A fairly chilling article at the New Yorker, called Black Sites.

This article, of course, is about CIA, and their interrogation methods, at the so-called "black sites", places around the world where people that are labeled "high value" terrorists have been taken.

One of the first things that strikes me (outside of my moral nausea), confirms a long held belief by Wilber, that different tracks in the world - say the moral, and the intellectual - definitely run on their own, without much interaction. 

In this case, all the different technological advances - in psychology, modeling, intake, etc - were applies to extracting informaton:

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

See there, the attention to detail, and the development of a practice, that operated on the physical, emotional, and psychological:

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”

The article goes on to describe the pluses and minuses of the confessions extracted.  The spokespeople quoted of course, emphasize high level information was extracted, while other point out that the men so treated tended to confess to everything they could think of confessing to, thus limiting the value of the information.  (I would suggest, people put in that situation would confess to shooting JFK):

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s difficult to give credence to any particular area of this large a charge sheet that he confessed to, considering the situation he found himself in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom again, so his only gratification in life is to portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.

So here, we have a situation where, technology works to improve one's knowledge of human beings - albeit of course, in an extremely evil way.

There is some recognition of the effect on the soul, in implementing these techniques:

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

In that center, the center of the soul, or how moral values progress, why the backslide, here, in the United States? 

I think Wilber's theory needs to account for the fact that it is very possible, on a moral level, to go "backwards".   Because in reality - because of the fear of more attacks after 9/11 - the U.S. did exactly that.  Depersonalization and fear, built into a fantastic, terrifying, and abstract "Other",  have acted to retard our moral values.