Torture, Tactics and Strategy
There is a very serious ongoing debate at The Corner about the correct position on torture, if we assume that it works. My only contribution is that I don’t think this debate has defined “works” properly.
Let’s assume arguendo that torture works in the tactical sense that I believe has been used so far in this debate; that is, that one can gain useful information reliably in at least some subset of situations through torture that could not otherwise be obtained. Further, assume that we don’t care about morality per se, only winning: defeating our enemies militarily, and achieving a materially advantaged life for the citizens of the United States. It seems to me that the real question is whether torture works strategically; that is, is the U.S. better able to achieve these objectives by conducting systematic torture as a matter of policy, or by refusing to do this? Given that human society is complex, it’s not clear that tactical efficacy implies strategic efficacy.
When you ask the question this way, one obvious point stands out: we keep beating the torturing nations. The regimes in the modern world that have used systematic torture and directly threatened the survival of the United States – Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union – have been annihilated, while we are the world’s leading nation. The list of other torturing nations governed by regimes that would like to do us serious harm, but lack the capacity for this kind of challenge because they are economically underdeveloped (an interesting observation in itself), are not places that most people reading this blog would ever want to live as a typical resident. They have won no competition worth winning. The classically liberal nations of Western Europe, North America and the Pacific that led the move away from systematic government-sponsored torture are the world’s winners.
Now, correlation is not causality. Said differently, we might have done even better in WWII and the Cold War had we also engaged in systematic torture as a matter of policy. Further, one could argue that the world is different now: that because of the nature of our enemies, or because of technological developments or whatever, that torture is now strategically advantageous. But I think the burden of proof is on those who would make these arguments, given that they call for overturning what has been an important element of American identity for so many years and through so many conflicts.
I think this is a helpful point, Jim.
By the way: are those three posts the only ones that constitute the “debate”, or have any of the participants actually been arguing that torture doesn’t work? Ah well, I suppose I should take solace in the fact that they’re at least calling it torture …
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 04:27 AM · #
As Winston Churchill reflected on the Great War:
“When all was over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”
— Steve Sailer · Apr 22, 04:28 AM · #
John:
Thanks. The debate is somewhat more far-ranging, and incorporates sub-threads on whether torture works (tactically, by my usage). I view this as a tachnical question that I’m pretty far from being able to address.
Steve:
I thought I knew all the good Churchill quotes, but it really is a bottomless well.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 22, 06:15 AM · #
I wish I’d written that! You’ve said much of what I wanted to much more succinctly.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Apr 22, 06:26 AM · #
Hi everyone,
I’m genuinely (really, I am!) interested in this massive disconnect between conservatives on the one hand, and at the very least me on the other. Jim is having an earnest debate over torture five years on, and it’s clearly had as if reasonable people could disagree, and that coming to one conclusion or the other is well within the bounds of being an upstanding American citizen, and that all sides ought to be taken seriously.
So if you would indulge me, I’ll cross post a set of calibrating questions here that I put to Conor – anyone who’s a self-identifying conservative, please take a shot. Forgive me if they’re a little straw-man-ish (I think you’ll deal):
- let’s say we attack Iran, and an American soldier is captured. The Iranians beat his legs so badly over the course of a few weeks that his legs are effectively pulpified, and he dies. Is this wrong because the person is American, or because the person is a person (generally. i.e. they’re human)?
- if it turned out that killing the children of a terrorist one by one until the terrorist talked was extremely effective – we’re talking about getting real reliable intelligence, saving many American lives, the whole conservative 24 dream scenario – should we do such a thing?
- and finally, let’s say I have an arsenal of suitcase bombs and I can only be stopped by doing away with the system of government we recognize as “American”, and going to more of a Chinese-style system (to crack down sufficiently). How many Americans must be under threat before you decide the change is worth it (this is a number between 0 and 300 million)?
— Steve C · Apr 22, 08:08 AM · #
I’d like to tie this into the notion of existential risk that Damon Linker alluded to (and was referenced in a previous post here). So if there were an existential threat, the argument Linker makes is that even if there were a small (say a 1% to 1e-4%) chance that torture would get us additional information (leaving aside the large precision vs recall issues everyone advocating torture completely ignores. honestly, more information-retrieval/computer science types need to speak up!), that would make it worthwhile.
Some thoughts — how valuable would this information need to be to ex post facto justify the torture? What if, instead, we could slightly torture/singe 100 suspects to get the same information that could prevent the existential threat with the same efficacy? How about a 1000? (Hey, that’s kinda what we did in afghanistan, and got a bunch of goat herders mixed in..). What’s the utlitarian calculus here?
There is also,in general, a very poor understanding of the fact that our societal actions indicate that we don’t believe an existential risk justifies doing and spending everything possible to reduce its probability asymptotically to 0. Consider other existential risks like: Carrington-Event Solar Flares in 2012 that could wipe out our power grid; Asteroid detection/moving; Global Warming, etc. For these latter events we, as a society, seem more than willing to allocate minimal resources giving the low probability of the existential event; events that can be mitigated/addressed to some degree technologically. Terrorist attacks are similarly low-probability (though our cognitive biases clearly blind us to this fact after every event), so should we not use the same logic to define weightings to assess our willingness to spend $X or sacrifice moral(s) Y to prevent/mitigate a human-caused existential risk like terrorism?
I do think its sad that a country that once prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding (and they certainly faced an existential threat vis-a-vis the Empire from the US) needs to have this debate at all, but proceeding onwards (and holding down the nausea): The argument surrounding efficacy needs to be framed within the context of risk management, appropriately modified to encode ‘values’ broadly speaking. Good interrogations can get you say on average 90-99.9% of the information you need (hey, it works for non-authoritarian states generally) and definitely has a lower false-positive rate on the data obtained compared to torture-derived data. If the torture could get you some part of that remaining 0.1%, but also give you a bunch of false positives, which it certainly will on average, the assessment would have to be that that 0.1% is nearly invaluable. That’s an exceedingly difficult claim to make, especially coming from people who would also argue that it is not worth expending resources (we don’t even need to sacrifice principles of human dignity here) to mitigate the “low probability” outcomes of global warming models. Moreover, torture advocates refuse to be data-driven about the process, and acknowledge that great interrogators extract most of the information we need within the confines of human decency and dignity.
The larger observation here is that we humans are just not built to understand and process existential risks (and what that term even means). In some cases we shrug and argue loudly against wasting money on some low probability event, and in others we are willing to sacrifice a half-century of a proud tradition and bedrock of values that defined free states apart from authoritarian ones.
— jackal · Apr 22, 10:12 AM · #
I am reminded of the Vice President’s response to being asked about his five deferrals: “I had other priorities.”
— Tony Comstock · Apr 22, 11:42 AM · #
If you believe that our country exists as a series of ideals concurrent with, or even above and beyond, the physical and practical existence of our people and places, then torture itself is the truly existential risk. History is littered with dead ideas of great societies (“there was a dream that was Rome”) which were ultimately undermined not from external threat but from moral rot within. That’s the very idea of Camelot, that the death of the greatest kingdom ever imagined didn’t spring from hostile nations but from the deadly creep of internal moral disease.
There is an idea that is America, and as much as I think this country does and continues to do horrific things, and as much as I feel many of our ideals are naive or simplistic, the reason to continue to fight against everything wrong with this country is because of what this country has meant, or what its people have wanted it to mean.
If there’s one chief lesson of this horrid decade, it’s that societies of ideals can’t be saved by the gradual extinction of those ideals.
— Freddie · Apr 22, 12:52 PM · #
Steve C,
I think that torture is absolutely wrong in every single case, whether it “works” or not. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t helpful to have people like Jim and Conor calling its value into question or putting pressure on certain understandings of what its value to be like in order for it to be (per impossibile, on my view) justified. In any case, there’s really no reason to get your panties in such a wad, especially given that neither of the posts you’ve commented on has been one in which torture was, you know, defended.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 12:58 PM · #
What Freddie said, in spades.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 22, 01:41 PM · #
“Given that they call for overturning what has been an important element of American identity for so many years and through so many conflicts.”
I think this sentence points out something that alienates me from today’s mainstream “conservatives.” What does it say about the conservative movement that torture is widely embraced despite being contradictory to America’s traditions?
— Steve N · Apr 22, 02:24 PM · #
Jim, I suppose that you are speaking so abstractly about torture as a way of speaking theoretically about its political implications. But I am still a little aghast at your comparison. Talking even abstractly as though the debate over torture in the United States has anything to do with the practices of the Nazis or Soviets is terribly distracting and unhelpful. No one more serious about the issue than Ward Churchill is actually accusing the United States of the hard-core car-battery stuff of the Vietcong. No one who is saner that Michael Savage is suggesting that the Jack Bauer school of interrogation should be widely implemented.
The torture debate is rather over fairly marginal situations: whether waterboarding counts as torture, whether we are responsible for prisoners we extradite to countries that unequivocally are torturers, whether extremes of temperature and sleep deprivation count as torture, and so on. If you want to make a slippery slope argument, that such practices could lead to the U.S. becoming more like the Nazis, then that is legitimate (if sort of Godwin-ish). But to speak as though we already shove hot reeds under fingernails is to deeply obscure.
— Blar · Apr 22, 02:33 PM · #
I am not sure of the utility of engaging in the “strategic critique” of torture. Its not clear that America’s moral unwillingness to engage in the practice has anything to do with why we ended up on top of history. Most people would say we won World War II because of our massive economic power and the resulting military machine; the Cold War because of our superior economic system and vigilant containment. Moreover, in winning these conflicts, America engaged in some pretty dubious moral behavior: the firebombing of Japan and Germany, the atomic bombs, the various atrocities associated with waging a war in indochina. If anything, linking America’s position in the World today to its triumph over evil regimes only underscores our resort to behavior that, if not exactly like torture itself, reflects the same kind of moral compromises. Schwenkler’s argument seems right to me: torture is bad in all circumstance because it is intrinsically evil. Therefore we should not engage in it ever, full stop. Tactical and strategic critiques are more effectively directed at the nature of the threat rather than the effectiveness of the practice. Torture may be effective. But the terrorists are not so fierce that it is ever necessary to use it. This entire debate hinges on a wild over-hyping of the terrorist threat.
— brendan · Apr 22, 02:47 PM · #
No, it’s about whether waterboarding AND subjection to extreme temperatures AND sleep deprivation AND beatings AND humiliation AND fear tactics and a great deal more than that ALL DONE SYSTEMATICALLY AND IN CONJUNCTION WITH ONE ANOTHER count as torture. Marginal, indeed.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 03:33 PM · #
By way of footnote to Freddie, Alan, and John, and in oblique response to Steve C’s question one, I think it must be remembered that the moral question of pulpifying legs and so forth is not to be settled strictly in terms of the victim, as important as those terms may be. It is one thing to delegate an executioner and retain one’s moral standing; another thing to delegate a torturer; and, of course, a third to BE a torturer.
— James · Apr 22, 03:56 PM · #
JS: pointed granted. But I think my point that we are not the Vietcong still stands, extreme capitalization notwithstanding.
Also, beatings? Says who?
— Blar · Apr 22, 05:04 PM · #
Conor:
Thanks a lot, although I thought your prior post made different points that inherently required more space to expound.
Steve C:
I purposely narrowed the scope of what I wrote about to be a much narrower gauge than “what I think about torture” because (1) I don;t know enough about a lot of technical issues that I would want to study before claiming an informed opinion, and (2) I was trying to meet others on their own terms and perform a very specific job, which is clarify the discussion a little.
jackal:
It is inetresting to me how similar the logic here (not just in your comment, but in this debate generally) to that of climate change. Would you spend anything (lives or money) to avoid the uncertain risks of AGW? (I mean that as a statement of the problem, I’m not trying to ask you to answer that question).
Freddie / Alan / James:
As per my earlier comment, I was not attempting to endorse a completely utilitarian calculus for this issue, but was only trying to clarify what I thought was a better definition for “works” if one were interested in this question.
Blar:
Exactly as you imply, I purposely didn’t try to answer the question of “what constitutes torture?”. I think that it needs to be answered, and that it is a crucial question, and that it is hard to answer. But I think that answering it relies on expert knowledge that I don’t have and haven’t done the work to obtain (e.g., what causes long-term pysch damage?, what is the technical, legal meaning of various terms?, and so on). As I said at the start of the post, I was only trying to clarify one term in the debate.
brendan:
As per the post, “correlation is not causality”. My point in this regard was that if one were to make the utilitarian / instrumentalist / whatever (i.e., not the moral case) for torture, then the history indicates that the burden of proof ought to be on those who propose a change to policy.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 22, 05:49 PM · #
James has opened the door to something I’d keep to myself, but what the hell…
I have no idea what I’d do if confronted with (what I believed to be) a ticking time bomb scenario. Probably I’d do whatever I my conscience told me what justified under the circumstance, and I don’t have any trouble imaging that under such circumstance if I thought crushing a child’s testicles would save lives that I would do it. I don’t suggest that this is moral or virtuous, or I am somehow “heroically” calculating. I am simply trying to imagine myself in an impossible situation, trying my best to do “the right thing” and under such circumstance I might do something awful and feel it was, if not justified, the only course of action my conscious allowed me to take. I don’t imagine that not having legal cover for my actions would stop me.
Some have suggested that if such a scenario were to play out and many thousands of people’s lives were saved as a result of a child’s testicle being crushed, that justice could be done in light of the lives saved and the testicle crusher could would be tried and then, with the benefit of hindsight, vindicated. I’m quite sure that if I were such a testicle crusher I would plead for mercy on the basis of my having been correct in balancing the child’s testicle against the lives of many dozens, hundreds, thousands of my fellow citizens.
But here from my comfortable perch as a blog commenter I believe this is the wrong equation.
Just above, Alan’s made a post about following one’s conscience. Of course following one’s conscience doesn’t mean that you’ve done the right thing, but (at least for me) it suggests that if a person does something in the name of their conscience, they are willingness to live with the consequences.
Certainly many people have gone to their deaths in order to be true to their conscience, and many other people (soldiers, police, fire fighters) risk their lives to do what they believe is right. If you doubt this, read the citations for the Medal of Honor. You’ll find many entries of soldiers throwing themselves on grenades to save their comrades, which would seem to be the ultimate ticking time-bomb scenario
Because this I find myself more concerned with consequences of creating a legal frame work that allows torture (under very dire conditions of course) than I am with the consequences of a legal framework that forbids torture under all circumstance.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 22, 06:10 PM · #
That’s right, we’re America. We’re only acting like we’re the Vietcong.
Are you serious?
Looks like we’re not Soviet Russia, either …
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 06:25 PM · #
P.S. On ticking time bombs, Jim Henley is the best: http://www.reason.com/news/show/117073.html.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 06:27 PM · #
Also this
— Tony Comstock · Apr 22, 06:29 PM · #
I think the “suitcase nuke” is pretty much an urban ledgend. From what I have read there may have been some devices made in the 50’s about as big as a coffin that two men could lug a short distance, but it would be pretty to check one of these on an airplane. The other problem with a small nuclear device would be that there is no room for shielding so they would be very short lived. The radiation would destroy the detonation portion of the bomb very quickly. Plus the bearer would gets a big dose. So it’s not likely that, even if the did exsist, that there are a bunch of old suitcase bombs laying around to sell to terrorists.
The reason I mention this is that the actual devices possible and their delievery systems and the most likely effect of these devices determine our response. For instance, when a big chunk of the american people were mislead into believe Saddam wepons of mass destruction that were a threat to us, they supported our invasion of Iraq. And the suitcase nuke makes the ticking time bomb scenario viable, and the ticking itme bomb scenario is one of the main intellectual justifications for torture.
So it is really important—before we start positing responses to threats—to be sure we really understand the threats in detail. I’m not acccusing anyone here of anything. It just that I keep hearing about these suitcase nukes and it bugs me.
— cw · Apr 22, 06:48 PM · #
An exmilitary man whom I respect put it well – “We shouldn’t torture because it shows that we’re afraid of them. Don’t give them the satisfaction”.
On the other hand, we do more and worse to civilian populations even in limited conflicts, not to mention all out war. it is often noted that we shouldn’t do things to other countries citizens that we wouldn’t do to our own. However, in war we regularly do things like drop bombs on cities, shoot people in “threatening” situations, arrest and hold people for indeterminate periods of time, etc. We have made an arbitrary distinction here that “enhanced interrogation” is morally reprehensible, but Predator strikes (without due process) are not.
I find this all to be at the very least puzzling…
— M00se · Apr 22, 06:56 PM · #
Jim: I’d like to take a shot at answering that, even if poorly. I do believe that the AGW models have probabilities for certain negative outcomes that are high enough now to justify expending significant resources both from a prevention, and more importantly mitigation standpoint. But not any amount. I’m an amateur though, so I’m not sure I can do these calculations!
But, that appears to be the general challenge. A safety report for the heavy-ion collider on long-island some time ago placed the risk of some catastrophic outcome on the order of 1/1,000,000. How do we properly weigh a one in a million possibility of annihilation? I’m not sure conventional actuarial methods can actually deal with this in a reasonable way.
The point for the torture debate, such as it is, is that these negative strategic externalities that you’ve posited factor into the overall cost of attempting to reduce the probability of terrorism-related existential risks. While we certainly should do a lot of what we’ve been doing to deal with the threat, it’s worth taking a dispassionate look at whether the marginal costs become too high when values are sacrificed, not to mention when we spend tens-hundreds of billions on capabilities to get that last 0.1% of information. On the question of torture, even if we ignore morality, this logic fits with your argument as saying that the long-term cost it imposes outweighs the marginal benefit proposed, even in the most extreme of scenarios, by proponents.
— jackal · Apr 22, 07:51 PM · #
JS: Are you serious?
— Blar · Apr 22, 08:36 PM · #
Back at Jim: I was pretty sure you weren’t consciously trying to compare the U.S. to Nazis. But now that you have clarified, I have to wonder then at the usefulness of your comparison. Saying that torturing states fail says nothing about the U.S. if we decide that what the U.S. does is not torture. And even if we decide the opposite, there is still the matter of degree. It would be like saying that warmongering nations fail, without reckoning that the Iraq war is far different in scope and intent than the blitzkriegs were.
— Blar · Apr 22, 08:46 PM · #
I am little surprised by the factual premise here. Is there some proof that beating, threats of death etc. were not used against captured German and Japanese spies (and, occasionally, captured soldiers)? I’ve read plenty of stories suggesting that such techniques were used. Furthermore, we certainly “renditioned” prisoners to our Soviet allies.
Argue that we were morally superior to the Nazis or the Soviets, and I agree. We are also morally superior to al Qaeda, though I’m not sure everyone here agrees with that. But to claim that we walked with Jesus through World War II is a bit of a stretch.
— y81 · Apr 22, 08:52 PM · #
Blar:
Yes, I agee with that. But recognize that in the warmongering analogy, all I’m saying is that it’s probably not a good idea to say that blizkrieg “worked” for Germany because it led them to conquer France in 1940, without recognizing that what enabled and followed from the Nazi war machine might have had something to do with what then happened between 1941 and 1945. Or more precisely, that somebody who argues for introducing a military method that the US has consciously avoided and is associated with R2 of about 100% with tyrannies that we have defeated or don’t have the physcial capacity to challenge us, then that adovcate faces the burden of proof as to the “total system” beenfits of this approach.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 22, 09:00 PM · #
y81:
I am confident that every army in every war in history employed ad hoc extralegal torture, at a minimum. This is why I was careful to limit this to “systematic torture as a matter of policy” by the US in “the modern world”. To my knwoledge there was no explicit, legal process for torturing even illegal combatants for infromation by the US in WWII or thereafter.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 22, 09:04 PM · #
“That doesn’t mean that it isn’t helpful to have people like Jim and Conor calling its value into question or putting pressure on certain understandings of what its value to be like in order for it to be (per impossibile, on my view) justified. In any case, there’s really no reason to get your panties in such a wad, especially given that neither of the posts you’ve commented on has been one in which torture was, you know, defended.”
Uh right. Did you read what I wrote? These are calibrating questions. If killing the children of a terrorist one by one turned out to be extremely effective, ought it be done? If it saves 10000 American lives, let’s say?
— Steve C · Apr 22, 09:08 PM · #
Jim,
“ I don;t know enough about a lot of technical issues that I would want to study before claiming an informed opinion”
But you seem to concede here that these are technical questions that ought to be debated. What does the decision turn on, for you?
— Steve C · Apr 22, 09:11 PM · #
I’ll bite:
Steve, I will trade your life and the lives of your family members for one of my children’s lives. I’ll do it with my bare hands if that’s what’s required.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 22, 09:29 PM · #
Steve C:
Uh, no. Did you read what I wrote? That doesn’t mean, however, that the question of efficacy can’t be a theoretically interesting or – more crucially – rhetorically helpful one to address.
And blar: If you don’t think that strapping a collar around someone’s neck and using a rope to slam him into plywood walls counts as beating him, I really don’t know how to help you. Though Danner does, by the way, go on to cite the ICRC as listing “Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face…” as another of the CIA’s “twelve basic techniques”. But hey, who cares! We live in a world where beating isn’t beating! It’s doubleplusgood!
— John Schwenkler · Apr 22, 10:04 PM · #
Chesterton, with necessary substitutions(except for the cat part):
“If it be true (as it certainly is)
that a man can feel exquisite [intelligence data] in skinning a cat,
then the [legal] philosopher can only draw one of two deductions.
He must either deny the existence of [rule of law], as all [despots] do; or he must deny the present union between [rule of law] and [government practice], as [some] [TAS writers/readers] do.
The new [legal philosophers] seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”
-Orthodoxy
— c.t.h. · Apr 22, 10:31 PM · #
“Steve, I will trade your life and the lives of your family members for one of my children’s lives. I’ll do it with my bare hands if that’s what’s required.”
For this to happen in some very, very, very particular situation is one thing.
But to state this abstractly, essentially as a general policy, is pretty chilling.
Kind of like the larger torture debate, I’d say.
— ws · Apr 22, 10:51 PM · #
Hmm, well, color me skeptical. Maybe we won World War II because we were the only belligerent who managed to create massive firestorms in our enemies’ cities. And we did it systematically. As for the Cold War, there were about a hundred differences between the Soviets and us; I would hesitate to ascribe great weight to our better treatment of prisoners.
— y81 · Apr 22, 11:53 PM · #
Jim, there are too many necessary caveats and exceptions for your empirical “we beat torturers” argument to work. Some have been mentioned in this thread, others are even more glaring.
More important are the game theoretic consequences of torture as policy, both internationally and internally. In the international arena, torture as policy risks delegitimizing, in the eyes of their voters, our allies’ cooperation with US leadership and strategies; it also risks delegitimizing and demoralizing the potential better-day reformers among our opponents. Internally it provides a psychological linchpin for those who might seek to destabilize the Union.
Unlike the terrorist threat, these are real existential risks for a modern democratic state, should it find itself endorsing a policy of state-administered torture.
— Sargent · Apr 23, 12:20 AM · #
Not if it doesn’t involve actual physical injury, which it apparently didn’t.
— Blar · Apr 23, 02:21 AM · #
Sorry for double posting. To Jim again.
I take your point on taking the long view on strategy, but the specifics are again assuming facts not in evidence, namely that what some people are calling torture in the U.S. is anywhere near as systematic or brutal as that of the defunct tyrannies you mention.
— Blar · Apr 23, 02:30 AM · #
Blar:
I don’t think I’ve said in the excerpted quote that the debated torture regime in the US was “as brutal” as what was done in the Soviet Union or whatever. Only that all of our leading enemies do the things that comprise the debated torture regime (and more), and this debated torture regime is not something the US has historically done.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 23, 05:32 AM · #
Hi –
Y’all are missing one great humongous point of torture: while it’s obvious that you can gather information this way, the real point of torture is to destroy the person being tortured’s will to be the way he or she is. This is the fundamental damage that torture does: it destroys the self-image, the idea that you can keep a secret, the idea that you don’t have to do what other wants you to do.
The idea behind torture, the kind with pliers, batteries and cables, is to break the one being tortured. Do this routinely over a long period of time and you can start disassembling that person’s personality, breaking it systematically and continuously.
Water-boarding, sleep deprivation, being uncomfortable? That’s to get information.
Breaking fingers, pulling out fingernails, batteries and cables, rape (both male and female), beatings? That’s to destroy the person being tortured. Talk to any real torture victim: that is what is most devastating. Torture the family and make the father watch, torturer the father and make the family watch, rape the mother and daughters and make the father and sons watch, rape the fathers and sons and make the wife and daughters watch, beat the others when one doesn’t want to say anything: do all that and watch that family dissolve and fall apart. Destroy the families of most people and you destroy that person. You will devastate them.
That’s what torture is really about. Drive your opponents insane and dump them on the street; teach your population abject fear and make them so desperately afraid of being picked up by the police that they will inform on anyone and everyone just to be petted like a dog by the secret police; turn child against parent, brother against sister, husband against wife.
Don’t think it happens? Nice world you live in.
— John · Apr 23, 12:45 PM · #
John: You talk as if destroying KSM’s personality was a bad thing. And, with your talk about the effects on “your population” you do explicitly what Manzi denies doing, conflate Soviet and Nazi style tyranny with the Bush administration. You are apparently unable to appreciate elementary moral distinctions.
— y81 · Apr 23, 01:44 PM · #
y81: I was talking about what has not been discussed, not of any specific: you are apparently unable to appreciate simple reading. :-)
You’re missing the point, the one that makes all the difference: we, the West, don’t do that anymore.
— John · Apr 23, 02:14 PM · #
Maybe he’s talking that way because that’s what it is. Being lectured by a torture apologist about “elementary moral distinctions” – which apparently boil down to: “USA! USA! USA!” – is really just too precious.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 23, 02:18 PM · #
“Water-boarding, sleep deprivation, being uncomfortable? That’s to get information”
Are you saying that you can’t destroy a personality through waterboading, sleep depravation, etc…? Because if you are I think you are very wrong.
— cw · Apr 23, 02:59 PM · #
cw – You’re missing the point as well: you can do that, but the other methods are probably faster and more effective. Further, the human spirit is very resilient, but only to a certain point.
The other methods only serve to destroy: information isn’t the point. See the point?
— John · Apr 23, 03:39 PM · #
I find this discussion uncomfortably cold-blooded, but it has the accompanying virtue of clear-headedness and cutting to the crux. The important (extra-moral) question is not torture’s tactical value, but whether it achieves America’s strategic goals.
That’s a damned good question—it’s actually the question that BushCo didn’t get, and it’s the question that Obama has put front and center in his rethinking of America’s foreign policy (diplomacy, military, trade, the whole ball of wax).
What this post doesn’t consider is the crucial question that accompanies the “strategic” angle: what are America’s strategic goals, and how are they effected by the Bush torture regime? In particular, how are those goals affected over the decades as our children come of age and take their places in the world?
Here are some possible strategic goals (again reluctantly putting aside for the moment the fundamental moral repugnancy of torture):
* To prevent foreign terrorist acts against Americans—on American soil and/or abroad.
* To protect the American homeland from military invasion.
* To reduce armed conflict worldwide.
* To increase American power and influence over other countries—the ability to convince our friends and coerce our enemies (and vice versa).
* To increase access to American trading parters abroad.
* To make it safe for Americans to travel the world or live abroad.
On the last item, the BushCo crowd and their most vocal love-it-don’t-ever-leave-it supporters don’t really like the idea of travelling abroad. (Do you think Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and company are planning any world tours?) They don’t seem to understand why anyone would want to.
Personally, I put that item quite high on the list—not only for its inherent goodness (I want my girls to have that international mobility in their lives—to be welcomed far and wide [think: Jackie Kennedy]), but because it’s a bellwether for all the other goals.
So, judging by that single goal for a moment: If torture results in killing or capturing a few dozen terrorists, how does that weigh against millions or hundreds of millions who come to hate us (or like us a hell of a lot less) as a result?
That question is aptly applied to the other strategic goals as well. I’m encouraged to see that the Obama administration seems to be doing exactly that, and that pundits who have previously ignored or dismissed the issue (i.e. “soft power” pooh-poohing) are now doing actually considering it.
Steve
asymptosis.com
— Steve Roth · Apr 23, 04:12 PM · #
The empirical evidence is firmly on the side of those who state that torture does not work for the purposes of intelligence gathering. Read Prof Darius Rejali’s “Torture and Democracy”. The Nazis knew it. Colonial France knew it. The Japanese fascists knew it. Imperial Britain knew it. Torture works for the purposes of producing false confessions. That is all.
— vimothy · Apr 23, 04:29 PM · #
What vimothy said.
“In June 2008, Human Rights First brought together approximately 15 experienced human intelligence and law enforcement professionals possessing 350 years of collective operational experience. We had interrogated, debriefed, and interviewed criminals, terrorists, prisoners-of-war, defectors, foreign intelligence operatives, and refugees. … CIA case officers, FBI special agents, and military intelligence officers …
…the approach ultimately adopted without exception … the approach found to be the most effective means of eliciting critical information … proved to be relationship-building. This paradigm requires extraordinary patience, intense study, interpersonal intelligence, a mastery of strategic and critical thinking, and an ego-less commitment to remaining outcome-oriented regardless of the individual sitting before us.”
Steven Kleinman is a military intelligence officer with twenty-five years of operational and leadership experience in human intelligence and special operations. He served as an interrogator in three major military campaigns in addition to teaching advanced interrogation and resistance to interrogation courses.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00355
— Steve Roth · Apr 23, 08:23 PM · #
More than a hundred people are known to have died from what you’re calling “what some people are calling torture.” Where does that rate on the systematic/brutal scale for you?
— Chet · Apr 25, 02:32 PM · #