Horror, Experimentation and Enhanced Interrogation

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.