedure itself as if delivered in isolation [to a person who was not experiencing it]. But even at that, they’re based the amount of physical pain – not the psychic impact on a person in Zubaydah’s state. And the Memo leaves out the cumulative effect of these procedures in a given "session" or their "escalation" from session to session. They talk about time limits, as if that matters. The whole point in a traumatic event is rapidly escalating anxiety. It doesn’t take long to discombobulate a mind.
You have informed us that your purpose in using these boxes is not to interfere with his senses or his personality, but to cause him physical discomfort that will encourage him to disclose critical information. Moreover, your imposition of time limitations on the use of either of the boxes also indicates that the use of these boxes is not designed or calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.
Yoo’s projected reactions are compared to those of SERE Trainees who know that they’re not going to be hurt – who know that, in the end, the meanies are really just guys from down the street playing bad boy. Zubaydah has no such assurance. But SERE Training itself is stressful and there are casualties, probably more than they know. In fact, the people in SERE training are in a situation of thinking like Yoo’s stoic straw men, but they get regularly disorganized by these procedures. If they didn’t, there would be little point in doing it in the first place. Finally, the Memo fails to pass the simple test of human empathy. Empathy is a human "just knowing" garnered from inserting oneself into the place of the other. If either John Yoo or Jennifer Keoster were shot in the stomach and groin, then taken from the hospital to Afghanistan, left naked in a cold cell blaring with the worst of Afghan music, then subjected to these techniques administered by al Qaeda members for weeks on end – they would come home and report that they were brutally tortured, and they would have sequelae for the remainder of their lives [and I suspect that John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Jennifer Koester actually know that].
"dislocation of expectation" could easily be seen as a synonym for "traumatize."
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