Actually it’s worse than that: our memories are fairly plastic. Not only will you “make up something to get them off your back” you will believe that story you made up. The neuroscience of torture is, obviously unethical to pursue directly but there is a body of research on the kinds of things used in torture and their effect on cognition and memory. I have had the pleasure of reading a draft of a forthcoming book on the topic and here are some links from the author:
The purpose of torture is always theatre, charade, show trials, and even making the victim change fundamentally. Why did you change your mind about heliocentricity - they showed me the instruments of torture. How many fingers am I holding up Winston?
But the Cranky Old Gnome reminds us of why this is so powerful:
Some shows would just stop here, ending on a win. But instead they have an epilogue, where Picard (now reinstated as the Captain of the Enterprise) is having a discussion with the ships’ counselor, Diana Troy. He begins relating the experience and tells him of the ultimate choice Gul Madred gave him: End the pain by admitting he can see five lights, or continuing to insist that there are only four lights and endure endless torment. It’s at this point that Picard admits that in that moment, he really thought that he could see five lights.
I was thinking of that scene also! It is an accurate portrayal of cognition under torture. That’s why they use if for show trials but not for actual intelligence.
I’m reminded of “Montaillou the promised land of error” the Inquisition arrested an entire village and asked them about everyone they knew and cross referenced it. The one case of torture had witches turning people into frogs but in general, even a thousand years ago, they knew what torture was actually for and when they wanted to find things out they didn’t do it.
That seems to be a lot of the premise behind 24. I just think it’s weirdly ironic that the interrogator and his prisoner were discussing their admiration for a TV character who inspired mistreatment of people like the prisoner, which indirectly led to a more humane treatment of the prisoner and success for the interrogator. The interrogator goes home satisfied that they’ve made a connection, when it wasn’t really anything but a different strategy to gain trust. Still, it’s lot better than torture.
One of the reasons there are well-followed laws in regards to assassination is that they don’t want to have people coming for them if they go after leaders themselves. If Cheney and company didn’t feel completely safe they wouldn’t risk their own legs being broken and forced to stand for hours on them…
Look this is quite simple. If you think torture works, or that people should torture to insure your security or whatever theory you have to justify it. You are a stupid person. I am sorry but it is as simple as that.
Even though they knew that they would get worse intelligence through torture, they still wanted to torture, because the idea of torturing “America’s enemies” was pleasing to them.
I wouldn’t put it quite that way. The Bush administration had lots of information at their disposal that they chose to ignore or disbelieve because it didn’t fit their preconceived model of reality. It may have been more “we are going to torture because torture is effective because I said so” rather than “we are going to torture even though torture is ineffective.”
Which isn’t an improvement. It’s a different kind of wrong.
The answer depends on what you mean by “work.” If the goal is to obtain a confession, regardless of its truthfulness, then torture does indeed “work.” If your goal, instead, is to gain an accurate picture of events about which a detainee is assumed to be knowledgeable, then the efficacy is much more doubtful.
The bigger question is why Mitchell and Jessen were called in as experts, when they had no track record in interrogation, in dealing with Al Qaeda or in speaking Arabic (or other Near-Eastern languages).
I recommend that you read the account of Ali Soufan, who was an Arabic-speaking, trained interrogator, and contrast that with the self-serving statements of the “enhanced interrogation” champions.
I think the reason it matters whether or not torture works is because we can see the goal here was pure sadism. The people who perpetrated these horrors on other human beings wanted to see other people suffer. They didn’t want information, and they didn’t really want confessions (you’d think there would be more trial and punishment of the people held if that’s what they wanted). They just wanted to make human beings writhe in agony for their own delight.
As the saying goes, “torture is ventriloquism.” But that’s when you do it like Jack Bauer, torturing a lone suspect. What the CIA and friends were doing is far worse.
They’d torture the target, AND they’d torture his fellow insurgents and anyone else associated with him. Then they compare notes to see who’s story doesn’t match. It was a DATA MINING operation - something any marketing IT department is familiar with - where any given datapoint is meaningless but large amounts of data are useful. The more people they torture, the more accurate a picture they get.
This is why Gitmo had to be expanded AND they had interrogation centers in eastern Europe and Morocco and elsewhere AND they were torturing in Iraqi prisons AND they were torturing in Afghanistan AND STILL they had to farm out work to places like Syria and Egypt. They even tortured people they had only the vaguest suspicions about, like Canadian Maher Arar, who has since been fully cleared. They were trying to get as big a dataset as possible.
It didn’t work, with the atrocity and failure on a far larger scale than a mere Jack Bauer example.
I mentioned Montaillou earlier as an example from a thousand years ago where this was done… only without the torture because the data mining analogy simply does not work when you torture people. They will say whatever they are induced to say and the will often believe it.
The only data you are mining is your own. The larger, expanded subject base does not in any way remove the error.
The purpose of torture is not, and never really has been, actionable intelligence.
Do you really feel it safe to assume you understand exactly what your opponents are thinking and feeling? Do you really feel that you can divine their innermost thoughts and impulses and then turn around and deny their claims that they understand you?
They are wrong for what they did. Their thoughts, feelings and reasons are immaterial.
Trying to pretend we can read their minds is either dangerous hubris, or worse still, a decision that truth must play second fiddle to one’s desires to smear one’s opponents. The fact that they may attempt to do the same thing to you only diminishes them. It certainly doesn’t justify us doing the same.
I think the approach to this question can be similar to a potential answer to the death penalty question. It comes down to whether any man-made system can be trusted with such an awesome power. Are there some people who will ultimately cause more human suffering due to being inexorably, irreparably psychopathic, to the point that their existence should be ended for the good of all mankind? Maybe. But can any man-made institution be trusted to make this call?
Also, no one thinks the guys on their side of the battle should be tortured. No one thinks true “freedom fighters,” “rebels” or “revolutionaries” should be tortured. Only terrorists. Only people who are so full of evil that they cannot be reasoned with, that they have no other motivation than the infliction of pain, therefore their only language is one of pain and suffering and thus we must speak it to them. They are fundamentally different from us, or anyone we understand. We can be reasoned with, reached, they cannot. This is a flawed understanding. Might there be a handful of pain-and-suffering-loving psychopath sprinkled into the ranks of a terrorist organization a-la the “deserving death row prisoner?” Maybe. (psychopaths probably do gravitate toward leadership roles in many kinds of organizations…) but it takes a pretty big group to make a true terrorist organization, and they can’t all be psychos. A lot of them are just employees. Still more probably believe they are freedom fighters. Are we so sure that they aren’t, or at least, given their limited understanding of the world, at least justified in believing that they are freedom fighters?
Torturing also creates a posture of taking no responsibility for the conditions that created terrorism. Not the individual psychology of terrorists, but the conditions under which frequent, large scale terrorism is a constant threat. I don’t think American officials (Or any military officials anywhere for that matter) can rightfully take this posture. Torture is a shortcut at best, to beat back conditions that could have been prevented in other ways, with far less suffering.
Simply put, even if effective, it’s still an incredibly intense line to cross to decide to be a torturing people. And, with history as a guide, humanity fought long and hard not to be a species totally comfortable with casual torture so backsliding on this progress is an incredibly slippery slope.
Would we be morally obligated to use effective torture? Only if we can satisfy the following conditions:
We know that we are absolutely right about who is good and who is bad
We know that our enemies are pure evil, and have no other motivation besides the infliction of pain and suffering
We did not have a large hand in creating the conditions under which terror flourished
We’ve done everything else we can to prevent the suffering the torturing is being employed to prevent
We think others are justified in torturing us if they can satisfy the above conditions to their own satisfaction (not ours)
See, this is why we should support Jeb Bush for President:
During the 2012 election Republican candidates Bachmann, Cain, Perry and Santorum each called for torture to resume. Mr. Romney’s advisers privately urged him to call for a resumption of torture. (Presumably Ron Paul thought that torture is an issue that should be left to the states.) Not only did this not cause a scandal or hurt their chances within the Republican Party, but there wasn’t a hint of a scandal about it with the Democrats or the general public.
This is not a country that has ended torture. At most it’s a country that has paused torture for the current administration.
Jeb Bush is different:
Consider CIA operative Orlando Bosch, responsible for bombings from South America to Florida, Washington DC and Canada. His “greatest hit” was bombing an airliner out of the sky, killing 73 people.
Jeb Bush arranged Bosch’s pardon and residency in the US with his dad. He’s old-school, from the days when terrorism was peachy-keen. Elect Jeb, and you can declare the War on Terror to be officially over.
Granted, terror would have a decisive victory. And it would be awkward for the CIA to switch back from torturing terror suspects to hiring them again. Perhaps they can rectally feed them chocolate and brandy first.
Where does it say that torture doesn’t work? Sure, rapport-building may, in the words of the study, be “more effective,” but that doesn’t mean that torture doesn’t work or is ineffective. I mean, can you say a hand-powered screwdriver doesn’t work or is ineffective just because you can drive four times more screws with a more effective electric driver?
And how well does rapport-building work in time-limited situation? There would seem to be a clear logical argument for torture in this context—at least if we only care about results.
But I think arguments over the efficacy of torture miss the more important question: is torture wrong? Would the torture of McCain be OK and acceptable if he has actually given them information? Would it still be a terrible thing? Is there a reason why we have signed the Geneva Convention, even though it bans all forms of torture (and not just ineffective forms)? If we don’t believe in torture, then we don’t torture… even if it is effective.
I realize that Cory addresses this, but it seems like a minor part of his piece, and used mainly as a pivot towards crass editiorializing about how officials preferred torture because it personally satisfied them — a really unfortunate allegation, in my opinion. I mean, at the very minimum this would require that all of the involved officials knew that torture was much less effective within the context in which they were operating. Of course, there’s the suggestion that they must have known this, given that the greater efficacy of rapport-building has “been supported in the literature for a very long time.” But obviously this doesn’t mean everyone knows about it, otherwise this new study and this BB post would be met with a round of “yeah, no shit.” And, as the Atlantic piece points out, people generally think torture is more appropriate for terrorists, but we don’t say that the average person prefers to torture terrorists because it satisfies them.
What if the person who had the information about the horrible atrocities said they would voluntarily give the information if only we tortured one innocent person just for the hell of it? The calculus - inhuman acts against one to save the many - is the same. I think we ought be glad we don’t live in that universe.
Though of course I should point out that the world would be a very different place in general. If the best way to achieve compliance was through brutality rather than through community building then I don’t think our species would have been capable of what it has been capable of. We manage to spent a vast amount of our resources on hurting one another even though it’s a waste. If it were productive I doubt we would do anything else, and we’d quickly go extinct.
No. We know torture doesn’t work actually. It has never been seen to work. Torture is wrong anyway so there is no argument to be had there.
There is an argument to be had as to what people were doing when they tortured people. It sure wasn’t gaining actionable intelligence, so what was it they were doing? It really is a “yeah, no shit” thing for the CIA though. They have long documented this to be the case. To be fair a lot of untrained torturers were hired by the US in the last decade or so. Again they were hired by people that institutionally knew better. So that is still an interesting discussion.
There is no interesting discussion to be had about whether torture is right or wrong: it’s wrong. And the scenarios invented to justify it as some thorny issue ignore the fact that, as far as we know, torture is completely useless at ascertaining the truth. That is not, and as far as I know never has been, its actual purpose. To discuss torture as if it is effective and / or ever morally justified, is to invent a hypothetical universe to muddy the waters and avoid discussing the real one.
