I’m resurrecting this thread to quote the results of a recent poll cited in the Post. I don’t now of any similar polls outside America, jump in if you do:
We now have a list of techniques, what do you feel about any of these?
Also note that half of those surveyed believes that torture is taking place as a matter of policy. Leaving the issue of Abu Ghraib aside, do you think torture or coercion really is common amongst intelligence personnel or services serving democratic governments?
The Discovery Channel’s program Spotlight had an episode Wednesday called “Geneva to Baghdad” that was about the applicable rules of war and the use of coercion. They didn’t make any new or groundbreaking statements, but they did have some very interesting interviews.
Among these was an interview with the gentleman in charge of the Army’s coercion training programs. He said that on high value targets (and he stressed high value), there is approved use of sleep deprevation, bright lights constantly, noises and music, irregular scheduling, that type of stuff. He also said that these tactics were NEVER used unless they were sure the individual had vital information (say, a captured Al Qaeda leader), and certainly never used on insurgents.
In short, there are some tactics that are accepted, there are most that are rejected. It seems to me that the “accepted” is more psychological - make them tired and confused. The “rejected” is physical - pain until they confess.
We were briefed from time to time about how to resist interrogation, at least in the European theater and interrogation by German intelligence.
The technique they favored was the “bad cop”, “good cop” routine. Not a lot of physical rough stuff but dragging you around from place to place, keeping you hungry, cold (if possible) and scared. Then a suave guy would come in, appologize for the previous 24 or 48 or whatever hours, offer a cigarette and sit down and start asking questions about people in your group.
Like, “How is Col. XXX’s leg doing?”, “Has Capt. YYY gotten back from the hospital?”. The object was to convince you that they were nice guys who knew so much about you and your friends and your outfit that you couldn’t possibly add anything. In short, they wanted to get you talking. Talking about anything because that way they could pick up bits and pieces of new information which could be sent to a central collection point where analysts would match it to what they already knew and update and if possible increase their data base. At that time the Germans had magnetic wire recorders, which we didn’t know about, and everything you said was recorded so they could play it over and over to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
The only defense against this sort of thing is to say nothing but “Name, Rank and Serial Number.” Unfortunately, this didn’t work in the Pacific and it didn’t work in Korea or Vietnam.
After they were done you went to Stalag Luft something or other.
Assuming, as has been done in this thread,
Why do we ‘stress’ random low-lives and terminate Udai and Kusai?
You can do it if you come up with reasons that their information is worth less than other considerations, so their information is relatively trivial. Or if the goal of ‘stressing’ is not information, but revenge, amusement, or whatever, so torture is relatively trivial.
Is there a good answer?
As the daughter of a torture victim, I don’t think torture can ever be considered trivial. My father was tortured by the Japanese in a prison camp during WW2. He was in hospital for a long time afterwards, and I’ve been told that it completely changed his character. [I wasn’t born at the time]
What I remember was his total inability to show any emotion apart from anger, and how his violent rages affected my childhood. All torture victims have families, and those families have to live with the after-effects … IMO torture can never, ever be justified.
ZombiesAteMyBrain, I beg your pardon.
I do not at all believe torture is trivial. Torture, or ‘stressing’ people to the point where they will obey sexual commands or inform on their own people.
I was trying to make the point that some justify torture for the purpose of getting information, but we (the USA) did not even act to collect Saddam’s two sons as sources of information.
I don’t believe I would be happy with ‘professional, competent, consistent’ use of torture, and it seems we are using random, midnight-shift nastiness. And blaming it on the grunts. Where was the chain of command? Who decided not to order EPW* training for those troops whose duty it was?
If it’s just the grunts, why do we get indications that degradations happen in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, American jails? Why does this Administration find legalistic reasons not to apply either the Geneva Conventions or the Fourth Amendment, and lets the word out?
Back to Iraq: You pressure Joe Nobody to fink, and what does he do but accuse somebody living down the street that he happens to resent. Now you raid that house and collect all the men, and start pressuring them. This is moral, or effective?
*EPW:Enemy Prisoner of War
I don’t see an answer from anyone who argues that we were forced to brutalize in order to get information, to the question of why we blew away Saddam’s sons who undoubtedly had valuable information.
As mentioned above, torture in the form of brutal physical and/or psychological punishment is of questionable value from an intelligence point of view; the tortured are likely to provide false information simply to escape the pain.
I fail to understand why, though, if we’re already so sangine about flouting Geneva Conventions, our military and intelligence organizations don’t use drugs more often, or as an alternative. Granted, pentothal and other barbituates only lower inhibitions; but with some braggart types, maybe that’s all that’s needed to get them to spill some valuable beans. Combinations of barbituates, dissociatives like ketamine (a nod again to those posting above), or maybe halluciongens, might make an indivicual more prone to speaking the truth under the right conditions. If a person could be disinhibited, disoriented, and then made to believe that they are in the presence of those with who they should share secrets, they just might.
Again, I know these drugs aren’t nearly 100% reliable as “truth sera”, but the harm to the prisoner is relatively mild compared to most forms of physical torture, which are also highly unreliable. Who knows, perhaps with more research (the CIA has years of data already about the pros and cons of drugs), screening more compounds, enhanced interrogation techniques to augment drug effects, and so on, it might be possible to get good intelligence a reasonable portion of the time. Highly trained interrogators and drug coctails are certainly going to be more expensive than ham-fisted brutality, but that just encourages more targeted interrogation. In the case of Abu Ghraib, they’re beating on pretty much anybody, which, besides being totally unethical, is a massive waste of time; even a potentially harmful waste of time if it winds up generating a lot of spurious data.
Isn’t the whole “ticking time bomb” scenario totally irrelevent?
These guys in Gitmo have spent as much as two years in there - people in Gharib over a year.
Are these terrorists using timers or calendars for their bombs?
-Joe
I’m sorry, MaryEFoo, I must have misunderstood what you were saying.
Something I don’t understand is why people keep using torture when it has shown itself to be so ineffective as a means for intelligence gathering. I can see similarities between what’s happening in the USA now and what happened here in Northern Ireland where it was tried at the time of internment - people were just picked up, held without trial and tortured. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/intern/pdfs/faul.pdf.
I remember how shocked I was when it happened in 1971, and relatives of student friends of mine were ‘disappeared’ into internment camps - at the time I was active in the civil rights movement, as were most of my friends - and I couldn’t believe it was really happening in our so-called ‘civilised’ country.
Why don’t people ever seem to learn anything from history??