I wrote this piece partially in response to assertions by some that however wrong torture may be morally, it is effective.
I also wrote this piece because I had to.
I, and plenty of others on the anti-torture (the sane and moral) side, know that "torture may be evil, but it works" is not the case. It has been proven time and again, over many different eras of history and in many different conflicts that torture is wildly ineffective. Yet in this era we still see the crowing of legions of fools who somehow believe that if we simply truncheon, torture and shoot enough, our enemies miraculously go away.
Thus that evidence bears repeating again: Torture does not work. Provably. Definitively. Does. Not. Work. It is long past time to hammer in why it does not -- and where the path advocated by its advocates will lead. It is worth doing this because this is not simply some argument over policy or approach or differing but defensible ideals. This is about an act that is demonstrably cruel, cowardly and completely worthless. There is no compromise possible and no legitimacy to the other view whatsoever.
Torture. Doesn't. Work.
Fortunately, a brilliant piece of journalism in "The New Yorker" titled Whatever It Takes has come along to dissect how exactly the positive impression of these "harsh but necessary" measures has become so widespread, courtesy of outlets like "24" -- and once again, why, in addition to being evil, torture utterly fails to extract useful information.
The heart of the article comes when Brig Gen. Patrick Finnegan, the dean of West Point, and three veteran interrogators sit down with the "24" creative team to explain exactly how false the view their show conveys is:
First off, they note that anyone who could stand to commit torture in the first place isn't the sort of operative you'd want:
Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I.’s top experts in questioning techniques, attended the meeting; he told me, “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don’t want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.”
The hits just keep on coming. Not only are torturers unreliable, lying psychopaths, but torture doesn't work, especially in the (almost impossible) "ticking time bomb" situation that gets trotted out by its proponents.
Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. “These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!”
The notion that physical coercion in interrogations is unreliable, although widespread among military intelligence officers and F.B.I. agents, has been firmly rejected by the Bush Administration.
Whose tactical and strategic brilliance are of course, beyond question. Speaking of the current situation:
“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.”
What instead happens is that people either clam up under pain for one reason or another -- the aforementioned fanatic types among them -- or that they start telling their torturers anything they want to hear, as noted by veteran interrogator Peter Bauer in this testimony. Note: He's the third clip in.
Interrogators are far from the only ones to recognize this, of course. Activist and author Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prison camps and survived torture (under some of the same methods being used by American soldiers and CIA agents today, sadly). He wrote this searing condemnation of the methods and their effects, opening with the classic weapon against evil, stupid ideas, humor:
"One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."
Bukovsky continues, not mincing words:
Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes.
So is that where we're headed?
Not, of course, that this is news to anyone who's bothered to actually dig into this subject, instead of just going by a gut "pain will make you talk" feeling that this will work. Notably, the USSR's later apparatus in the Cold War generally wouldn't use torture to get information, but to extract false (key word there) confessions.
In fact, in World War II, Marine Major Sherwood Moran scrapped the "hard-boiled" bullshit, which wasn't getting results against the notoriously fanatical Japanese soldiers, for something counterintuitive but very effective -- being nice. As this Atlantic Monthly article details:
The document described a situation very similar to the one the United States faces in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: a fanatical and implacable enemy, intense pressure to achieve quick results, a brutal war in which the old rules no longer seem to apply.
Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report's author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.
Yes, that's it. They were nice to them. "Know their language, know their culture, and treat the captured enemy as a human being." is how one military scholar in the article sums up Moran's successful approach. Not as preeningly macho, maybe, but far more effective.
How successful was it? Well, we won that war. More specifically:
The Navy and the Marines recruited second-generation Japanese-Americans to teach an intensive one-year language course for interrogators that included a strong emphasis on Japanese culture. James Corum notes that the graduates of this course were among the most effective interrogators in the Pacific Island campaigns of 1944 and 1945: Marine interrogators deployed to the Marianas in June of 1944 were able to supply their commanders with the complete Japanese order of battle within forty-eight hours of landing on Saipan and Tinian.
Once again, the idea of a decisive single piece of information that a prisoner will spill when they break is also false: "Rather, it is the small and seemingly inconsequential bits of evidence that prisoners may give away once they start talking—about training, weapons, commanders, tactics—that, when assembled into a larger mosaic, build up the most complete and valuable picture of the enemy's organization, intentions, and methods."
So we have proof, from history, from the people who have actually done this for a living, from its victims -- that torture doesn't work. Furthermore, there are proven, better methods available. Moran's report became the foundation for military operating methods in the coming decades, up until their recent, deplorable reversal under the Bush administration.
There is still one more refuge of the pro-torture camp, and this by far the most reprehensible: the assertion that torture inflicts fear upon the enemy and that must be a good thing. Indeed torture does inflict fear. But fear itself has a tendency to backfire.
There have been multiple governments in history that have tried the approach of inflicting total fear on the enemy (and usually their own populace as well). Let's take one example -- early Imperial China. Under the ruthless Shi Huang Di the kingdom of Chin united the entire country with overwhelming military force. Old cultural institutions that might foster dissent were utterly destroyed, books were burned, many laws carried the death penalty (by various methods of torture), the secret police were everywhere.
So, according to the assumptions of the pro-torture crowd, this should've worked, right? Wrong. People guilty of minor crimes (or entirely innocent of any crime, but threatened with a slow death nonetheless) realized they had nothing to lose by rebellion. After all, the government would probably kill them anyway -- at least a death in combat would be quick. Then there's the fact that the sheer hatred that any such policy creates breeds rebellion. Shi Huang Di's dynasty did not outlast him by very long.
Again, this should be common sense to anyone who has ever led an organization. The best approach is to be polite and nice. This engenders respect. People like you. It also makes the occasional harsh moments memorable and effective. If you just berate and abuse people all the time, your anger will lose any potency and your subordinates will find ways to undermine you.
Flash forward to Iraq, 2004. You're a random Iraqi male, age 19. You're picked up in a traffic stop because there's been an insurgent attack in the area. You don't know anything about this, but you're beaten anyway by soldiers frustrated, tired and paranoid, who weren't trained for this kind of job and have been tacitly given the signal by their superiors that it's ok to treat prisoners this way.
You're shuttled off to one of the same prisons used by Saddam Hussein. You're tortured, savagely. You confess to anything you can make up and yet your captors still continue torturing you. At some point, you're shoved into an overcrowded holding area with a bunch of other prisoners. Then you're released.
This, by the military's own reports, is what happened in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (substitute Afghanistan for Iraq in that last case). All lies aside, it still continues today. Say you're that torture victim. What, then, is the very natural response when you're brutalized for no apparent reason? The same response any human has, across the world: revenge.
Now multiply it. Every member of the victim's extended family, every friend of theirs, who may have been neutral or even positively inclined before, now wants vengeance. If someone tortured your mother, sister, brother or child wouldn't you? If the victim is never released, or dies under torture (as some have), the effect is magnified. As for the revenge, well, there are plenty of weapons to carry it out and plenty of noxious groups out there happy for the new recruits.
Fear then fails. After all, if anyone can be tortured, often when guilty only of minor crimes or no crimes at all, what incentive is there not to rebel? People who believe they have no chance will fight to the death.
In the first Persian Gulf War, huge numbers of Iraqis surrendered rather than fight. As veterans of that war have noted, they would have lost, but even after the air bombardment, they still had the numbers and equipment to do significant damage. Why did they surrender? Because at the time America and its allies had a good reputation for the treatment of prisoners. They no doubt compared this with the treatment they would have received under the Stalinesque Hussein, who would likely have had them imprisoned or executed for returning defeated. The result is not rocket science or some inscrutable cultural mindset. Humane treatment of prisoners gave them a way out, so they took it.
This sort of shadowy war is one based on morale. It doesn't matter how many insurgents are killed, because as long as there are always more of the enraged and desperate to take their places, they can replenish their losses. On the other hand, every soldier lost to the Americans represents a significant loss of training, equipment and morale. The key is getting people not to want to fight, to have some reason to lay down arms or not pick them up in the first place (not going into wars unless it's a last resort helps too). Raw fear does a damn poor job of that.
Why then, if the evidence is so overwhelming and clear, are there still proponents of torture out there -- and why are they so vigorous in their support?
Once torture is permitted, it's always a ticking time bomb situation. Without any appreciation of the culture or any knowledge of the area and minimal training, every interrogator sees anyone who comes before them as a terrorist, and themselves as the (necessarily, of course) hard-hearted hero who must break them to save lives. No matter that the methods aren't working, beating the shit out of someone you think is a terrorist sure feels like something is being done.
The key word there is "feel." Because almost since 9/11, the entire response has been run by feeling in the worst way possible. The current mania for torture is one part of that. Actually fighting a foe that's located in a dispersed network across the world requires infiltration, informants and actual useful interrogation. This is all largely unglamorous, trudging sort of work, like the spycraft of the Cold War, with the occasional surgical military strike.
But does that sound very bad-ass? Of course not. People are afraid and in the weakness of their fear they yearn for tanks rolling through streets and statues coming down. They yearn for the easy victory. They want to hear assurance that tough, brutal men are finally (in only the most necessary way, of course) beating the enemy senseless. Then they can once again relax in safety.
Why? Because real sacrifices are hard. Because telling people that the world has changed and that the way out will be slow and long may be true, but it won't be very popular.
If they were interested in victory, they wouldn't be firing translators because they're gay. If they were interested in real sacrifices, the executives of the oil companies would be having the worst years of their lives. But they aren't.
So real interrogation, that finely tuned system of psychological ruse and cunning investigation that worked against Nazis, Bushido-driven Japanese soldiers and hardline communist fanatics, now seems... weak.
The key word is "seems." Because the society and government knows deep down that it has become weakened, but lacks the will to reconsider how it got that way. But it has raw power, so it mistakes that for strength.
Then, when some rise and point out that this is not strength at all, when they assert that beating a chained victim to death in a cold room is not courageous, but the very depth of pointless cruelty and cowardice, they are called limp-wristed traitors. When they suggest a more intelligent approach, they are derided as not having the stomach for the real fight.
So we enter an era based increasingly on illusion. The illusion of freedom, the illusion of sacrifice and finally, the illusion of strength.
This illusion screams that real men don't talk, they kill.
"Believe, fight, obey" actually seems to sum it up pretty well, doesn't it?
It should also be noted that those who voice this dogma most loudly are often far from the actual fighting. Erasmus was right: "War is delightful to those who have no experience of it."
But never mind that the methods don't work, that all the torture and all the brute force still lose the day. When the war is lost they will blame those who stood up, because, as Moran knew long ago, the most belligerent and vicious are the most afraid.
But the coward's creed of fear, cruelty and ignorance will have already been exalted. Maintaining those idols, to assure themselves at night that they are still strong, will be more important to them than any sort of victory over any sort of real enemy -- and rest assured that there will always be more enemies.
And torture, once just reserved for those labeled terrorists in another land, will find new homes and new victims. Because its nature is to spread. Because they might know something. Yes it's harsh, but it's necessary to protect our way of life.
We have seen this before. We have seen societies and governments aplenty embrace pointless brutality and power for their own sake. They fall. In the end, they deserve to.
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