Author: Daniel Castellano

Cattle Prods for Humans

Apparently, it isn’t torture if it doesn’t leave a mark, or so we are led to believe by the recent study approving the safety of tasers. Since the electric stun devices cause serious injuries in only 3 out of 1000 cases, we should not be concerned that they are unsafe, notwithstanding the fact that the increasing frequency of their use may make even this low rate result in thousands of injuries, including over 200 fatalities already, according to Amnesty International. This debate over safety ignores what should be the more obvious issue: that any use of a 50,000-volt shock stick will result in excruciating pain far beyond that received by beatings or other practices commonly regarded as torture. It seems that a practice is not torture, no matter how intense the pain, so long as the duration is brief and no lasting injury results.

For those wondering how such a simple technology did not achieve widespread use until the 1990s, this is to be accounted for by Taser International’s development of a firing system without gunpowder, so that the device is no longer regarded as a firearm under the notoriously lax gun laws in the U.S. Selling the devices to police departments across the country enabled Taser to expand abroad, where the devices have met much more mixed reception, sometimes being withdrawn from use after a trial period. People in other countries tend to object more strenuously to being treated like cattle.

Apart from its use of twin tethered darts for long-range deployment, the taser is essentially a cattle prod for humans. The short-range stun gun end of the weapon is in fact the same device as a cattle prod, modified only in appearance and voltage. Of course, the taser does more than stun its victim, but sends searing pain through every nerve in the body, causing even the toughest men to scream in agony, as they experience what might be called maximal pain, if only for a few seconds. Even involuntary functions are affected, so the victim loses control of breathing and excretion, and even the heartbeat is affected. Victims with pacemakers or heart conditions can be sent into cardiac arrhythmia. Neurological conditions can also be aggravated, but these sorts of complications are only to be expected from a device that simply electrocutes the entire body for several seconds, in eerie reminiscence of the electroshock “therapy” previously favored by psychiatrists in the treatment of mental patients. The real purpose of the device, whether for cattle, mental patients, or persons under arrest, is coercion.

Here we arrive at the crux of the taser problem: whether it is licit to administer excruciating pain simply to obtain the compliance of a suspect. We should note that even the threat of the use of a taser can obtain this end. It is one thing to use a taser in substitution of a firearm, but more commonly they are used as simple coercion devices in situations where a firearm would be totally inappropriate. The belief that police have a right to use a taser when a suspect is simply being non-compliant or resisting arrest entails the belief that a suspect never has the right to be non-compliant or to resist arrest. Even in the law-enforcement-heavy United States, federal courts have ruled that a suspect has a right to resist unlawful arrest. Giving police the power to enforce compliance through torture undermines this right of resistance, and indeed can be used even against those not under arrest, such as public protesters.

The taser’s predecessor, the cattle prod, has a long history as a torture device, used in regimes such as Baathist Iraq during interrogations of political prisoners. Electrocution sticks are an effective torture weapon, since they can be administered repeatedly to the victim without injury or diminished effectiveness. They generally leave no mark or other evidence of their use. In other words, the very features which the proponents of the taser tout as evidence of its safety are what make it an effective and easily abused torture device. For every act of police brutality caught on film, there are many others that are not, so it is the height of irresponsibility to entrust officers with a weapon that leaves no evidence of its use or abuse.

Setting aside the more egregious abuses, any use of the taser as a compliance device undermines a citizen’s right not to be punished without a trial, as well as his status as a citizen equal in stature to the arresting officer. The pain inflicted by a taser is at least comparable to that of flogging, which we now hypocritically regard as barbaric, though at least in English common law, it was used as a punishment after conviction by jury. Not only are the police now empowered to inflict punishment without a trial, but the threat of this type of coercion creates an environment where citizens cannot speak freely with officers, for fear that any non-compliance will be punished. This undermines citizenship itself, as anyone interacting with a police officer is immediately placed in a subordinate position, bound to comply with any instruction reasonable or unreasonable under pain of electrocution.

If most people are content to be treated like cattle, or rather to have others treated like cattle, secure in the confidence that they will never be among the unfortunates, then the considerations discussed above will have no impact on public policy. On the other hand, for those of us who demand citizenship, we must recognize that police who use the threat of torture to obtain compliance are enemies of republican government, as are their “pro-law-enforcement” political enablers. These enemies of society should be opposed at every level, through financial, political, and physical resistance.

Fascistic tendencies in the United States are not limited to criminal law enforcement, but are expanded into the military sphere, where “pain boxes” are being developed that can inflict intense, incapacitating pain remotely over an entire region through electromagnetic transmission. It is easy to see how such a device could bring entire cities to submission, and make modern warfare even more cowardly than our current practice of dropping precision munitions from high altitudes at night. Such a device would have been of interest to many fascistic regimes, but it is difficult to see why a freedom-loving country would have any interest whatsoever in this form of coercion, though this is the same country that developed the neutron bomb. These ghouls who devote their energies to finding new, exotic ways to kill or coerce people should be opposed from below, and the beast of their creation must be killed by draining its political and financial lifeblood.

The Reluctant Saint

The rush to canonize Mother Teresa of Calcutta ought to be reconsidered, if only to provide time to distinguish popular perceptions from reality. Both supporters and opponents of her canonization often operate from mistaken understandings of the nature of her work and her interior life. Without prejudging the question of her sainthood, we should set the relevant facts straight so that the subject considered is the real person, not popular myth.

The most striking contrast between perception and reality concerns the nature of Mother Teresa’s vocation among the poor. Contrary to their name, the Missionaries of Charity are not a charity in the common sense. They have no infrastructure to adequately feed, clothe, house, or otherwise materially help the poor. They do not provide disaster relief, nor do they found hospices. Their ministry to the poor is almost entirely spiritual, with only minimal material aid. This can be seen most notably in their care for the dying. Those who are not admitted to hospitals receive palliative care from the sisters, inadequate to the task of healing, but sufficient to prepare for death. In some cases, care involves little more than the comfort of dying in the presence of a human face. This may not be what many people consider the most effective form of helping the poor, but there are other organizations to provide material relief, whereas Mother Teresa had a spiritual vocation, insisting she was not a social worker. One might as well fault the police department for failing to put out fires as accuse the Missionaries of Charity of neglecting the material needs of the poor. Even less pertinent is the well-worn criticism that their upholding of Church teaching on contraception and abortion opposed the interests of the poor, as if these practices were a social panacea. The eugenic solution to poverty is not morally obligatory.

Be that as it may, the Missionaries of Charity have received tens of millions of dollars, including many donations from people who believe the order to have the mission of providing substantial material relief. Given this wealth of resources and the donors’ intent, it is arguable that the order is obligated to direct these funds to provide material aid to the poor, if not directly, then by redirecting funds to an organization equipped to do so. While there are no accusations of corruption, there is the possibility of negligence by allowing donations to accumulate without any plan for their use.

The second area of profound contrast between perception and reality concerns Mother Teresa’s spiritual life. Here we must tread carefully, for the real person appears to be an amalgam of the external persona and the troubled soul revealed in her letters, rather than one over the other.

If one were to judge solely from her most despairing letters, we would conclude that Mother Teresa was weak in faith, doubting God’s presence when she was denied overt spiritual consolations. This sense of darkness or divine absence dated from the 1940s, when she left her convent to follow her special vocation to help the poor. Deprived of the consolations of life in her convent and perhaps hopeful that the spiritual experience of her divine calling would be followed by a life of special consolations such as those known by contemplatives, she was faced with the barren horror of poverty and despair without any consoling angels to strengthen her. Then she spoke of God as one who is absent, her soul as filled with darkness, and at times even questioning the basic propositions of the faith: the presence of God, the existence of the soul, the fidelity of Christ.

It is arrant sophistry to suggest that these doubts are signs of great faith. The illogical idea that doubt is essential to faith comes from existential Protestant thinkers and is foreign to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. As Cardinal Newman said, to hold a dogma subject to question is to have already lost the faith. Mother Teresa herself plainly admitted at many times to have had “no faith”. This is a serious condition, incompatible with the state of grace. It goes beyond the sorrows of the saints in the absence of spiritual consolation, the so-called “dark night of the soul.” It is one thing to feel abandoned by God, and quite another to lose faith in His Providence. Doubting the faith is not an example for Christians to live by; Mother Teresa herself knew this, so she kept these letters secret and asked that they be destroyed.


As grave as this interior darkness may be, it is not the entire story of Mother Teresa’s spiritual life. Her own statements and those of her closest confidants, including those aware of her secret struggles, attest clearly to many acts of faith, whether in prayers of gratitude for divine blessings, teaching sisters to love Christ, and above all, scrupulously obeying the demands of the faith. It is in this last aspect of her life that Mother Teresa’s greatest merit is to be found, for she always obeyed, even when she was in internal turmoil. Thus her definitive acts of volition were those of faith, as her doubts were never strong enough to sway her from her vocation. While external acts do not compensate for lack of faith, her testimony and that of her confidants give numerous examples of a simple, certain faith that she held throughout life, though not unfailingly.

The real Mother Teresa is a complex character with a vocation quite different from her popular image. Before deciding whether she is the sort of character to be counted among the canonical saints, we should be clear about our subject, and not mythologize her into a person of unfailing faith, nor misconstrue her mission as simple philanthropy.

The Future of Manned Space Flight

The most recent mission of the space shuttle Endeavour has drawn attention once again to the fundamental deficiencies of the shuttle program. Although the damage to Endeavor’s tiles was not a threat to the safety of the crew, it served as a reminder of the problematic basic design of having the orbiter mounted alongside its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. Whether the debris striking Endeavour shortly after launch was foam or ice, it clearly came from the mounting bracket, and would not have struck the shuttle had it been possible to mount it atop the boosters and tank, as was the case in the Mercury and Apollo programs. The last shuttle missions will fly in 2010, and hopefully the successor vehicle will correct this basic design flaw, returning to the more successful earlier model, rather than banking on the supposed reusability of the orbiter.

In truth, the space shuttle as it exists is not properly reusable, as many of its parts need to be replaced or rebuilt after each mission, and there are extensive safety inspections needed to find fractures or other failures. NASA’s model of tolerating stress failures of individual parts, so long as they do not fracture sufficiently to cause the loss of a vehicle, and replacing them after each mission, was exposed by Richard Feynman in the wake of the Challenger disaster. At the time, there was an alarming propensity among NASA administrators to overstate the safety factor and grossly underestimate the probability of failure, which we now know from experience to be at least 1 in 100, consistent with the prediction of engineers in the 1980s. A culture of secrecy and concern for public relations prevented realistic assessments of risk, and prevented certain facts about the Challenger disaster from reaching the public. NASA prevented state authorities from performing autopsies on the astronauts, and downplayed evidence that the astronauts likely were alive and conscious during their free fall before impacting the ocean’s surface.

Among Feynman’s findings regarding NASA’s attitude toward safety was the irrational practice of regarding a situation (such as certain structural damage) as safe if missions have been successfully flown in that condition, regardless of any probabilistic assessment of failure. This posture resulted in the Columbia disaster, as NASA engineers mistook the success of previous missions as an indication that there was no intrinsic danger to the model of having the shuttle alongside its rocket boosters. Worse still, although the impact of foam against the shuttle tiles was recognized during the mission, the shuttle was authorized for re-entry, denying the possibility that there was a threat to the vehicle.

Now that the dangers of the space shuttle are more fully and publicly understood, it is increasingly cumbersome and expensive to assure mission safety. The space shuttle is also burdened with antiquated electronics and computer technology, so that its reusability has become a liability. A new manned space vehicle needs to be developed, more along the lines of the earlier successful American programs, and the currently successful Russian model.

The development of a new space vehicle, as part of NASA’s new objective of returning to the moon and landing astronauts on Mars, will undoubtedly limit its ability to fund other endeavors. Already, basic scientific research unrelated to manned spaceflight has seen reduced funding by NASA, even though important questions in astrophysics and particle physics can be explored with unmanned vehicles that are much more cost effective. Manned space flight increases the cost of research well over a hundredfold, and it provides no data that unmanned probes cannot provide, save for the effects of space flight on humans. Such a circular justification should not be the basis for an enormous investment. Even if scientific research on humans in space is necessary, this can be achieved on the International Space Station, which is also in danger of losing NASA funding. Considering that NASA advocated destroying Mir in favor of a new station that would not be in exclusively foreign control, it is understandable that European partners strenuously object to its plans to scuttle the ISS as soon as 2016, only six years after completion. The enormous cost and complexity of the ISS make comparisons to the space shuttle program inevitable, and given NASA’s recent track record, it is unclear whether they are institutionally capable of leaner, more efficient design for the moon and Mars programs.