The Uselessness of Torture
Scott Shane for The New York Times reports on the non-existent value of torturing Abu Zubayda:
The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum. [...] Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
The specific information is good to have. But one doesn’t really need to peer too deeply into a specific case to know that institutionalized torture is not an effective investigative method.
In abstract terms, trained interrogators already have decent methods for getting accurate information out of prisoners. Subjecting the prisoner to coercion, physical suffer, and mental torment can certain get someone to say more things but the very fact that the “things” were coerced out of the captive by torture limits their value. You’ll almost certainly get him to say some accurate stuff. He might, for example, correctly insist that he doesn’t know anything more. But he’ll also say all kinds of inaccurate stuff. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get you to stop torturing him.
In historical terms, you don’t look back on the Spanish Inquisition or on Stalin’s Russia and say man, those guys had some crack investigators! Rather, you see that historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear.
47 Responses to “The Uselessness of Torture”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
April 18th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Torture is merely the province of sexual sadists. At some point in the process, someone’s getting wood.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Hell, the mere retrospective mention of torture on this blog gets a flood of erotically driven torture advocates to deposit several dozen comments.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:36 am
April 18th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Matt, your point is a good one. Nevertheless, is it wise to rely on consequentialist arguments here? The point is that torture is so wrong that we shouldn’t do it, even if it were to work.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:38 am
“Rather, you see that historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear.” You’ll also see that systematic torture frequently appears when the military/police is forced to improvise a lot of interrogators quickly (when called to control a fast growing insurgency, usually). It’s not a very effective tool, but is an easy one to teach. Many of the modern cases (Algeria, for example) follow that pattern. The strange thing about the CIA case is that this was NOT the case, since the CIA had no shortage of trained interrogators at that time.
April 18th, 2009 at 11:56 am
I disagree. Widespread torture as a response to insurgencies is not an improvisation, but an attempt to terrorize the civilian population and induce a state of paralytic fear.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Skeptic, I’ll say it’s both a forced improvisation AND an attempt to terrorize the civilian population. Military commanders want both to maximize intelligence gathering and to silence the political opposition. Insurgencies are military/political groups, and there is usually a large legal/peaceful opposition to the government; an easy to teach interrogation tool that induces fear into political opponents is very convenient in that circumstances.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
@ Ano,
But we don’t even need to make that argument. Why bother stipulating that torture works when it doesn’t? We shouldn’t torture because it doesn’t work, and we shouldn’t torture because it’s disgusting, immoral, emotionally damaging to our intelligence agents, and against domestic and international law. I think these arguments, though strong individually, are considerably more compelling when used in concert.
Whenever discussing this with my friends, I always refer them back to this piece about intelligence gathering from the Atlantic in 2005. It’s a fantastic article about our extremely successful intelligence operations against the Japanese during WWII.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/budiansky
This article highlights why it’s infuriating to watch the talking heads on Fox News present their fabulous hypotheticals (”Would you put a guy in a box for a few hours to save your children?”) — if my kids are in danger, I want the CIA using the most effective, well-tested methods of intelligence gathering. And all the available evidence informs us that establishing a rapport with your captives and treating them well is by far the most effective method. It’s hard to believe that 21st-century terrorists would be a harder nut to crack than WWII-era Japanese soldiers.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
“I disagree. Widespread torture as a response to insurgencies is not an improvisation, but an attempt to terrorize the civilian population and induce a state of paralytic fear.”
An elementary, but for some reason not very widely understood point.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Of course, in this particular case, there is a certain element of revenge fantasy that is very obvious. You rarely saw public, unapologetic defense of torture in Latin American dictatorships, for example. The fact that the tortured are foreigners, that the torturing is happening far away, that all is done to avenge a terrible attack, changes the public perception a lot.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Please don’t rub the turd lamp, else the sh*t genies may appear, and you also get it on your hands.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I made this point at the very tail end of a previous torture discussion but I’ll repeat it here:
1) The DOWNSIDE of torture in combatting an insurgency is not usually noted –but has significant negatives.
2) To combat an insurgency , you want the general population on your side — or at least neutral and willing to give up terrorists via a phone call for the rewards/bounties. To do that, you need to have a decent reputation –because You need thousands of snitches to keep track of what’s going on and for early warning. That’s true of police in our urban neighborhoods, but even more true if you are in a foreign country.
3) But when word gets out that you use torture, you are viewed as a monster. An object of hatred. Even if people don’t join the insurgency , they will give it the help they can safely give. If they won’t risk housing a wanted man, they will at least not give him up and they will pass warnings to him if you get close to the neighborhood.
4) George W Bush fucked the war on terror when he lied to this country and told us that Sept 11 occurred because “they hate our freedoms.” Ever motherfucker in the Islamic World KNEW that was deceitful bullshit — Bin Laden had given us clear warnings in 1997-98 re why Al Qaeda was going to declare war on us: the killing of 600,000 Iraqi children via waterborne disease (blocking purification supplies with sanctions), the decades long support for the tyrannical Saudi regime in order to loot the oil deposits of the Saudi people, and the long time support for Israeli extermination of the Palestinians.
5) Rumsfeld and Cheney fucked it even further with their support for torture.
6) We have been down this road before. We supported the Shah and his Savak torturers in the 1970s. As a result, Iran — a country with many strong reasons to be a close ally of the USA — hates our guts. And are probably developing nukes.
The CIA bureaucracy ain’t all that bright — but even the KUBARK manual notes that if you torture someone, he is going to try to strike back if he ever gets free.
Even the most amoral pragmatist would argue that if you ever do torture, it should only be under the most dire necessity and on only a few occasions. Because otherwise you can not keep it covered up and the blowback on public exposure will cost you far more than what you gain.
Cheney and George W Bush were extremely stupid and corrupt. They were only focused on what advanced Big Oil’s interests. That’s why Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are still around almost 8 years since the Sept 11 attack on the most powerful nation on earth — a nation which spends almost $1 Trillion per year on military operations.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Ano,
I understand your point, but when having a crucial public policy discussion in a democracy, I think we need to use every arrow in the quiver.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
I also think much of what we are hearing re Bush Administration torture is either deceit or –if truthful — a sign of deep incompetence.
As I’ve noted, intel has a very short shelf life — if you are going to get the guy to talk, it needs to be within a few short days. The only way to accomplish that and get the truth is by extreme fear — and the things you need to induce that are not what are being described in the released memos.
Of course, it may be that Cheney managed to get all the negative costs of torture –blacken our reputation –while receiving none of the benefits.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Charrua, I continue to disagree.
The trouble with insurgencies or popular movements is that they are largely invisible and intangible to the state. Revolutionary leadership comes and goes.
Capture one insurgent… gives you very little, for the most part what he knows and does will become obsolete quickly, and what he actually knows is very very limited. Insurgencies are movements, not operations. They are amorphous, inchoate and opportunistic. Strategies are evolved and diffuse.
It’s not as if its possible to find the right guerilla, and interrogate him until he reveals the secret plans to the D-Day landing, the complete status of forces, organisational chart, etc. Most of the time, this doesn’t even exist. And in most cases where anything like that does exist it there are double blind safeguards.
Frankly, under the circumstances of insurgency, torture is likely to produce misinformation and quantities of useless information. But that’s really not the point.
In combating an insurgency, the sort of information to be derived from actual insurgents is mostly useless – ‘We’re in the jungle.’ ‘We get help from sympathetic civilians.’ ‘Our strategy is to attack where you aren’t and avoid direct confrontation.’ ‘Our reason for doing this is…’ The state knows all that already.
The point of torture is terrorism. It is affirming the power of the state against its enemies and subjects. The insurgent or the unlucky civilian is tortured and made to confess, not in hope of valuable information, but merely to demonstrate who is in control.
As I’ve said, at the heart of it is little more than sadism.
April 18th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
“historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear”
That’s true, but torture had another purpose during the Spanish Inquisition: saving souls. Really. The intent was to get the victim to convert to Christianity so they wouldn’t rot in Hell for eternity. It was actually considered an act of mercy. Pretty twisted, huh?
April 18th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
re: Rather, you see that historically the function of torture has been to extract false confessions and to inspire a general climate of fear.
And in those settings reducing the tortured and getting any confessions, false or otherwise, was the point. Torture was politics by other means, if you like. Coverage of the US torture activities is still being written up as if extracting information was the aim.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
As I’ve noted, intel has a very short shelf life — if you are going to get the guy to talk, it needs to be within a few short days. The only way to accomplish that and get the truth is by extreme fear
But extreme fear is no guarantee of the truth. At best, it guarantees that the victim will scream out whatever they think the torturer might want to hear.
This is actually a major problem. I have some background in law and law enforcement, and one issue which has over the years gained quite a lot of attention is the issue of ‘leading confessions.’ Essentially, in the situation of a stressed or vulnerable person, they can pick up on information fed to them by the interrogator, often unconsciously on both sides, and feed it back in the form of a confession.
In one case, I borderline retarded man provided a detailed confession to a terrible murder, the confession contained information that the police had kept from the general public. So he had to be the killer. The only problem? Turns out that he was in jail during the period of the murder. He definitely wasn’t the killer. Examination of the interrogation transcripts and records indicated that all the information in his confession was supplied directly or indirectly to him. The police officer, an experienced interrogator, was not fully aware of what was going on.
Which raises a tricky point. It seems clear that Zubaday (sic) under torture, confessed to all sorts of deranged plots. But looking at the plots and activities he was confessing to, without seeing transcripts, I get the impression that he was desperately trying to read his captors and feed them whatever they wanted. I’d bet a lot of his stuff was directly or indirectly suggested.
The problem is twofold, it takes a really sophisticated interrogator to question and sift statements without actually leading the victim. The interrogator usually comes in with a certain amount of pre-knowledge which informs the content of questions and questionning, so its very hard not to give the victim information which can be fed back, or which can bias or deform the answers given.
On the other hand, a tortured victim is problematic for the interrogator for a couple of reasons. First, often torture or induced stress hypertunes the victim to pay attention to the interrogator and every nuance. So they’re incredibly good at picking up cues. On the other hand, a victim in a state of terror and stress has no range of reactions to read. An interrogator looks for ‘tells’. A victim in a state of terror has only one reading ’sheer terror’ There are no ‘tells’ left, only physiological white noise.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
..to inspire a general climate of fear.
I am sure that Matt is being intentionally obtuse here.
Anyone who has had even a very casual conversation with any right leaning being must know that inspiring a general climate of fear was the point.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Skeptic, we’ll have to agree to disagree. Many guerrilla organizations had hierarchical structures that were quite vulnerable to the right information leak. This was especially true in “urban guerrilla” situations, because operatively, even a simple task was quite complex. When moving from one place to another requires a stolen car, a safe house, fake IDs, a contact, etc. you can’t be very “amorphous, inchoate and opportunistic”. At least in my country (Uruguay), the Tupamaros were a pretty structured group and in fact, information acquired under torture led to the capture of the entire leadership. Operations like the massive escape from Punta Carretas or the attempt to take the city of Pando required extensive coordination and preparation. The members of the leadership themselves admit that information leaks due to unprepared personnel were the downfall of the organization. While torture came to be certainly a political tool for the military dictatorship, it was also an important intelligence gathering tool.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Gee, you think maybe that made those captors less effective in dealing with him? You think they were 100% on their game the next time they questioned him?
We are not savages in this country. We will never out-savage our enemies. We need to plan accordingly.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
And also, because it increases our enemies’ size, ferocity, and determination. Our military and intelligence officials have been telling us for years that the biggest drivers of recruitment to anti-American groups are Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Even from a consequentialist perspective, the specific information gained from any one specific act of torture is not the only consequence that needs to be considered.
Star power and the “Shining City on a Hill” image are two of the most important planks of our national power, and we should not toss them away.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
There’s also the thing about not wanting to have your society torture because you don’t want to be a society of torturers, just like you have fair trials and stuff not just because they’re ‘more effective’ or you are sympathetic for the accused, but because you want to be the kinds of people and to have the kind of society which has fair trials.
Hell, a good portion of the anti-slavery movement argument among white non-Southerners was how slaving and the treatment of slaves would distort the moral makeup of the slave-holders. It may not be the most democratic and sympathetic argument, but, there you go.
There was a time in which some degree of self-respect was supposed to guide the values in our aims for our society. But now that’s clearly antiquated, a historical document, as it were, because there are people who say they gotta do what their loins tell ‘em to do or else they can’t Keepusafe.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Charrua,
Then as you’ve said, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I don’t have any detailed information as to the circumstance and evolution of the Tupamaro insurgency, so I can’t argue it one way or the other. Whether torture as an investigative technique in contrast with other techniques made a substantive contribution, I’m not prepared to argue for or against in that situation.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Don’t get me wrong. In terms of the argument over whether torture is effective or not, I take the position that torture is very very effective.
If you are uninterested in right or wrong, truth or falsity, and in exercising the power of the state over an individual, torture is great, there’s nothing better.
For obtaining confessions? Torture will make anyone confess to anything at any time.
Destroying an enemy, a lifetime of post-traumatic stress, perpetual fear, nightmares, seizures, panic attacks, moments of terror. We’re all so concerned about those pansies coming back from Iraq feeling a little touchy cause people were shooting at them. You want to see someone really screwed up… go look at torture victims.
Forcing him or her to acknowledge the supremacy and legitimacy of the state. That’s the big one. Y’see, any regime based in whole or in part on the use of force or corruption is always in a panic about its own legitimacy. It’s always pursuing the signs and signifiers of legitimacy. Thats why dictators endlessly award themselves titles and medals and all sorts of braid. If you look at historical torture, its almost never about information but about legitimacy, essentially having the victim confess his apostasy as a way of endorsing the rightness of power.
Torture is great for that sort of stuff.
For terrorizing a population, for breaking and intimidating human beings, for inducing helpless paralysis on a society so that it will not question or challenge the powers that be…
Its good stuff.
The trouble is that torture is utterly incompatible with a free and democratic society.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Skeptic: understand me, I’m not defending in any way, shape or form the use of torture. Several of my relatives were tortured (my family mostly simpathized with the guerrilla) and I grew under the knowledge that being arrested meant being savagely tortured. But it was clear that torture sort of “worked”, that is, it was an interrogation technique that could be taught to semi-illiterate soldiers and that could produce results if applied in a sufficiently massive and indiscriminate way. For that reason, I fear that a mostly utilitarian argument against it may turn out to be counterproductive and that arguments against torture need to be ethical in nature.
April 18th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
[...] Torture doesn’t work: In abstract terms, trained interrogators already have decent methods for getting accurate information out of prisoners. Subjecting the prisoner to coercion, physical suffer, and mental torment can certain get someone to say more things but the very fact that the “things” were coerced out of the captive by torture limits their value. You’ll almost certainly get him to say some accurate stuff. He might, for example, correctly insist that he doesn’t know anything more. But he’ll also say all kinds of inaccurate stuff. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get you to stop torturing him. [...]
April 18th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I respect your position, Charrua, however, I will observe that conventional/popular wisdom and narratives often do not hold up under detailed examination.
I think we can agree that there was a Tupamaro insurgency. We can agree that this insurgency was defeated. And we can agree that widespread torture was employed as a tactic in defeating the insurgency.
From this, the popular/conventional wisdom is that widespread use of torture was significantly successful in producing useful intelligence to undermine the insurgency.
Is this true? I don’t know. I can acknowledge that people believe this with sincerity. But to refer to a previous case, the police officer who extracted the confession of murder from the borderline retarded man genuinely believed that this man was the killer and that the confession was genuine.
The role of torture and its utility in extracting information in the Tupamaro insurgency would be something for careful scrutiny and analysis. I will not predict the results. But I would say that any careful study would have to examine several questions – What were the range of investigative and interrogation techniques used, torture and non-torture?
What were the relative efficiencies of various techniques, to the extent that they could be isolated? For instance, if we’re looking at an investigation that was a combination of torture and regular police work, how do we assess the information obtained? Was it actually police work that made the real difference? Or was it torture? Or a were the results inseparable from the combination of torture and investigation? Can we identify cases where the techniques were isolated from each other?
How do we measure the success or efficacy of torture. For instance, if we torture 10,000 people and 100 give useful information, is that good or bad? If other methods of interrogation or investigation give a ration of 1000 for every 10,000, does the apparent superiority of other methods invalidate torture? Does torture produce additional data than other methods. Ie, if you employ both torture and non-torture on the same group of 10,000, and you get useful information for 1100 does that justify torture? If you get useful information from 1000 does that mean that torture is effectively meaningless, it produces no results that are not duplicated and exceeded? If you get only 900 useful results, does this mean that torture is a net negative which has degraded the fact finding process?
What about false positives and misinformation. People tortured will say anything. Is information from torture useful if occasional nuggets are buried in masses of bad information?
The trouble is a lot of this stuff is not amenable to careful analysis. Torturers are notoriously awful in their record keeping and reporting, and they have an inherent bias to justify their conduct making their reports and claims fundamentally unreliable. The subject is unsavoury, governments are reluctant to make records available, and are more likely to conceal or destroy these records.
As a result, we are reduced to assessing torture indirectly. We have the results and input of truth commissions and revelations of secret police files in recently overthrown tyrannies. We have parallel evidence from police investigations. We have broad histories that we can use to compare and contrast.
Was torture an effective intelligence tool in the Tupamaro insurgency. Maybe yes, maybe no. But Uruguay is not the only state that has had an insurgency or has employed torture. There are a lot of data points to test Uruguay, the Tupamaro and Torture against.
April 18th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
I’m an inveterate George Tenet defender. Not that he’s innocent of much of what he is accused of, but various of the most powerful people in government have tried to pin the worst of their failures and malfeasance on him regarding the greatest overall failures of the past eight years. He has been set up as the primary villain in both failing to prevent 9/11 and bringing about the Iraq war, when many other failures and dishonesty were necessary for both. Moreover, he was passionately focused on the correct threat years before the rest of the government, and was struggling to reorient an organization that had essentially had only one mission for fifty years before he took over. He certainly should escape historical responsibility for his true failures, and won’t, but his record should be considered in full.
But right now, I din’t see how he doesn’t go down as one of the most important forces behind U.S. torture in the Bush era. If I want fairness in considering his record, there is just no way around that. He was vocal in defending whzt the CIA did both before and after receiving the Ashcroft DOJ’s dubious legal sanction. He flat-out defends it on the merits, and makes no bones about it. I think he very well ight go down, if anyone does. There is no doubt that both calculations of the balance of harms (harm of prisoners in U.S. custody versus harm of potential further attacks), as well as the understood definition of torture were completely different at CIA in 2002 as they are in the media in 2009. I don’t know if Tenet is covered by Obama’s forgiving stance toward CIA officers. But if he is prosecuted and defends his actions on the merits as he saw them at the time, I think he would deserve a unsympathetic type of respect from us, even as he should be shown no actual legal mercy. I think he was a flawed person who took more on his shoulders than he could responsibly carry, but did so out of real patriotism. Should he end up paying a steep price for his obvious failures of judgement, I think he would nevertheless be remembered as a patriot in a way that most of those under whom he served in 2001 and beyond wouldn’t even approach.
I’m excited to see how utterly I get taken to task for this outburst of sentimentalism.
April 18th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Oops:
Er, that should’ve read “shouldn’t escape.” In case that’s not clear from context.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Matt, your point is a good one. Nevertheless, is it wise to rely on consequentialist arguments here? The point is that torture is so wrong that we shouldn’t do it, even if it were to work.
I love your reasoning here, “Ano.” Decide what you want your conclusion to be first (”torture is always wrong”), then select whatever moral argument is needed to support that particular predetermined conclusion. But pretend you’re engaging in honest, open-ended moral reasoning.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
skeptic,
Even if it is true that torture is not a useful or reliable method of interrogation in general, that does not mean torture never works at all. One may agree that torture is unreliable — even that it is very, very unreliable — without also agreeing that there are no cases at all in which torture is justified. So even if you could establish empirically that torture is a very unreliable way to extract information, that finding wouldn’t justify an absolute ban on the practise.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I disagree that torture is largely used to terrorize the general population — if that were the case, they would televise it. (Although I probably shouldn’t be giving Fox ideas for a new reality TV show –”Will the Islamofascist Crack — and who will he Implicate?”.)
April 18th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Remember, “charles” has decided his conclusion (”I want to spend all day trolling”) and will repeat whatever is needed from his years of doing the same to support that predetermined goal.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
You’re not fooling anyone, ‘Mixnerspotter’.
April 18th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
“So even if you could establish empirically that torture is a very unreliable way to extract information, that finding wouldn’t justify an absolute ban on the practise.”
Actually, it would justify an absolute ban. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that torture works 10% of the time and produces false intelligence 90% of the time. In theory, we could say torture was justified 10% of the time. In practice, however, we have know way of knowing which people are susceptible to torture and which are not. They only way to determine if the information provided is accurate is to follow up on every lead. That means that 90% of the time, the follow up is a waste of time and resources. But it’s not just a waste, it’s counter-productive. With finite resources, a wasted follow up takes resources away from the efforts to follow up on good leads. And the problem gets more acute in the “ticking time bomb” scenario. There, time is critical and you simply won’t have time to follow up on every lead. So, you have a situation where the most likely outcome is that you will go to a place where the time bomb isn’t, and the time bomb will go off anyway. Now, if torture produced accurate intelligence 50% of the time, it might be worth it. But that seems unlikely. When you consider an organization like al Qeada, torture probably works less than 10% of the time. The reason is that the organization is divided up into small cells with each person having access to only a very small amount of information. So when they say “I don’t know about that,” they are probably telling the truth. But that’s not an acceptable answer, so they’ll just make something up that they think will satisfy the interrogator. So the result is that torture will produce some goof information mixed in with a lot more bad information. And we don’t know which is which, so we waste a lot of effort trying to sort it out. And that’s counter-productive.
April 18th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
You can find torture is useless, but it could still be justified?
The only outcomes of torture are 1) the victim provides information and 2) somebody experiences horror and agony.
Do you think charles realizes that he just argued that forcing someone to experience horror and agony is, in and of itself, sufficient to justify torture?
What a moral monster.
April 18th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Charles, tell me if this logic works for you:
“Even if it is true that child molesting is not a useful or reliable method of raising children in general, that does not mean child molesting never works at all. One may agree that child molesting is unreliable — even that it is very, very unreliable — without also agreeing that there are no cases at all in which child molesting is justified. So even if you could establish empirically that child molesting is a very unreliable way to raise children, that finding wouldn’t justify an absolute ban on the practise.”
April 18th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
For what it is worth, I have never posted here as Mixnerspotter, or indeed as anyone but DTM.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Chuckles is shooting the mirrors, because he can’t tell which image is the real one.
Hilarious.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Charrua and Skeptic,
Regarding ‘effectiveness’, there’s an important difference between what we are talking about here, and what was done in South America. I’ll defer to you on Uruguay, Charrua, but I do know a bit about Argentina, and I would be surprised if the mode of operation of the security services was that different.
The techniques of torture and assassination in Argentina worked because it was applied not just towards the guerrillas themselves (I really don’t think that the Montoneros and company are best described as ‘terrorists’) but against their friends, associates or family members. The guerrillas rapidly became aware that if they were captured, not only would they likely be tortured to death, but that the security services would look through their arrest books and arrest (and torture) lots of people that they knew. It’s not hard (at least in a place like Argentina in the 1960s or 1970s) people who are sufficiently devoted to a cause that they are willing to be tortured or killed for it. It’s much harder to find people who are willing to risk, not only their own lives, but the lives of everyone they care about.
The Argentina anti-guerrilla campaign worked, in the end, because they were willing to be as brutal as it took, and didn’t care how many civilians they had to torture or kill to win. (It was a Pyrrhic victory, however, as it also discredited the Argentine military in the minds of the populace for a long time to come). That isn’t a policy that the United States is going to take, nor should it. So, just because torture ‘worked’ for the Argentines, does not mean it will work for us.
Whether I think that torture is justified in a _moral_ sense really depends on what we are talking about when we say ‘torture’. Slapping and caning- I think so. Waterboarding and other things that threaten life, limb, or sanity- probably not. This is a separate question from effectiveness of course.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:11 am
“Probably not”? Hector, you are a man out of time.
In any event, Torture as applied by the Argentines was used in the classical sense, not as an information gathering tool, but a weapon of terrorism and intimidation against an entire society. Torture always works in that sense.
Torture used in that way would work very well upon and against Americans.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Re: Hector, you are a man out of time.
Don’t you mean ‘out of date’? And if you do, then my answer is, gee, ya think? I would gladly confess to being out of place in modern America.
April 19th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
[...] Torture doesn’t work: In abstract terms, trained interrogators already have decent methods for getting accurate information out of prisoners. Subjecting the prisoner to coercion, physical suffer, and mental torment can certain get someone to say more things but the very fact that the “things” were coerced out of the captive by torture limits their value. You’ll almost certainly get him to say some accurate stuff. He might, for example, correctly insist that he doesn’t know anything more. But he’ll also say all kinds of inaccurate stuff. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get you to stop torturing him. [...]
April 20th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
[...] on the left) work themselves into an indignant rage. I share much of their disgust as well as the conviction that torture rarely works as a means of procuring information. At the same time, I find much of [...]
April 20th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
If I were a torture advocate (and I’m not), I would counter that you can separate the inaccurate statements from the accurate statements by torturing two prisoners and cross-referencing their statements.
Again, I’m not a torture advocate–I’m very much anti-torture–but I think Don Williams’ concern (about torture losing us the support of the populace) is the strongest utilitarian argument against it. I’m intrigued by Matt’s point about the existence of better alternatives, but I don’t know enough about them to say he’s right.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
charles,
I wasn’t engaging in moral reasoning. I was making an argument about moral reasoning. You’re right that I was assuming that “we should not torture” would win the fight, though.
Runaway Horses and DTM: sure, maybe torture doesn’t work, and maybe we should use all possible arguments. But I think we should start with our best arguments (which I think are the ones based on principles and morals, but reasonable people can disagree on what is the best reason not to torture).
I guess I’m also thinking: what if someone found an instance where torture did appear to work? Or, to address a current reality, what if a group of people thought torture worked better than non-torture interrogation, even when it probably doesn’t? We should rely on “we should not be monsters” because that is not a scientific, falsifiable claim, and I would find it convincing even if it were proven that torture works sometimes.