Let’s talk about torture! In ancient Rome, slaves were subject to torture to illicit information. In fact, the only information from slaves that was admissible in court was obtained through torture, as slaves were considered unreliable sources. That was the ancient practice, but over time, the Romans realized it didn’t work. According to Ulpian, writing in the 3rd Century A.D. (a time when gladiatorial matches were popular) torture was, “no means of obtaining the truth,” because those able to withstand the pain would withstand it, and those unable to withstand it would tell any lie to make it stop. A few centuries and a few thousand miles apart, when Sun Tzu wrote about the use of secret agents, and about the interrogation of the enemy’s secret agents, he did not suggest torture. He suggested, instead, flattery and bribery. This is a man who advocated sending “agents” into the enemy kingdom with false messages swallowed so that, when the enemy cut the betrayed agents (hint: your own other agents would betray them) in half in order to search for secret messages, they would find the messages you had planted, and they would send their army to the wrong place. If torture worked well, do you think Sun Tzu would had shied away from it? Torture, in Europe, was formally abolished during the Dark Ages, a period not know for an abundance of civilization. But it was considered inconsistent with Christianity (at a time warfare was considered part of Christianity). It re-emerged in the Middle Ages as a kind of religious ceremony around the Inquisition. The idea, however, was never to obtain useful intelligence. It was to break the will of the heretic and illicit a death-bed (stake burning) prayer to God, Mary and Jesus. By the mid-1600s, torture had been formally abolished in England, and by the early 1800s, no state in Europe practiced it. Torture was perpetrated on slaves in the New World, even though both slavery and torture were banned in the home countries. There, torture was used to instill fear, not to illicit information. It isn’t clear that torture ever served more than an aesthetic purpose among the great dictatorships of the twentieth century. The objective was never to obtain reliable information, rather, it was to prove that the individual could be made to betray him- or herself, that any single person could be broken and reduced to a pathetic condition. Look at how the Islamic State tortures people now, and at what the objective is. As in Orwell’s 1984, the objective is not to obtain crucial military information from some aid worker or journalist that your troops or paramilitary police picked up. It is to show everyone that you can cause principled, civilized people to betray their beliefs and to say whatever you tell them to say. It is to show your people and everyone else that any value or principle can be crushed or transformed by the State. Good work, CIA, for re-establishing what has been well know since Latin was spoken in London and China had not yet built the Great Wall. Torture is not informative. Without even getting into whether torture is “nice” or “okay” from a moral perspective, it simply is not informative. To judge by the partisan debate around the extraordinary rendition program, apparently the moral argument against torture alone doesn’t cut it in our time (although, I have to give credit to certain Senators who know what torture is first hand, and to other Senators who are advocates for civilization even in these strange times), as compared to the year 866 when Pope Nicholas I banned it, when less than 1% of the population was literate. So let’s talk about the opportunity loss in terms of gathering useful intelligence. The practice of torture undermines intelligence. Let’s talk about how the practice of torture in interrogation is incompetent, and from a patriotic and professional standpoint, immoral. Because, if a known practice works, and a known practice does not work, is it anything but unprofessional and immoral to use the practice that does not work? Police detectives are able to obtain intelligence from psychopaths and from professional criminals who fear both the justice department and their bosses in the criminal syndicate who can have them killed in prison or outside it. They know full well that they will not have their toes removed or molten silver poured into their eyeballs or be marched to a wall and shot. But they cooperate with police! Why? The techniques for obtaining actionable information from prisoners are numerous. 1. Cut them a deal. Hey, KSM, you are going to be in prison until the day you die. We can make it a nice prison or a nasty prison. That’s up to you. All we want from you is for you to save two hundred lives. So. Do you know of any other plots underway? Let’s trade. 2. Prisoner’s dilemma. Hey, KSM. You know we’ve got your so-called pals over in rooms 1, 2, 3, and 5. In fairness, we’re going to make the same offer to you we’re making to them. Now, do you really want to be the chump who holds out when everyone else cuts a deal? We’re not asking you to give up anyone you like. Give us the top ten psychopaths you wish had never joined Al Qaida. 3. Ego. Hey KSM. You may have been a big deal back in Tora Bora, but here, you are prisoner 31221. So, why don’t you just sit tight in cell 31221 and play solitaire. Sorry, Duke of Spades is missing from your pack. Look, if you can think of something you want to tell us, great. Otherwise, welcome to Economy Class, Abu Ghraib. There are numerous other interrogation techniques that even a quick Wikipedia search will turn up. So it just floors me that CIA and the doctors and psychologists they hired (another fine moment in the annals of American medicine and psychology) went straight for the 1984 stuff. Not even Machiavelli, an early Renaissance Italian political cynic and apologist for the Borgias, thought anything useful could be made of torture. I admit, I have never taken a course in medicine or psychology, but none of my friends in med school ever mentioned that torture enablement was part of their degree. If you are the mechanical engineer responsible for an aircraft wing and you pass over systems that are known to work well in favor of a crazy design that was debunked in the 1600s, can you say that your action is anything short of unprofessional and immoral? In the twenty examples the CIA provided to justify their torture program, zero of them were found to have linked torture to unique or actionable intelligence, and numerous other examples provided the CIA with false information that it, naively and recklessly, acted upon. Far from saving lives, as the CIA claims, it has been demonstrated that the extraordinary rendition program probably caused innocent lives to be lost, an opportunity lost against using other, better techniques to gather intelligence. Sometimes the CIA does very well. They tracked down Osama bin Laden. And they did so without a shred of data that was obtained through torture. Give the people who acted professionally and commendably a medal. Take the ones who tortured detainees who would otherwise have provided valuable information out behind the shed, where the people who put arsenic in food and asbestos in air conditioners should go.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 01:30:24 +0000
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