If Sister Diana Ortiz isn't expecting to smell
it, a whiff of tobacco smoke can devastate her. She trembles,
her hands perspire, her breathing becomes labored, her stomach
churns. Sometimes, she even feels a throbbing on her back at the
spots where her captors in Guatemala seared her at least 111 times
with cigarettes more than 15 years ago.
"Even talking about it right now makes me go back in time,"
says Ortiz, 44, a Catholic nun and co-founder of the Washington,
D.C.-based Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition
International. "My body automatically remembers it. It's very
difficult to explain."
But doctors studying the physiological effects of such torture
are starting to home in on explanations.
In the wake of prisoner abuse of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo
Bay, the American Association for the Advancement of Science
convened a panel Monday in Washington on the science of torture.
They sought to answer questions about the psychology of how
torturers become torturers and what the lasting physical and
psychological effects are.
Questions have been raised about whether the prisoner abuse
by U.S. military personnel actually constitutes torture, but
researchers in the field say they have no such doubts. Key factors:
The prisoners were restrained, threatened and humiliated. They
will endure similar physical responses in the future, even if
they're not as physically brutalized as Ortiz was, says Allen
Keller, a physician who directs the New York University Program
for Survivors of Torture.
"There isn't any difference between what is being done psychologically
in (the Abu Ghraib prison) photographs and what happens to other
victims of torture," says Keller, part of the science panel.
The science of torture is sketchy because it isn't ethical
for researchers to apply abuse or deliberately trigger flashbacks
in survivors to document the body's responses. But there are
an estimated 400,000 torture victims from 90 countries in the
USA for them to observe.
The current theory is that torture not only harms the body,
but it also corrupts the portion of the brain that screams at
the body to fight back or flee - when the body is restrained
and can do neither.
That function comes from the same section where sensory perception
functions operate, so a new and destructive pattern of reactions
to sounds, smells and images is branded into the programming.
At the same time, the front portion of the brain responsible
for filing memories in their proper chronological places is
disabled, says Bessel van der Kolk, a professor at the Boston
University School of Medicine and a leading researcher in the
neuroscience of trauma. Like a computer hard disk unable to
store its data properly, that part of the brain leaves the horrifying
memory out on the brain's desktop where it can be launched automatically
by various situations, setting into motion an almost uncontrollable
chain of physical reactions, he says.
"The brain becomes very sensitive to danger, and that reaction
that the person was unable to have at the time of the abuse
then is triggered by certain sounds, smells, physical sensations,
images, light patterns," says van der Kolk, co-author of Traumatic
Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body,
and Society. "Physical inability at the moment of torture is
probably a very important element of the permanent alteration
in the brain that occurs."
Van der Kolk says the subjugation of the flight-or-fight response
also explains why torture is a more scarring, insidious form
of trauma than that endured by, say, survivors of the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks.
"Very few people who ran out of the World Trade Center were
permanently damaged in the same way because they ran and ran
and were able to save themselves," van der Kolk says. "Over
time, most people do recover from those experiences unless they
had a prior history of trauma."
Ortiz, an American who had been teaching at a grade school
in a remote Guatemalan village when she was abducted amid civil
war in the late 1980s, could do nothing as her captors burned,
slapped and raped her.
"One never heals from torture," she says. "One merely learns
to cope with the aftermath."
