The footage of Omar Khadr’s interrogation shows a 16-year-old sobbing in abject despair as he tells his interrogator, “You don’t care about me.”

Here we see a boy in hell; who among us can resist the urge to look away? Khadr is a young Canadian citizen who comes from a family of Al-Qaeda sympathizers. He was captured by American forces in 2002, when he was 15 years old, after a firefight in Afghanistan that left him badly wounded and blind in one eye. He was accused, on rather dubious grounds, of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier. Khadr was taken to the infamous Bagram prison, where he claims he was tortured. He was later transferred to Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, where he has remained without trial ever since. He’s been denied contact with his family and subjected to prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation. On June 25, 2008, Justice Richard Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada ruled that Khadr’s treatment constitutes a breach of the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

While Britain and Australia have demanded the return of their citizens from Guantanamo, Canada hasn’t even asked the Americans to let an independent medical expert inspect Khadr’s injuries. Even though Canadian authorities have long known about the treatment Khadr was receiving, both the Conservative government and its Liberal predecessor have refused to intervene on Khadr’s behalf.

Regardless of the sins of Khadr’s family, the fact remains that Canada is complicit in the torture of a Canadian citizen, a citizen who has been detained without trial for six years in prisons reviled worldwide for grotesque human rights violations. It’s particularly horrifying that Khadr was a child when his torture began, but every inmate in Bagram, Guantanamo, and America’s many CIA Black Sites could be considered, in an important moral sense, to be a child. The whole point of torture as it’s practiced today is to destroy the hard-won psychological structures that distinguish adults from children.

To understand what modern methods of torture do to a person, we have to understand a few fundamental features of the human mind.

Every animal has an ecological niche, an environment that meets its needs and helps it to thrive. Thanks to our ability to use imagination and reason to work collectively to solve problems and overcome obstacles, human beings have expanded their ecological niche across much of the Earth’s surface. For this reason, our environments are as much mental as they are physical. In Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Basic Books, 2001), Pascal Boyer writes that “Human behavior is based on a rich and flexible database that provides parameters for human action. Very little of human behavior can be explained or even described without taking into account the massive acquisition of information about surrounding situations. This is why some anthropologists have described the proper environment of humans as a ‘cognitive niche.’ Just as frogs need ponds and whales need seaweed, humans are constantly immersed in a milieu that is indispensable to their operation and survival, and that milieu is information-about-the-environment.” Our cognitive niche includes other human minds. According to Boyer, “Humans depend upon information and cooperation, and because of that they depend on information about other people’s mental states—that is, what information they have and what their intentions are.”

In The Structure of Evil (The Free Press, 1968), Ernest Becker argues that it isn’t just information that humans need, but also meaning. The information in our cognitive niche has to be organized in a way that’s coherent and comprehensible, and that lets us interact competently with our environment without anxiety. Most importantly, it has to give us a sense of personal significance and value. Our cognitive niche, in other words, is what we usually call culture. Without immersion in a satisfying culture we can’t maintain any sense of competence or self-worth, and we can’t emotionally mature: we remain stranded in childhood, in a state of fear, confusion, and utter dependence upon authority figures. Exiled from our cognitive niche, we face psychological annihilation.

Culture, however, is fragile. Every culture, from the cultures of nations to the cultures of families, has to synthesize a bewildering amount of information into a comprehensible whole. There is no one correct way to synthesize this information, which means that there is no simple 1:1 correlation between any given culture and reality. Each culture is largely arbitrarily constructed, and is therefore a kind of fiction. Unfortunately, to give us a sense of self-worth a culture has to have an aura of culture-transcending authority. We have to believe that our self-worth is founded upon something real, something more solid than a cultural game, an arbitrary consensus. This creates a fundamental paradox: culture is a fiction that has to hide its fictitious nature in order to work properly. To hide this fictitious nature, we have to remain constantly engaged in the collective creation of culture. Once we stop, the fiction is revealed and we start disintegrating.

Psychological disintegration is commonplace in the modern world. Capitalism depends upon constant innovation, transformation, and expansion, and therefore upon the ongoing disruption of social structures like families and communities. It also tends towards plutocracy, creating sheltered and affluent enclaves for the powerful few and perpetual insecurity and fear for the powerless many. These dynamics dissolve cultures, preventing them from performing their most important psychological functions.

In their 1997 essay, Religious Totalism, Exemplary Dualism, and the Waco Tragedy, Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins write that “If it is assumed that coherent selves require a coherent culture, then contemporary cultural fragmentation . . . might be expected to provide a context for the pervasiveness of ‘narcissistic’ syndromes, ‘borderline’ personality disorders, and ‘dissociative’ disorders of self-fragmentation. . . . In a fragmented culture, persons with fully holistic and integrated selves may even be in the minority.”

Modern techniques of torture intensify this identity-annihilating process. In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2007), Naomi Klein writes that “Torture, or in CIA language ‘coercive interrogation,’ is a set of techniques designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation and shock in order to force them to make concessions against their will. The guiding logic is elaborated in two CIA manuals that were declassified in the late nineties. They explain that the way to break “resistant sources” is to create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved of any input (with hoods, earplugs, shackles, total isolation), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings, electroshock).

“The goal of this ‘softening-up’ stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind: prisoners are so regressed and afraid that they can no longer think rationally or protect their own interests. One CIA manual provides a particularly succinct explanation: ‘There is an interval—which may be extremely brief—of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply, than he was just before he experienced the shock.’”

Regression and fear are the key concepts here. Torture is designed to turn us into children, to isolate us from life-giving cultures and to shatter the cognitive powers that allow us to think, feel, and behave like adults. The damage done to those faculties may well be permanent, especially if, as in Khadr’s case, it’s inflicted upon an adolescent. No matter who it’s inflicted upon, however, modern torture is best seen as a particularly sadistic form of child abuse, and, in cases involving sodomy and other forms of sexual humiliation, child rape.

American civilians aren’t protected from this abuse. Jose Padilla, an American civilian, was declared an enemy combatant in 2002 and detained and tortured for years before being tried in a civilian court. In 2006, Forensic Psychiatrist Angela Hegarty examined Padilla and found that extreme isolation and torture had left him essentially brain damaged and incapable of assisting in his own defense. Klein writes that the tortures applied to Padilla “completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were intended to do.” The government dropped its dirty-bomb allegations against him, but he was convicted by a federal jury of criminal conspiracy.

Padilla’s case may only be the first of many. A US federal court ruled in July 2008 that the President can order the indefinite jailing of civilians in the United States, overriding their right to a trial. Even if detained civilians get a trial, and even if they’re found innocent of the charges against them, by the time they come to court they may, like Padilla, have already been psychologically destroyed.

State-sponsored torture isn’t good at getting useful information from its victims, but it’s very good at intimidating a regime’s enemies and critics. The message torture conveys is clear and terrifying: no one is safe, so shut your mouth and do what you’re told. At first, only social pariahs feel the torturer’s institutionalized hatred, but torture has a way of corrupting the entire state, becoming increasingly accepted as the state moves towards totalitarian control of its citizenry. Unless the shift towards totalitarianism is reversed, torture eventually becomes commonplace in the state’s dealings with dissidents.

The threat of torture, no matter how remote, is ruinous. It discourages us from trying to understand and change our world, further fragmenting our culture and thereby juvenilizing us all. It steals our maturity, and with it our ability to defend our interests. Cases like Khadr’s and Padilla’s reveal a repugnant truth: the foundation of the great ziggurat of the American empire is a hell created solely for children, and those children are us.