I wanted to highlight a couple of comments from yesterday’s mostly civil thread on the importance of narrowly defining “torture,” because taken together I think they best capture what I’ve been arguing.
First, here’s Jeff Medcalf, who addresses the (to be expected, I suppose) drift of the thread, and draws a series of important distinctions:
We’ve certainly gone beyond the realm of definition, here. Instead, we are talking about utility. That’s fine, but it just begs the question Jeff originally raised: how can we argue the utility of “torture†if we don’t know what “torture†unambiguously is? Once we know that, we can discuss its utility in various circumstances. Ideally, that’s how a good law gets made, to control what our interrogators do and do not do.
There is a huge level of ignorance being displayed, too. To take a simple example, [one commenter] makes the utilitarian argument that a person being tortured will simply say what the torturer wants to hear. That’s certainly true for many people, if the intent of the interrogator is to hear what he wants to hear, or if he is unskilled. If, for example, you want a captured pilot to say he committed war crimes, you can often get that through massive physical abuse.
But what if the interrogator (not torturer, because at this point we’re not talking about torture) actually wants information? In that case, the interrogator needs to be sure that what he’s getting is true. He’ll ask the same question multiple times, sometimes using different words. He’ll re-ask a question he’s already asked, after a long period of time has elapsed. He’ll confront the prisoner with contradictions and with extrinsic evidence he already has. He will lie to the prisoner about what the prisoner said in answer to earlier questions, to see if he will change his story or stick to it.
This method of questioning requires a few things. It requires time in order to work; you can’t trust anything the prisoner says without repeating it several times in different circumstances. It also takes breaking the prisoner’s resistance, and here is where we get into the torture/interrogation debate.
If you put me in a chair, making me a bit uncomfortable because if I’m not tied or strapped to it I’m going to rip your throat out, I can lie to you consistently. If you do that when I’m very tired, I can lie to you less effectively: my brain will sometimes slip. Make me physically uncomfortable in other ways: too cold, too hot, bombarded by loud and unpleasant sounds, disoriented as to night and day, or whatever, and it will become even harder to lie consistently because my brain will be trying to cope with too many things at once. Trigger my guilt or shame, and my desire to lie is lowered; or more to the point, my desire to overcome my guilt and shame lead me to want to help you to my own detriment, as compensation. Further overload me with the fear of death or extreme pain, which may or may not require the actual causing of some pain, and it becomes nearly impossible to sustain a lie over any period of time. Eventually, the truth will almost always come out.
Now, those who say that the US should never torture, and who define torture to include physical discomfort, threats of death and so on, would take away most of the ways that the interrogators can obtain the truth. By removing techniques that allow interrogators to disorient, discomfort, and shame the prisoners, the ability to get the truth from the prisoner is greatly diminished. By eliminating the interrogators’ ability to cause pain or the fear of death, the final element that usually breaks a person so that you can get real information is denied the interrogators.
Now, let’s not kid ourselves, these things are unpleasant. They are unpleasant to discuss; I imagine that they are massively unpleasant to do. But there are only two options: attempt to get information, or don’t attempt to get information. What are the consequences of these, and at what point do they become worse than the techniques that are banned?
If we decide we are going to get information, we can set up rules on what we will and will not allow (this is, I think, what Jeff was aiming towards), and those can provide a bright-line guide that allows us to get information without becoming monsters.
If we are not going to get information from captives, why take captives? Under the laws of war, the people we are fighting are, when captured, subject to summary execution. Why would we not execute them if they will be of no use to [us]? At least if we kill them right away, they won’t attack us again when we eventually release them from custody. Moreover, if you oppose torture, you likely oppose rendition as well, so we cannot give captives to our allies to take care of, one way or another. So again, no incentive to take captives there, either.
If we are not going to […] seriously try to get information from our captives, but keep questioning them, at some point an exceptional case is going to come up, and an interrogator will turn to torture. They will do this because there is no line to draw: after they have determined that they want information, and that they are breaking the law and will likely go to jail for going beyond asking questions at all, there is no line to stop and say, this far but no further. And so when those exceptional cases arise, we are asking our interrogators to choose between probably going to jail, and possibly having thousands of people he is there to protect, die.
No sane society, that wants its government servants and its military to protect us, will put a person in that kind of position. But I’m far from convinced that we are a sane society any more.
(The saddest thing about Abu Ghraib, by the way, was that there was not even a desire to get information: this was just amateur playing around with prisoners for no reason but personal jollies.)
…And here’s Cutler, taking on the oft-cited assertion that “torture” just doesn’t work—that there are more effective ways to extract information (the position Cathy Young holds). Cutler begins by quoting an assertion made by another commenter:
The historical facts are, torture doesn’t work. It does not produce reliable results often enough to make it worth much, and it DOES produce grotesquely unreliable results a whole lot, e.g., McCain and others confessing to war crimes in Hanoi.
…to argue:
There is some truth to the fact that the threat of force is often more effective than the force itself, and there are times when it is counterproductive. However, there are clearly times when it isn’t. For instance, when you already know enough about the subject to cross check what he says with what you already know.
Declaring that torture doesn’t work has at least 3 effects:
a. It allows opponents to avoid facing difficult decisions.
b. It allows politicians to avoid those same questions, where answering them would put them in intense scrutiny considering the state of our opinion shapers.
c. It soothes the ego, pretending that out of almost infinite peoples on Earth, only we were smart enough and moral enough to realize the truth.
Common sense dictates that if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t have been used for thousands of year – from the Sumerians, to the Romans, to whoever. There is a different between extracting confensions a la the Inquisition, sheer sadism a la Christians in Rome, and extracting information. A simple read of the Gulag Archipelago will prove that the latter can work.
In all of this, one of my major points has been that to legislate away even the threat of coercive interrogation techniques by first shoehorning them into an expansive and highly subjective definition of “torture” and then banning all such practices in the service of banning “torture,” is a dangerous tactical mistake, one that would certainly weaken us in the same way that the Church restrictions weakened our intelligence services by hamstringing them to the point of impotence.
The bottom line is, my position is that we should define “torture” as narrowly and specifically as possible—drawing a bright line that we should not cross. But that line should certainly NOT be drawn in such a way that opponents of “torture” can now claim, with some degree interpretive certainly, that “humiliation” or physical discomfort—or lying, or threats (or some of the interrogation techniques that are available to civil law enforcement)—fall within the parameters of “torture” as currently defined.
I am not advocating for torture; instead, I am advocating for a clearly defined distinction between “torture” and the kinds of coercive interrogation techniques that our own interrogators (and those from foreign intelligence services that we’ve consulted and with whom we likely share techniques) have been able to use effectively to extract useful information from those who wish to do us harm.
I’ll finish with this follow-up comment from Cutler about removing the threat of coercive interrogation:
It didn’t take long for interrogators in the war on terror to realize that their part was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed over decades of cold-war planning, held that 95 percent of prisoners would break upon straightforward questioning. Interrogators in Afghanistan, and later in Cuba and Iraq, found just the opposite: virtually none of the terror detainees was giving up informationâ€â€not in response to direct questioning, and not in response to army-approved psychological gambits for prisoners of war.â€Â
…
“But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,†writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.â€Â
Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of tortureâ€â€a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.
If our enemies are willing to adapt, the pragmatists in us must be ready to adapt, as well; the idea that we have sold our souls by developing and carefully honing coercive interrogation techniques that create fear and panic, or that rely on discomfort and the breaking down of physical and mental resistance—all while causing no permanent damage—is itself an indication that we’ve surrendered our soul to PC-self righteousness, and can no longer make the distinctions necessary to protect ourselves from ourselves.
****
related: Submandave, “What is Torture”
“The Dark Art of Interrogation,” by Mark Bowden
“The Will to Win,” from Cutler’s Yankee Station.
“Defining Torture Down,” Vodkapundit.
“Torture is Good,” LaShawn Barber
TORTURE ADVOCATE!!!
Hmmm.
The whole idea that torture doesn’t work is complete nonsense. If I had you strapped to a chair and wanted to know your ATM pin number you can bet your ass I’d have it post haste.
The only instance where torture won’t work is if the prisoner genuinely doesn’t have the information in the first place.
I simply love the argument that the moonbats make that by spreading patently false lies and accusing US soldiers of war crimes, that they are somehow acting out their patriotic duty.
In the beginning, I wanted to believe that the moonbats were simply people with a differing political perspective than myself. I did not want to believe that they were unpatriotic, just misguided.
However, their ongoing actions make my prior sentiments much more difficult to cling to.
Maybe it’s just semantics, but I also find the notion that “questioning” someone’s patriotism is anathema. I would submit that “questioning” is similar to asserting that someone is unpatriotic if the patriotism being questioned is false.
I’m occasionally given to wonder about Shakespear’s quote “Methinks thou dost protest too much.”
I have to take issue with Mr. Metcalf’s last assertion.
Can he possibly believe that this wasn’t, as the soldiers involved have testified, an attempt, hovever amateur, to
as directed by the interogators?
That’s it – from now on I’m carefully eliminating typos.
Ok, maybe I’m naive but how about we begin with the lowest threshold being the things our people do to our own people.
Find out the worst instances of hazying in fraternities, USMC boot camp, RECON training, SEAL training, etc. and agree that if we do these things to our own people it can’t be torture.
Alrighty then, extreme cold and heat, check; stress positions, check; mild physical contact, check, etc. Again, if we do these things to our own people then terrorist prisoners should AT LEAST be subject to the same thing, don’t you think?
There was a story a few months ago [I couldn’t find it via google] that Australian interest groups were even trying to stop their military from putting recruits through similar conditioning. This was done to prepare them for what might happen to them if they were captured by Islamics or other sadistic captors.
Saying that these interrogation methods do not work and using the KGB and North Vietnamese is ridiculous. Their motives for interrogation/torture were quite different than ours. They were often looking for propaganda, to advance their careers, to get revenge, or to compromise someone for future use. Of course the KGB and the North Vietnamese didn’t get accurate information out of their interrogations, they were never looking for real information in the first place.
Excellent debate. Excellent posts. I have learned tons. Thanks, Jeff!
TW: however. However, it is going to be a challenge to explain (or remember) all this stuff if I need to argue with someone.
That should read as:
I must learn to type more slowly…
The bottom line is, my position is that we should define “torture†as narrowly and specifically as possibleâ€â€drawing a bright line that we should not cross.
Except of course when you really really need to. After all, there may be an atomic bomb going off in an American city in 24 hours, and you wouldn’t want to take away a necessary tool.
And then, of course, there’s no reason not to apply it more widely. After all, there’s a lot of prisoners, and you need a lot of information to draw correlations.
And then, of course, there’s no reason not to apply it as a routine. Would you want to miss the one prisoner who has the information you need?
And, hell, your interrogators need the practise. Indeed, they’re starting to kinda enjoy it. And the public likes it too – it shows how tough America is on the Bad Guys(tm).
But, of course, there’s another bright line that we should not cross – say, cutting off people’s fingers or limbs in the course of interrogation.
Except of course when you really really need to…
That’s not my position.
Listen: It’s a holiday. Are you so miserable and lonely that you have nothing better to do than troll my comments dropping your pissy little snark?
That was rhetorical, by the way.
Obviously subject to restrictions as laid out by the Geneva Conventions For Typo Elimination.
“Of course the KGB and the North Vietnamese didn’t get accurate information out of their interrogations, they were never looking for real information in the first place.”
I’m not so sure of that. There was real tactical information to be gained from downed pilots and, just as they were able to extract false confessions, it follows that they also gained at least some useful specifics. Or at least had the capability of gaining such information if desired.
More importantly they chose to focus on the greater benefits of propaganda victories v.s. tactical victories as part of their overall strategy for defeating the U.S. Improving ground-to-air defenses are of limited benefit as compared to the possibility of inducing another bombing pause or bringing an end to the bombing entirely. In that sense the benefits of torture were no less real simply because the ‘confessions’ were false.
That’s not my position.
It’s how your position translates in the real world. There used to be a bright line the US didn’t cross, that the US didn’t torture prisoners. If you look back behind you, you can possibly still see it. At the moment you’re engaging in sophistry about the next bright line the US will not cross – and the same arguments for crossing the last, briefly detailed in my post will still apply.
Having crossed the last line so easily, you have no way to defend against the same arguments being applied to cross this line. Indeed, I expect we’ll find you arguing after the fact that it was right to so cross – but that the next bright line will hold.
Meanwhile, from some people who know about the subject:
“”If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it,” he said. “One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, ‘Why didn’t you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?’ They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn’t even bother to ask questions.” Ultimately, he said—echoing Gerber’s comments—“torture becomes an end unto itself.””
You have a choice. Either you’re going to have to explain to your children why the US turned so rotten during this period, or you’re going to have to explain to your children why Lyndie England got picked out and prosecuted…
No, it doesn’t.
I doubt very much you’ve even read my posts, so enamored of you of posting your own carefully culled agitprop. If you had, you’d know that I’m not advocating torture at all. I’m trying to separate out from torture things I don’t think should fall under the rubric of torture.
Thanks for the link to the Bowden piece. I don’t always agree with him, but I respect him as an honest, informed broker or information.
With all due respect, the discussion you have started seems to revolve more around where to draw the line at using torture than trying to define it. Sure, there are the sanctimonious folks who will claim that anything that makes them feel uncomfortable should be forbidden. Of course, such puerile posturing isn’t to be taken too seriously. I certainly wouldn’t want to be tortured, but where I captured by an enemy such as those we are fighting today, I sincerely doubt that the good intentions of the fine people at Human Rights Watch will do much to protect me.
The examples offered in Bowden’s piece are quite instructive ranging from trying tactical efforts to save a single person to strategic efforts to fight an enemy at virtually a national level. In each case the willingness to exercise less discretion and ever more sadistic methods grows in direct proportion to the size of the stakes.
I don’t think it is possible to define a clear line about what is permissible and what isn’t independent of the context. To illustrate this, answer the following six questions and see if your answers are the same in each case.
1. If you knew a dog was being abused and might soon be killed, and you had supervisory custody of a suspect who you sincerely believed had information that might save the dog, how far would you go to get the information you think the suspect has?
2. What if it was your dog?
3. If you knew a child was being abused and might soon be killed, and you had supervisory custody of a suspect who you sincerely believed had information that might save the child, how far would you go to get the information you think the suspect has?
4. What if it was your child?
5. If you knew a nuclear weapon was about to be used on an American city, and you had supervisory custody of a suspect who you sincerely believed had information that might prevent its use, how far would you go to get the information you think the suspect has?
6. What if it was your city?
Unless you are going to take an absolute position on torture, never permissible or always permissible, odds are you are a little bit like the woman at the bar who won’t sleep with a guy for $100 but will for $10,000,000. Once we’ve established what you are, we are just haggling about price.
ThomasD, I think you and the fellow you are quoting are agreeing, but from different directions. The North Vietnamese got what they were looking for, but they might not have been looking for information as much as the propaganda victories, whereas we have different objectives.
I advocate torture (Of anything short of highly unprofessional physical mutilation.) and see nothing wrong with it. Largely because the pragmatist in me sees nothing gained from trying to argue with the moonbats out there who remain convinced in their heart of hearts that physical discomfort is torture. You try to iron out a set of rules with these people, and they will scream, cry, whine, gnash their teeth, and flail about in childlike temper tantrums through a sympathetic, downright anti-patriotic press. They will continue to force all of us to live in their fantasy world without accepting any compromises for their childish view of how we should act in the war. Because of this, I see no reason to give ANY sort of extension of compromise on our part to these children. Deficit reduction doesn’t occur without both sides seeking to compromise, and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t stonewall on torture definitions and regulations because they will never THINK to give an inch.
PIATOR, *COUGH*CHILDISH*/COUGH*… what? Excuse me.
Actually, it’s the other way around: I wish to better define torture so that we have a clearer idea where to draw the line.
You’ll pardon me if I beg out of this discussion now, though. I have to go catch and kill a turkey so that we can get it in the brine.
That’s not nice, Jeff. You know the guy’s nothing more than a paid Moby.
Hmmmm.
I think I disagree that the KGB never got good intelligence from torture.
Really the primary examples of torture that we know were done either simple as a sadistic enterprise or as a methodology to break the will of the prisoners so that they would be amenable with being used as a propaganda tool. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that such techniques didn’t provide the KGB with good intelligence when they used torture to obtain specific intelligence from individuals likely to have that information.
The simple fact is that I, and I think the rest of us, really don’t know how effective torture really is in the real world. But I think we should keep in mind that if torture really were ineffective then, aside from sadistic impulses, there wouldn’t be much need for it.
That torture is and can be used in interrogation to acquire valuable intelligence proves that torture both works and is a valuable technique. Either in actuality or as a threat.
Hmmm.
As far as a definition of torture is concerned. I think the only workable definition is one where:
Permanent uncorrectable physical damage inflicted on an individual.
– or –
Permanent uncorrectable physical damage inflicted on an individual **that nobody would be willing to pay for**.
This last definition is for you perverted types out there in Goldstein-land. Some of my friends of doctors, emergency room nurses and police officers. And the crap these people have told me about what people are willing to pay for, is just completely fucking amazing to me.
In the pages of the Washington Post stick an economy size dish detergent bottle up someone’s ass might be defined as torture, but there’s a few guys in Alphabet City that’ll pay you $50 to do it to them.
One man’s torture is very likely another man’s good time.
Hmmm.
Sorry. Change that to: “ Some of my friends are doctors …”
Preview is my friend.
“I think I disagree that the KGB never got good intelligence from torture.
Really the primary examples of torture that we know were done either simple as a sadistic enterprise or as a methodology to break the will of the prisoners so that they would be amenable with being used as a propaganda tool. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that such techniques didn’t provide the KGB with good intelligence when they used torture to obtain specific intelligence from individuals likely to have that information.”
The reason I pointed out Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is that he devoted an entire chapter to the KGB’s methods, filled with plenty of anecdotes about how the it forced information [or confessions] out of its targets, whether it was the location of hidden gold from Kulaks, or dissident networks.
One notion that Solzhenitsyn never entertains is that the KGB were necessarily stupid. They had as much experience as anyone on the gruesome subject. Indeed, he gives the advice to break early, because noone can hold on indefinitely and it will just be easier on you that way.
And if everyone did that for a generation or so, the interrogators would be out of practice…
Hmmmm.
Yes that is a very good point.
Now to get some coffee before I post something really idiotic.
I’m trying to separate out from torture things I don’t think should fall under the rubric of torture.
I propose the following test – if it was being done to your kid and you had a gun, would you shoot the person doing it to stop them?
And there’s one obvious reason why I don’t care whether it’s Thanksgiving or not…
Crass emotional appeals do not an effective argument make. But thank you for playing.
Followup links on torture:
On torture in Vietnam.
CIA officials admitting torture leads to questionable confessions.
Padilla case tainted by torture (Padilla is, of course, an American citizen who was held without charge for three years and without habeus corpus. So much for the Land of the Free). And a followup on this.
“The “recap” in the Padilla matter is no less jarring: The U.S. Government arrests a U.S. citizen and throws him into solitary confinement in a military prison, denies him access to lawyers, refuses to even charge him with a crime, and then announces to the world with great fanfare in a news conference that he was trying to smuggle a radiological bomb into the U.S. and detonate it.
The only information which they have to support this accusation and this indefinite imprisonment is obtained via torture techniques which are notorious for inducing false and unreliable information—information which the Government has now concluded has so little reliability that they could not even charge Padilla with this crime, let alone convict him of it.
It is certainly worth emphasizing again: the reason that the Government is not supposed to—and is not Constitutionally permitted to—imprison people without telling them why they’re being imprisoned and without giving them a trial to disprove the accusations is precisely because the Founders of this country did not trust the Government to act responsibly or honestly if its imprisonment powers were unchecked by the scrutinizing instrument of a jury trial.
That constitutional prohibition would be a critical protection against government tyranny if we had a Government which actually abided by the prohibition. Because we don’t have that, we instead have U.S. citizens being throw into prison without a trial based upon information which the Government knows is likely to be inaccurate because they tortured it out of someone.”
And lastly, a little thought experiment. I wonder if the commentators here are able to grasp the point being made?
Coincidentally, treating suspected terrorists like our kids is definitely how nations stand the test of time. *Rolls eyes*
Experts say torture works
I GOT LINKS TOO!
Well, if I were a terrorist, I would hold the American pilot’s feet over the fire to save more than one life as cited in that article. I see no reason not to. The cost of breaking such a rule is NOTHING to me. Nobody would care.
But that thought experiment, well, frankly, it is stupidly written. I gotta fix it. Changes highlighted in bold.
PIATOR, Americans don’t target civilians. Thank you. Good game.
Such a thought experiment also requires the willful suspension of any sort of notion that the terrorist insurgents are organized at some level, or have an objective. Furthermore, it also presupposes that the terrorist I am in the exercise thinks of the US captive as more than just an infidel, a member of the Great Satan. Odds are, considering the beheadings we used to see on television, the fictional terrorist me wouldn’t. Thus, I would have little moral imperative and little strategic imperative (Honestly, the rest of the world doesn’t give a crap about what a terrorist does. They want anything they can GET about whatever ‘atrocities’ the Americans are committing. So what I would theoretically do is the old Vietnam thing. Torture the American until he confesses to war crimes. All I’d have to do is sell it. Nobody REALLY cares if info drawn by terrorists is inaccurate… it just has to fly in a sympathetic media.) to NOT torture.
PIATOR, Americans don’t target civilians.
Uh-huh.
“Sanctions wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people, in part because the Pentagon intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water-treatment systems during the first U.S.-Iraq war:” […]
“A Washington Post analysis published on June 23, 1991, noted that Pentagon officials admitted that, rather than concentrating solely on military targets, the U.S. bombing campaign “sought to achieve some of their military objectives in the Persian Gulf War by disabling Iraqi society at large†and “deliberately did great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society.â€Â
The bombing campaign targeted Iraq’s electrical power system, thereby destroying the country’s ability to operate its water-treatment plants. […]
“In an estimate not substantively disputed by the Pentagon, the [Harvard] team projected that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects†of the bombing.”
Hey, nice threadjack Phoenician…
Getting back to the topic: we should define what is torture and what is coercive interrogation technique. Torture is off the table, and interrogators are given the green-light to use coercive techniques. Pretty effin’ simple topic to understand, dontcha think?
I watched a documentary awhile ago on the History Channel in which a group of everyday people attempted to withhold secrets from professional military interrogators: <a href=”http://www.teamdelta.net/HistoryChannel.htm” target=”_blank”> Everyday people, undergoing the same interrogation techniques that lefties are whining about now. They came out unscathed, and the interrogators obtained most of the information they were looking for. Other than the waterboarding thing, all the methods previously described by Goldstein – feigned violence, loud noise, stress positions, uncomfortable temperature – were used in this program.
It was a friggin’ “reality show”. A GAME. And leftards all over the place are wetting their panties because we’re practicing these techniques in real-life, with real captives? The same techniques that people were willing to submit themselves to for the sake of being on a reality show?
Let’s get serious, folks. Stop living in your heads. Interrogation is unpleasant and, at times, nasty. And wholy necessary.
So… we cut off Iraqi power? Is that it? We cut off Iraqi power in wartime, and… *Sigh* Whatever, PIATOR.
Our training is that if captured and questioned, we are not to cooperate. We are however, told to tell tehm anything that will satisfy them so long as it is not true, current, actionable….
Our job, once captured, is to live to get away and fight another day.
Someone woul dhave toell me definitely that any other force, even an ad hoc one operates in any significant way.
Ed, you would not get my PIN and unless you had an ATM immediately hand to test what I did tell you (because I would tell you something) I’d get a repreive each time you left to try a withdrawl. Anything to get a little time to muster new resistance.
In those cases where torture has been effective, it has not been the torture itself that did the trick. Rather it ws the “good cop” half of the team who swoops in, stops the pain, empathizes with the subject and makes a deal; tell us what we want and I’ll make them stop.
Effective interrogation either removes the subject from any context that makes them comfortable or creates an empathy with the subject. Torture is a way to speed up that empathy building. Context removal is faster than empathy without torture.
Some means of context removal: sleep deprivation, playing games with light and dart patterns, moving the subject frequently, stress positions (these aren’t dmaging, in fact they can be an effective part of a good fitness regimen), simply denying the subject anything they might take comfort or refuge in, isolation…
As I’ve said, my brain’s not big enough to formulate a good definition of torture, but I thought I might contribute some to the context of that discussion.
Is it not logical that in everyone but PIATOR’s statements lies the assumptions that our “torture” would be done in whatever the most intelligent manner is, with proper oversight (A good cop, disorientation, et al.) and a minimization of sadism?
And, of course, fact-checking with as much speed as one can muster. The false-information canard assumes that our servicemen are just playing games. I swear, if in my Bond villain fantasies, I can outdo what PIATOR’s like thinks of our servicemen, someone’s assumptions are wrong.
[…] Obama’s remarkable and unconscionable buckling to his far-left base on the issue of potential “torture” prosecutions: I think it’s a terrible error for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I think […]