Something that colleague Dick Bitzinger unearthed, some time back …
5 Myths About Torture and Truth
Myths About Torture and Truth
By Darius Rejali
Washington Post, Sunday, December 16, 2007; B03
So the CIA did indeed torture Abu Zubaida, the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to have been waterboarded. So says John Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of “high-value” al-Qaeda detainees to speak out publicly. He minced no words last week in calling the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” what they are.
But did they work? Torture’s defenders, including the wannabe tough guys who write Fox’s “24,” insist that the rough stuff gets results. “It was like flipping a switch,” said Kiriakou about Abu Zubaida’s response to being waterboarded. But the al-Qaeda operative’s confessions — descriptions of fantastic plots from a man who intelligence analysts were convinced was mentally ill — probably didn’t give the CIA any actionable intelligence. Of course, we may never know the whole truth, since the CIA destroyed the videotapes of Abu Zubaida’s interrogation. But here are some other myths that are bound to come up as the debate over torture rages on.
1. Torture worked for the Gestapo.
Actually, no. Even Hitler’s notorious secret police got most of their information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation. That was still more than enough to let the Gestapo decimate anti-Nazi resistance in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Russia and the concentration camps.
Yes, the Gestapo did torture people for intelligence, especially in later years. But this reflected not torture’s efficacy but the loss of many seasoned professionals to World War II, increasingly desperate competition for intelligence among Gestapo units and an influx of less disciplined younger members. (Why do serious, tedious police work when you have a uniform and a whip?) It’s surprising how unsuccessful the Gestapo’s brutal efforts were. They failed to break senior leaders of the French, Danish, Polish and German resistance. I’ve spent more than a decade collecting all the cases of Gestapo torture “successes” in multiple languages; the number is small and the results pathetic, especially compared with the devastating effects of public cooperation and informers.
2. Everyone talks sooner or later under torture.
Truth is, it’s surprisingly hard to get anything under torture, true or false. For example, between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals. Torture was legal back then, and the records document such practices as the bone-crushing use of splints, pumping stomachs with water until they swelled and pouring boiling oil on the feet. But the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever.
And such examples could be multiplied. The Japanese fascists, no strangers to torture, said it best in their field manual, which was found in Burma during World War II: They described torture as the clumsiest possible method of gathering intelligence. Like most sensible torturers, they preferred to use torture for intimidation, not information.
3. People will say anything under torture.
Well, no, although this is a favorite chestnut of torture’s foes. Think about it: Sure, someone would lie under torture, but wouldn’t they also lie if they were being interrogated without coercion?
In fact, the problem of torture does not stem from the prisoner who has information; it stems from the prisoner who doesn’t. Such a person is also likely to lie, to say anything, often convincingly. The torture of the informed may generate no more lies than normal interrogation, but the torture of the ignorant and innocent overwhelms investigators with misleading information. In these cases, nothing is indeed preferable to anything. Anything needs to be verified, and the CIA’s own 1963 interrogation manual explains that “a time-consuming delay results” — hardly useful when every moment matters.
Intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to this problem. When police officers torture, they know what the crime is, and all they want is the confession. When intelligence officers torture, they must gather information about what they don’t know.
4. Most people can tell when someone is lying under torture.
Not so — and we know quite a bit about this. For about 40 years, psychologists have been testing police officers as well as normal people to see whether they can spot lies, and the results aren’t encouraging. Ordinary folk have an accuracy rate of about 57 percent, which is pretty poor considering that 50 percent is the flip of a coin. Likewise, the cops’ accuracy rates fall between 45 percent and 65 percent — that is, sometimes less accurate than a coin toss.
Why does this matter? Because even if torturers break a person, they have to recognize it, and most of the time they can’t. Torturers assume too much and reject what doesn’t fit their assumptions. For instance, Sheila Cassidy, a British physician, cracked under electric-shock torture by the Chilean secret service in the 1970s and identified priests who had helped the country’s socialist opposition. But her devout interrogators couldn’t believe that priests would ever help the socialists, so they tortured her for another week until they finally became convinced. By that time, she was so damaged that she couldn’t remember the location of the safe house.
In fact, most torturers are nowhere near as well trained for interrogation as police are. Torturers are usually chosen because they’ve endured hardship and pain, fought with courage, kept secrets, held the right beliefs and earned a reputation as trustworthy and loyal. They often rely on folklore about what lying behavior looks like — shifty eyes, sweaty palms and so on. And, not surprisingly, they make a lot of mistakes.
5. You can train people to resist torture.
Supposedly, this is why we can’t know what the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” are: If Washington admits that it waterboards suspected terrorists, al-Qaeda will set up “waterboarding-resistance camps” across the world. Be that as it may, the truth is that no training will help the bad guys.
Simply put, nothing predicts the outcome of one’s resistance to pain better than one’s own personality. Against some personalities, nothing works; against others, practically anything does. Studies of hundreds of detainees who broke under Soviet and Chinese torture, including Army-funded studies of U.S. prisoners of war, conclude that during, before and after torture, each prisoner displayed strengths and weaknesses dependent on his or her own character. The CIA’s own “Human Resources Exploitation Manual” from 1983 and its so-called Kubark manual from 1963 agree. In all matters relating to pain, says Kubark, the “individual remains the determinant.”
The thing that’s most clear from torture-victim studies is that you can’t train for the ordeal. There is no secret knowledge out there about how to resist torture. Yes, there are manuals, such as the IRA’s “Green Book,” the anti-Soviet “Manual for Psychiatry for Dissidents” and “Torture and the Interrogation Experience,” an Iranian guerrilla manual from the 1970s. But none of these volumes contains specific techniques of resistance, just general encouragement to hang tough. Even al-Qaeda’s vaunted terrorist-training manual offers no tips on how to resist torture, and al-Qaeda was no stranger to the brutal methods of the Saudi police.
And yet these myths persist. “The larger problem here, I think,” one active CIA officer observed in 2005, “is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn’t work.”
Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the recently published “Torture and Democracy.”
I attended “Matthew Alexander”‘s seminar on interrogation a month or so back. He doesn’t believe enhanced methods (ie. torture in the traditional sense) doesn’t work, which is what we all can logically deduce (the above article illustrates this).
What I found interesting is:
1. Most members of of the interrogation team are incredibly young, nor do they come to the job with specific training. We’re talking about kids in their early 20s. They’re not selected by experience, but are rotated in from other appointments. They come with little experience. There’s something to be said about the recklessness of youth. I’d like to think an 18 year old might be more inclined to start with waterboarding than a 38 year old, which I believe is Matthew Alexander’s age.
2. THe approval for enhanced torture methods spiked the same time their appearance on TV did too. When 24 was in season, it went through the roof. Matthew Alexander had a chart which showed this. It was pretty shocking. Jack Bauer had inadvertently become a role model of the right way to do things in desperate times.
As someone I know indicated, he attended a ‘familiarisation’ course on torture and interrogation, and in the course of the ‘familiarisation’, was given an experience of watered-down (pun fully intended) water-boarding. After just 2 minutes, he was starting to think thus: what exactly does my interrogator want to hear, and can I sya this to him convincingly.
What this indicates is that the torturee (person being tortured) tells not what the torturor wants, but what the torturee THINKS his torturor wants to hear. Which must surely cast further doubt on the accuracy of the confession and the ‘intelligence’ gleaned from it thereafter.
Here’s a rotten-egg question: if not torture, then what’s the alternative to get those life-and-death answers–ones that “24” has assured us exists?
Matthew Alexander would say, “build rapport, establish a friendship.” He doesn’t have a solution to getting intel for immediate threats, or the “ticking timebomb”, as is often featured in 24.
I think he hopes better, softer interrogation techniques would allow enough intel to be gathered regularly so that such a scenario doesn’t happen.
And if you think about, “ticking timebombs” are set by the really secretive cells. What makes you think they’re gonna crack under torture? The most secretive are usually the most fanatical. They’re the ones who know how to keep quiet and not claim their 72 virgins before they do the deed.
[…] threats to the Occupation and the puppet regime. Torture is not a very effective way of getting reliable intelligence from detainee […]
[…] threats to the Occupation and the puppet regime. Torture is not a very effective way of getting reliable intelligence from detainee […]
Nice to see an article that doesn’t just report the idiotic claim that “torture doesn’t work.” It’s debatable whether torture is ethical or more effective than alternatives, but I’d guess most adults have experience with situations where violence against themselves or a friend led someone to do, say or reveal something they didn’t want to do. I remember a kid in my middle school giving up his locker combination after getting hit a few times, so obviously torture works sometimes, especially if there are ways of checking the veracity of the claims of the tortured.
I say this not as a defense of torture, but to point out that it’s ludicrous on its face to say that torture never works.
These are all the wrong questions. As mentioned in the article torture is effective as intimidation. Winning Hearts and Minds is basically about intimidating people into behaving in a manner that achieves your goals, IF your simply suggesting they might do so has no chance of success.
The 24 hours BS, and the high value BS is just a script to encourage the widespread application of brutality. If it is OK to torture to stop a nuke, then it is ok to torture to save a patrol, at least from the patrol’s perspective. So within minutes of loosening the rules there was widespread application of brutality in the war on terror, and that is what a certain kind of counter insurgency consists of. Obviously, if building a few schools would solve the problem, that would be better. But certain difficult peoples just require being put through a grinder. It took killing 3 million in south east asia to pacify vietnam for a relatively short period. The US has killed 27 million in various wars (not including the good wars) since the Philippines.
The troop levels are also a part of this. Obviously if you do not have adequate levels to repress militants, and these would be huge, the dynamic you put in place is one were the troops on the ground will struggle to meet goals, including their own security. And that is how you get the nice folks you lent to the military to do truly terrible things to civilian populations. Bolstered in the Iraq case by the fact that there was sense of grievance over 9/11, notwithstanding the fact that had nothing to do with Iraq. It also had little to do with Afghanistan, except the Taliban was given the chance to hand over Osama, and declined, because they were being run by the Pakistanis, who sheltered him ultimately. But the Taliban was not responsible for 9/11.
Torture has multiple uses. Interrogation, repression, and punishment. It may not always be particularly effective, but then what is?
“Winning Hearts and Minds is basically about intimidating people into behaving in a manner that achieves your goals…”
Umm, I’m not sure if “Winning Hearts and Minds” is a specific program or a general strategy… but if you’re speaking of a general subject, intimidation and coercion are definitely not the same thing.
Coercing someone to do what you want doesn’t involve breaking down deliberate mental defenses that they are using to shield themselves from your will; it involves misdirecting their attention so that they achieve your goals, sometimes without them even realizing they’ve been coerced. Coercion is subtle; where an intimidating person would attempt to convince a suicide bomber directly not to blow theirself up, breaking down the bomber’s mental defenses and ultimately making a scene (one that might traumatize the bomber by forcing them to address themselves all at once), a coercive person would simply give the would-be bomber a suit with fake bombs and let nature take the rest of its course.