Elaine Meinel Supkis
Bombarding the brain with dangerous imaging processes in order to discover the 'truth' is unhealthy, tremendously invasive and is under the definition of 'torture' because the process is psychologically frightful as waterboarding. Meanwhile, the USA military has sent one of the 'punished' torturers of Abu Ghraib back to Iraq to train police! This is pure madness.
Brain scans might one day replace polygraphs as the best lie detectors, new research suggests.Different parts of the brain are activated by lying versus honest statements, two studies have found, and lies create activity in more locations. The differences can be measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.
"There may be unique areas in the brain involved in deception that can be measured with fMRI," said Temple University researcher Scott Faro, who led a study announced today. "We were able to create consistent and robust brain activation related to a real-life deception process."
In the research, six volunteers were asked to shoot a toy gun with blanks and then lie about their participation. Four volunteers who did not shoot were asked to tell the truth about what went on.
Scientists did a polygraph and fMRI on each. In all questions, both tests distinguished between truths and lies. Importantly, the fMRI revealed more areas of the brain firing when a person lied.
The results were presented today at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. The study was small, however, and more research is needed, Faro and his colleagues say. The conclusions nonetheless are similar to a comparable study announced in July by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina.
ALL scans are dangerous. The reason we still use them is because the possible health beneits outweigh the dangers. For example, it isn't good to bombard breasts in women with x-rays but in order to prevent breast cancer, one submits to the process because the chance of death from breast cancer outweighs the possibility of getting it from the tests. Same with dental x-rays.
The process of this 'new' system which isn't all that new, it is just the data collected over the years has given the psychologists enough information to claim they can detect lying, is also psychologically dangerous. Namely, it is like being strapped into an 'iron maiden' in the Middle Ages. All torturers know that locking people in the equivelent of a 'tomb' destroys resistance to probing for information. The claustrophobic set up, putting the prisoner or person being investigated, inside a big, very tight tunnel, putting something on his or her head and then, in total darkness, interrogating them, is torture.
Over the last 100 years, psychologists have assisted torturers in order to find increasingly sophisitcated methods of torture. The prefered method is psychological but as all torturers know, psychology only goes so far, one needs to inspire physical fear, too. An artful combination of both is what despots need. The fact that the USA, which our Founding Fathers sought to create in such a way as to insure the dignity and freedom of themselves, ie, revolutionaries, tried to outlaw all forms of secret interrogations and imprisonments. The creation of the lie detector test was in violation of this freedom and note how that methodology has spread like wildfire during the Cold War in a vain attempt at finding 'commies.'
Now it is being used to find 'terrorists' and yet it isn't. It is really used by corporate America to find whistle blowers and leakers of corporate secrets and also to screen employees. Anyone who thinks this new system of interrogation won't be used by these creeps is dreaming.
They will rush to use it! For nearly everything! There is no limit to the number of things corporations want to know about underlings. And politicians will use it to probe the minds of anyone opposing them. Rich men marrying women might incorporate the use of this system if their wives divorce them, asking for money, for example. Courts will use them 100% of the time in the end, seeking the truth, not via Socratic questioning which requires intellectual skills and a sense of logic and evidence but rather, lazily using this system because it is easy, quick and requires no thought, just some psychologist pulling levers and studying images.
It is very depressing contemplating the use of this new system. One reporter said, when he gave it a test run, they asked him to lie about a month he spent embedded in the Marines and pretend he was a Marine. When they questioned him about this, the part of his brain that lit up was Bocca's region, the deepest part, which we call 'reptilian', is where the deepest fears and loves reside. One can see how this process opens the door to discovering all sorts of psychological processes that are at the core of one's being.
And this is the power of gods and devils.
In The Lord of the Rings, the primary antagonist Sauron controls his minions from within the Dark Tower, Barad-dûr, and thus he is never physically seen by the main characters. However, he does sometimes confront them from a distance, and in those cases he is often perceived as an "Eye". The most notable example is Frodo's vision in the Mirror of Galadriel:
"The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing."
In the Bible, we are told that God sees into our souls and we can't hide anything. I happen to believe that when we die, we meet our own inner souls at the Gates of Death and this entity then patiently shows us the truth of ourselves. And this event is incredibly painful because all humans lie to themselves all the time, this is how we survive.
On this same topic, an Abu Ghraib torturer has been sent back to Iraq to teach the police.
By ADAM ZAGORINAs if the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal weren't bad enough for America's image in the Middle East, now it may appear to much of the world that one of the men implicated in the scandal is returning to the scene of the crime.
The U.S. military tells TIME that one of the soldiers convicted for his role in Abu Ghraib, having served his sentence, has just been sent back to serve in Iraq.
He fears being assassinated. But the Pentagon doesn't care. Nor will it stop torturing people or degrading people.
The general commanding the torture was never punished but was quietly shuffled aside.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. lieutenant general who once served as the top commander of American forces in Iraq has been forced to retire from the Army, allegedly because of the abuse scandal at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, news reports said Thursday."That's the key reason, the sole reason, that I was forced to retire," Ricardo Sanchez, who retired Wednesday, told a newspaper based in Texas.
He, like the offiers who were put on trial, should have had a trial but didn't simply because this would mean going up the chain of command to the White House. Thanks to the GOPredator Congress, it is OK to torture people but back then, it was still verboten by our Constitution and the main body of laws we used to live under.
So the ploy used by our government was to pretend all the guards were 'out of control' and it was their independent desire to torture that led them to violate the laws and of course, this was done, hidden away from our government which has finally given up and decided to legalize the torture they were condoning.
This is why they feel secure in sending a known torturer back to Iraq to train people as if the Iraqis don't already know all about the fine art of torture! They practically if not actually, were the inventors of torture about 6,000 years ago. Frankly, humans accross the globe, throughout history, have figured out how to torture each other, physically and emotionally, and this is a deep human evolutionary force we cannot escape but must control since it can know no limit.
Thus, the Constitution, a document that supposed to lift us above despotism.
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