Bystanders and Torturers ...

(Again, references from Wikipedia)

'Bystanders resent the tortured because they make them feel guilty and ashamed for having done nothing to prevent the atrocity. The sufferers threaten their sense of security and their much-needed belief in predictability, justice, and the rule of law. The sufferers, on their part, do not believe that it is possible to effectively communicate to outsiders what they have been through...

Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman states:

"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perperator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim demands action, engagment, and remembering."

It was long thought that "good" people would not torture and only "bad" ones would, under normal circumstances, However, research over the past 50 years suggests a disquieting alternative point of view, that under the right circumstances and with the appropriate encouragement and setting, most people can be encouraged to actively torture others. '

Why do I care?

My own sons stood by, watching the effects of my being tortured after I took custody at age 12, and by their senior year in high school both began to participate. Any negative indications by one of them from much earlier on were expanded by adults and grotesquely transformed into justifications for communal, family, and government crimes.

These are the sons I have loved and raised, and put first in everything. They learned to read sitting on my lap. I made sure they had every educational opportunity, was proud of them, said so often, and always wanted to spend time with them and see them have every advantage. When my employment and basic privacy was interfered with I still did whatever I could to put them first and ensure their success, eventually reduced to cooking their meals and discussing school and testing vocabulary in between running to the law libraries while under continuing surveillance and harassment.

My sons show the effects of living with me while I was subject to torture, both as victims and as torturers, without a clue as to what to rightly attribute this to. Evidence suggests they committed to US Federal Intelligence Agency commissions in exchange for tuition support to go to college, after having US Federal Intelligence Agencies interfere with our lives for so long, but now also including illegal recruiting and interviewing by the FBI at age 16. I have not heard from them for a long time, and when I have, it has been in humiliating fashion, coordinated by invasions of privacy passed between countries.

This has been a continuing series of frauds and crime not only by their mother, but Dallas Bar attorneys, Harriet Meiers of the Bush Administration (her friend), the US Justice Department, US State Department and others. These are the acts of women in both families. It is Parental Alienation and Malicious Mother syndrome in the extreme case, because of the level of influential contacts by my sons’ mother. A dominant woman who captained every one of her high school sports’ teams, could do no wrong, and expressed anger that her father did not let her mother do whatever she wished, nor did she feel she could. It was a bad marriage, I felt alone through most of it, and still don’t know whether it was the right call to stay married after the first year when I’d had enough, considering she was seeking something as a grounds for divorce later.

I did not deny their mother a divorce. I never denied my sons access to their mother or vice versa. In fact, I encouraged it. I simply insisted that I would fulfill my role as their father, and I could not hide what I was being subject to. Only later did I come to understand these acts were about custody, and my ex-wife’s desire to insist on custody and create a new family, while destroying the parental bond with me, and me personally if need be to achieve this goal.

So much for ‘family law’ and the ‘best interests’ of the child. Apparently, neither feminists nor strident religionists recognize the ‘best interests’ of the child, nor those of society, and are willing to break all laws and bounds in dishonest pursuit of other agenda.

What has been done by these and other parties is criminal and unacceptable, deserving of reversal and restitution.
© Copyright 2006 Dean Levinson

Insights into Psychological Torture ...

A good summation of what has been/is being directed towards myself for a period going back to two years prior to divorce, twelve years ago. Coached by senior lawyers, my ex-wife began this process, widened it with defamations wherever she could, and with unjustifiable attorney assistance elevated it to others at professional and governmental levels of interference. This is the true face of ‘family law’ and the abuse of public governmental institutions and ‘intelligence’ agencies --
© Copyright 2006 Dean Levinson

(from Wikipedia, and the referenced sources):

Torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical or psychological torment as an expression of cruelty, a means of intimidation, deterrent, revenge or punishment, or as a tool for the extraction of information or confessions ... Torture is common in situations where disparities in interpersonal power and control occur... Torture can be both physical and/or psychological. Physical torture is well-known, tends to be brutal, and is hard to hide. Psychological torture is not well-known, tends to be subtle and is much easier to conceal...

Psychological torture is directed at the psyche with calculated violations of psychological needs, along with deep damage to psychological structures and the breakage of beliefs underpinning normal sanity... Because psychological torture needs no physical violence to be effective, it is possible to induce severe psychological pain, sufferring, and trauma with no externally visible effects...

The process of torture is designed to invade and destroy the belief of the subject in their independence as a human being, to destroy presumptions of privacy, intimacy, and inviolability assumed by the subject, and to destroy their unspoken trust that these things can save them. Beyond merely invading the subject's mental, physical independence on a one-to-one level, such acts can be made further damaging via public humiliation, incessant repetition, depersonalization, and [attempts toward inducing] masochistic manipulation...

The CIA, in its "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983"... summed up the theory of coercion thus: " The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavior level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations."

Psychologically, torture often creates a state where the mind works against the best interests of the individual, due to the [attempted] inducement of such emotions of shame, worthlessness, dependency, and a feeling of a lack of uniqueness... These and other responses can lead to a mutated, fragmented, or discredited personality and belief structure...

Torture can rob the subject of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, can be the equivalent of cognitive death. The self ("I") can be shattered. The tortured often have nothing familiar to hang on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. They can lose their resilience and sense of freedom. They can feel alienated - unable to communicate, relate, attach…

Psychological pain is pain caused by psychological stress and by psychological trauma ... the practice of torture induces psychological pain through various acts...to achieve a tactical goal … Examples of psychological stress include: ...uncertainty, unfulfilled anticipation, fear for (and of) others and desire for (and of) others. But torture also creates further extremes of dynamic … Some well-known animal experiements performed in the 20th century show that in addition to these, the subject's own strengths and weaknesses can be enhanced by psychological stress to the point … where certain critical faculties in the brain shut down under overload... Torture...shatters deep down narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability which help sustain personality...

Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalystic treatment": "As the gap between the 'I' and the 'me' deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The subject that, under torture, was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense of interiority, intimacy, and privacy..."

The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture in a seminar titled "The Psychology of Torture" (1989): "Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture entails all the isolation and the extreme solitude of privacy with none of the usual security embodied therein...Torture entails at the same time all the self exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience..." Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation.

The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered subject and an empty display of the fiction of power and control. It is about reprogramming the subject to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, profferred by the abuser or user. The abused or used also swallows whole and assimilates the torturer's negative view of him and often, as a result, is rendered suicidal, self-destructive, or self-defeating...

Subjects typically oscillate between emotional numbing and highly sensitive arousal...other psychological consequences include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal...emotional flatness... The sufferer rages at their own suffering...their sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled... Torture subjects often suffer from... strong feelings of hate, rage, terror...sorrow...

Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its subjects feel helpless and powerless...often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture subjects encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other "objective" proof of their ordeal …