ABSTRACT

After 9/11 the United States launched a global War on Terror. As part of this War, U.S. psychologists, supported by doctors, designed an ‘Enhanced Interrogation’, or torture, programme to extract information from detainees in their custody. The Enhanced Interrogation programme caused huge international controversy, including for the various health professional groups who became bound up in it. Little research has been conducted on how nonprofessional audiences reacted to and made sense of Enhanced Interrogation. This study therefore examines how members of an internet community understood the Enhanced Interrogation programme, and the actions of the health professionals who designed and supported it. The article is based on an analysis of postings from seven major threads from this forum. These postings were made in the year following the release of a major investigation into the Enhanced Interrogation programme’s inner workings. The article argues that the main lens through which people on this forum made sense of Enhanced Interrogation is horror. Individuals connected this horror very strongly to the horror of unethical human experimentation, and particularly to the destructive research of the Nazi doctors.

摘要

9/11 之后，美国发动了全球反恐战争。作为这场战争的一部分，美国心理学家在医生的支持下，设计了一个“强化审讯”或酷刑程序，以从被拘留者那里提取信息。增强审讯计划引起了巨大的国际争议，包括参与其中的各种健康专业团体。关于非专业观众如何对增强审讯做出反应并理解其意义的研究很少。因此，本研究调查了互联网社区的成员如何理解增强审讯计划，以及设计和支持该计划的卫生专业人员的行动。本文基于对该论坛七个主要主题帖子的分析。这些帖子是在对增强审讯计划内部运作的重大调查发布后的一年发布的。这篇文章认为，这个论坛上的人们理解增强审讯的主要镜头是恐怖。人们将这种恐怖与不道德的人体实验的恐怖联系起来，尤其是与纳粹医生的破坏性研究有关。