The torture debate in the U.S. has highlighted a key paradox in American ideology: We value human rights, but we also fear outside threats, enough that we’re willing to put the rights issue aside when we want to wring truth out of a suspected Al Qaeda operative.

But what about the medical side of torture? Search magazine has a fascinating article on how doctors are specializing in torture detection, and researching how torture affects the body and mind. Specifically, writer Jina Moore profiles Rajeev Bais and Lars Beattie, two doctors at the Libertas Human Rights Clinic in Queens who provide medical affidavits for U.S. asylum-seekers who claim they were tortured in their home countries.

These affidavits hold a ton of weight with judges, and play a key role in determining whether or not asylum is granted. The reason is that Bai and Beattie can tell with relative certainty if an applicant is telling the truth about being tortured, first by interviewing and observing him, and then doing a physical exam to look for corroborating evidence—in effect, using the patient’s body to check out his story.

And there’s plenty of evidence to look for, such as scar tissue, ligament or muscle tears, popped ear drums, and poorly-healed bones. Some methods, like burning with cigarettes or brands, leave easily identifiable scars, while others are usually mark-free—falanga, a practice in which victims are beaten on the bottoms of their feet with rods, causes excrutiating pain but leaves little to no permanent damage.

The dichotomy, as Moore notes, is interesting: Rather than the methodology of torture, which is to inflict pain on the body in order to wring truth from the mouth, these investigators use the body to corroborate the victim’s already-told story. As Moore puts it:

Bodies, in other words, can expose a lie. One doctor in Manhattan interviewed a man who claimed the scars above his nipples were the result of torture he suffered in Liberia under Charles Taylor’s regime. But the scars were symmetrical and equidistant, implying a precision which raised the doctor’s suspicion. A Liberian culture organization to which he described the markings told him the scars were more likely evidence of a tribal ritual ceremony.

This mix of psychology and forensic medicine can have gray areas, and Beattie admits he makes plenty of judgment calls:

Beattie never doubted his story, but he did wonder about the moral equivalence of pain: Who’s to say, he wondered, that [a tortured patient] never inflicted brutality on someone else?

“I decided, look, I believe him as a human being. I believe he was victimized there,” Beattie says. “And I believe I’m doing the right thing by writing the affidavit. But you know, I’m sure—” He paused. “Other people might feel otherwise.”

Moral judgments aside, the increased doctor attention on torture has led to a necessary ramp-up in research—as well as investigative reporting. Dr. Steven Miles even searched through 35,000 pages of government documents outlining the role medical personnel played in military interrogations in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, resulting in the book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror. Among his most alarming findings was this:

Miles also found more than two hundred military studies, by his count, that concluded the intelligence elicited by torture is usually faulty.

Which leads to a different conversation entirely.

What’s worse, the genocide in Darfur or the horrors of North Korean prison camps? While the question may seem a bit like comparing global warming and the financial crisis, it can be useful to evaluate and compare all the awful things humans are doing to each other around the globe.

And in order to create an effective comparison, you need a set of objective data that can be analyzed to evaluate wars and even give direction for intervention and deterrence. While throwing around numbers like “45,000 Iraqi civilians killed” can be useful for nabbing attention, it typically does little for inspiring solutions.

With this idea in mind, Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks of King’s College in London and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College in Egham, UK, have created a “Dirty War Index” that quantifies all of the various atrocities we commit—such as rape, civilian murder, or torture—and labels them as a proportion of the total number of incidents reported. For example, the DWI of civilian casualties would be “the number of civilian deaths divided by the overall number of mortalities in the conflict, both civilian and combatant, multiplied by 100.”

While turning carnage, beatings, and other horrors into data might sound callous, it can have major benefits as far as finding solutions in war-torn areas, says University of Toronto biostatistics professor Nathan Taback:

In general, gathering data on the health effects of conflict can illuminate patterns of violence that may not be apparent from anecdotal evidence, and that have not been taken seriously until quantitative evidence was available.

Of course, the danger is that, as with all statistics, DWI ratings can vastly oversimplify, or even potentially muddle complex issues (think of the old “You can prove anything with statistics” adage). Then again, sometimes numbers can reveal pretty incredible things, like this observation from Hicks:

In our analysis on casualties from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we found that the proportion of females killed was significantly higher when Palestinian forces targeted Israelis (40%) than when they targeted Palestinians (3%), or when Israeli forces targeted Palestinians (5%).

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In the wake of near-daily scandals involving billions of dollars, it can be easy to lose sight of the rampant unrest in the rest of the world—including Sri Lanka, the small Asian nation that has been fighting a lengthy civil war. The conflict is between the government and a group of insurgents known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and while the violence has been ongoing and tragic, the fascinating aspect is how both sides are using technology to spin their actions, gain public support, and put down the other side.

Brian Calvert at World Politics Review, who is doing an investigative series on the country’s unique technological warfare, reports that releasing YouTube videos depicting things like suicide bombers has become standard practice for both parties. The government even has a headquarters for its information campaign, called the Media Center for National Security, which was established in 2006 to “disseminate accurate defense-related news within short as possible time, to both local and international media, and then at the same time to counter the LTTE propaganda.”

The insurgents, meanwhile, have formed their own technological strategy, described as follows:

The government is battling an image of the Tigers as underdogs, led by a leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose message has not changed in 25 years: The Tamil people face eradication by the Sinhalese majority. There is no salvation for them but through armed struggle for Eelam. The Tamil Tigers are that struggle.

Prabhakaran has taken the conflict deep into the information environment, accessing the imaginations of supporters through satellite links and radio signals, on Web sites and in chat rooms. Each attack and every stunt builds on his message, encouraging the diaspora to send money, spurring weapons sales and keeping the Tigers armed and viable.

While the information depicted in these videos and other online sources may not be factually perfect—journalists “complain that information coming out of the Media Center is impossible to verify and often contradicts equally hard-to-confirm LTTE statement”—it certainly gets the message across, with some videos grabbing hundreds of thousands of views. And for an insurgency like the Tigers, it could mean greater public support, new recruits, and even media attention (in the form of stories like this one) for their cause.

Though whether that translates into military victories has yet to be determined.

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RB: Technology Plays Key Role in Mumbai Attacks, Both for Terrorists and Civilians
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Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association voted (at last) to ban its members from participating in interrogations at U.S. detention centers, including the notorious Guantanamo Bay. This marked a major shift from its previous stance, which permitted work with interrogation (some of which is known in certain circles as “torture”) despite the fact that both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have banned any affiliation with the practice for years.

So what’s different about psychologists, that it took them this long to decide that participation in torture wasn’t something the field should strive for? Stanley Fish at the New York Times blog “Think Again” offers the following explanation:

One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists.

It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic.

Fair point, though it doesn’t really weigh the fact that ethical considerations govern all scientists, psychologists or no. From the Stanford experiment to the controversy surrounding self-experimentation, scientific discovery has never operated on a separate, removed level from human rights. Certain behaviors—such as torture—could very well provide valuable data for psychologists, and maybe even lead to breakthroughs in the field. But do the potential benefits outweigh the ethical landmines of participation (at least through silent concession) in human rights violations? Put another way: Do we really have to condone torture to learn about the human psyche?

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Most people peruse blogs at the office, meaning that if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you weren’t a victim of Bloody November, in which around 500,000 jobs were systematically purged from the U.S. workforce—many of them from the tech sector. But one industry that’s been hiring in droves, reports the Boston Globe, is defense contractors, particularly those focused on the latest in war technology.

The cluster of defense companies based in New England is expected to weather the downturn reasonably well, because of their tech focus:

[R]ather than building entire jets, ships, tanks, or ground installations, many of the region’s defense firms develop the electronics, combat, and communications systems they use…

Area contractors, for instance, work on electronic eavesdropping, signal processing for radar systems, and equipment used to integrate intelligence from different sources, technologies critical to helping the US military and allies battle terrorists in multiple countries.

Not that we’re suggesting qualified applicant shouldn’t jump at a well- (or any-) paying gig, but it’s worth asking: Is this really the place we want to be re-channeling our tech talent?

There’s also the question of stability: These firms must know their clock is ticking, and that once Obama takes office, there’s about a 99.99% chance the defense budget will be machete-slashed and the Bush waterfall of cash for military spending will be over. Which calls into question just how stable these—or any—jobs are in the long term.

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Humans have been historically eager to kill each other. Throughout history, we’ve thought up all sorts of nutty reasons to slaughter our fellow man that had nothing to do with immediate survival of the fittest. We tend to chalk all these wars up to cultural differences fed by a species-wide need to be ideologically right (and impose that right-ness on others), along with a knack for weapons discovery culminating in a technology boom that’s constantly supplying bigger and better ways to off each other. Add governments to the mix, and you’ve got a big steaming pile of questionably necessary interspecies violence.

So it’s a little—but not a lot—surprising that the growing scientific consensus is that war not only dates back to the origins of humankind, but has also played “an integral role” in or species’ evolution. According to this theory, which emerged during a recent conference at the University of Oregon, the war “instinct” was present in our common ancestor with chimps, and has been a “significant selection pressure on the human species,” as evolutionary psychologist Mark Van Vugt put it.

His and his colleagues’ reasoning goes something like this: Evidence exists to show that war and humans have been friends since the beginning (fossils of early humans show wounds consistent with combat injuries). As such, we would have evolved “psychological adaptations to a warlike lifestyle.” To this end, researchers have presented “the strongest evidence yet that males—whose larger and more muscular bodies make them better suited for fighting—have evolved a tendency towards aggression outside the group but cooperation within it.”

In other words, men have evolved to be team players within their own clans, and be warriors with everyone else—much like the behavior observed in chimpanzees, who regularly engage in short bursts of intergroup violence to weaken neighboring groups of males.

So should we resign ourselves to a future of ever-escalating violence due to our Darwinist predisposition for war? Not necessarily, says John Tooby, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who insists on looking at the bright side:

“The interesting thing about war is we’re focused on the harm it does… But it requires a super-high level of cooperation [within military organizations].”

Fair enough. Now if we could just figure out how to apply that trait to government.

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While Russian warships head to Abkhazia and arguments begin over who started it all, the conflict in Georgia has “paralyzed” scientific research in the country, according to Nature News. The director of the Georgia National Science Foundation said that 72 research projects, or 30 percent of all the foundation’s current work, have been halted because of the conflict.

In an example of terrible timing, the invasion hit smack in the middle of a new ramp-up in the country’s science-funding system, following a resurgence of young and skilled Georgian scientists. The GNSF had planned to double its national science budget next year, from $8 million to $16 million—which spells a lot of research and travel grants. But given the huge costs of post-war reconstruction (not to mention the hit Georgia’s economy will take from its loss of foreign investors), that money is now likely headed for recovery efforts.

Since we’re heaping on the bad news:

International conservation charity WWF estimates that 280 hectares of forest have been burnt in the conflict, and warns that key conservation areas are under threat, including a biodiversity research hotspot in western Georgia. “Since last night, Russian helicopters are dropping bombs in the Borjomi Gorge, in the area of Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park,” David Tarkhnishvili, a zoologist at the Ilia Chavchavadze State University in Tbilisi, wrote on 16 August in an e-mail to Italian colleagues. “Multiple fire patches are currently spreading over the area.”

As for international students and teams of non-national researchers currently working in Georgia, they’ve (wisely) flown the coop.