I’ve never read about a former intelligence officer praising torture as a means of collecting reliable information, whereas I have seen many say it’s at best a means to seek revenge and boost moral and at worst a very damaging practice for the reasons which are pretty obvious.
The weird hypotheticals put forward about bombs and a “ticking clock” from the right are pretty absurd and don’t make much sense. They appear all the more insipid when contrasted with goes on in real life, what we’ve actually done. I’d think it’d be easier to concoct a situation in a conventional war where torture might work on the tactical level, if you captured the right guy. I’m just not sure if I’d want to base my decisions on the say so of a guy who I beat with a pipe (He says there are only two machine nests around the next hill…let’s go!).
From all I have read, getting information isn’t the real problem. Putting it together and infering from it the intentions of an eneimy is the real problem.
For example, I believe we had quite a bit of information about the 911 perpetrators. An FBI agent even sent a warning to headquarter that something was up. The failure, if it could be called that, was in not recognizing what the information meant.
Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day recounts that the Germans knew that the invasion was to take place on or about the 5th of June. Radio messages were sent regularly by the BBC to groups in occupied Europe. The Germans had knowledge of a coded message that would be sent telling the resistance that the invasion would take place within 24 hours. On the 4th of June that message was intercepted and passed on up the chain of command. When the invasion didn’t take place on the 5th (weather delay) they relaxed. In addition the German high command was certain that the invasion would take place in the narrowest part of the English Channel. When reports came in on the 6th of partroopers and then thousands of ships with troops landing they dismissed it as a feint to draw them away from the real landings. The stories of the size of the landings were dismissed as panic on the part of the coastal defense troops.
The mindset of those interpreting the information is crucial. Our mindset is on aircraft hijackings. Any attack wil probably be somewhere else.
Here’s my simplistic view of the interrogation situation. Somebody in the upper ranks of the interrogating organizations must know whether or not whatever techniques they are using result in any useful information.
If the techniques are ineffective, one would think they’d try something else. That is, unless the people running the show are just sadists who enjoy inflicting whatever anguish they can on people whom they regard as enemies. While this is not out of the realm of possibility, I sincerely hope (notice I didn’t say “believe”) it’s not the case.
That leaves the alternative – the interrogation techniques ARE effective in gaining useful information. While I believe that the use of torture by the US is completely reprehensible, that is not what the OP asked.
Based on the simplistic view, the answer to the first part of the question is “yes” – whatever they’re doing must be working or they’d do something else.
Of course, the larger question is just what techniques are they using (I doubt anyone in this forum KNOWS for sure what they are), and are those techniques torture?
Well, of course, they are trying something else. Standard intelligence gathering goes on all of the time. Those in charge might go along with torture because they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to be criticized that they didn’t do everthing just in case.
Your position that those in charge know what they are doing is questionable at least.
Those advocating torture are political appointees, the Attorney General, etc. We have no idea what the experienced, working intelligence gathering community thinks about it.
Atually, there are a number of psychological factors that interfere with your proposal. It is pretty well established that torture is an effective way to get a person to say what you want them to say. Since the coerced information tends to support one’s own bias regarding the information desired, there is very little in the way of a corrective feedback loop. Confirmation bias will ensure that any correct guess on the part of the interrogators will be a sign that the information gathering had been “good” while they will write off “bad” information as the result of changes undertaken by the enemy, knowing that their confederate had been captured, or simple ignorace on the part of the subject of the interrogation.
The idea that people who make decisions always examine their outcome for signs that their information was good is shown to be seriously flawed by any wide ranging examination of business decisions.
This really is a GQ question. The answer is no…there is no way to prove such a claim as you’d need to be able to scan alternative branches of history to do so. You’d need to have one branch of history where you tortured the guy, obtained the information and acted on it…and then have another branch of history where you didn’t torture the guy (or maybe several branches where you used varying levels of torture I guess) and then compared the results. How would you do this?
I think what you REALLY want to debate is: Is torture effective at all? What constitutes ‘torture’? If torture is (assuming it is, however defined) then is it justified in terms of means and ends?
No, it isn’t what I wanted at all. I am not interested in debating the merits of torture, or what is possible to prove or disprove, or how national security plays in.
I am interested if the “pro-torture” camp has ever produced anything they would view as evidence to support the idea that it saves lives.
I fear you shall leave the thread disappointed then, if thats your aim. Even if there was such evidence I seriously doubt that the members of this message board would have access to it…or just blithely post it in such a public forum for laughs.
What’s the point in making someone say what you want them to say if what you’re looking for is actionable information? Yeah, you can eventually get anybody to admit to being a member of al-Queda, but so what? That’s not actionable. You can also get anybody to tell you where the bombs are being made, even if they have no idea. That’s actionable information, but if it always turns out to be wrong, you’ve really got nothing anyway.
I suspect that among all the “information” elicited by whatever interrogation techniques they use, there has been a nugget or two or more of useful stuff. Any success at all would keep them using the same techniques. If nobody has EVER learned anything useful by employing them, you’d think there would be somebody who’d say, “This isn’t working; let’s try something else.”
Then again, if their only measure of success is getting a detainee to say anything at all, of course they’ll be “successful”.
My point is that people supposedly in the know have said that they get useful stuff with their interrogations. I find it likely that among all the interrogations conducted, there have been at least a few successes – all the al-Qs can’t be uniformly resistant to questioning.
If they’ve NEVER found anything useful, claiming that they have solely to justify continued “pressure” is indeed evil
Yeah, nobody here REALLY has access to hard evidence. I’m saying that based on claims by those in the know and that simple odds are against never having gotten any useful information, there probably have been at least a few plots foiled or lives saved by information interrogated out of some bad guys.
Well, this is just silly. We already know that out interrogation regime is based on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program that was set up to help American GIs resist torture during the Cold War. And we know that they used the experiences of Korean War prisoners to figure out how Communist Bloc agents questioned prisoners. Unfortunately, the processes were designed to get confessions, not information. An essential part of the process is sleep deprivation, which causes psychosis and suggestibility. If a prisoner is torutred, and “reveals” that three other people in his town are AQ agents, and under torture those three people admit to being AQ agents, then the first interrogation was successful, right?
First, I have to commend **tomndebb ** for noticing that torture gave a false piece of information that was an element of the justifications to go into Iraq, I was beginning to think I was the only one here.
I do think now more than ever that torture is used by the powerful to get justifications (more often false ones than true ones) on why they are following a reprehensible course of action:
As for saving lives AFAICR in a past discussion there was a posted article on “torture” working to find a bomb planted by Tamil revels in Sri lanka, but unfortunately the example looked more like murder than torture. The police shoot the captured suspects one at a time until one confessed. That IMO is not torture but murder. However is shows that there is indeed an element of luck in this and I do understand that sometimes you will find examples of torture working.
OTOH looking at how false torture information helped us to get into Iraq and now see many prisoners not being released because of torture (they can reveal how we do it!) or confessions obtained by it, that then the evil result of torture is clear, governments are “forced” to hide their failures by punishing the victims even more.
So why continue? It is because what you can get out of it is profitable still or it helps the political standing of the ones in power that approves it?
I remember reading how effective torture was for past empires, for the Spanish inquisition torture was effective: [del]Iraq’s oil[/del] the property of the confessed was confiscated by the catholic church. (never mind the small detail that virtually all accused were innocent or did not deserve what they got)
I think torture was and is considered effective for the state, but not for its protection, but to get evidence to prove an evil path was/is the correct one.
The New Yorker article (8/13/07) talks about torture information and black sites in general, but focuses on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who under torture (or whatever they call it) admitted to killing Daniel Pearl. Mariane Pearl, Daniel’s father Judea Pearl, and Asra Nomani, friend of Pearl and former WSJ reporter, are skeptical.
In discussing the US investigation of Mohammed, the article has the following quote: “Mohammed, born in either 1964 or 1965, was raised in a religious Sunni Muslum family in Kuwait…”
There’s lots of detailed information on Mohammed’s militancy, his college activities in Greensboro, N.C., his participation in terrorist plots. But yet they can’t figure out whether he was born in 1964 or 1965? I suppose in the grand scheme of things it’s not important. I take this, though, as an indication that the CIA’s research is just not that reliable.
As to whether the information has prevented anything, the article states that "…Mohammed supplied intelligence on the history of the September 11th plot, and on the structure and operations of Al Qaeda. He also described plots still in a preliminary phase of development, such as a plan to bomb targets on America’s West Coast.
“Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony began to seem inherently dubious…”
The article quotes a “former top agency official” as estimating the information from the CIA’s program as being 90% unreliable. Which is not to say that it’s impossible that the 10% remaining might have saved some lives.
We don’t know whether it has saved lives, but we certainly know that it has caused quite a few (thousand) deaths. The US went to war in Iraq based partly on intelligence that was gathered through torture, that turned out to be false.