Re: Torture, Tactics, and Strategy, ctd.
As per Conor’s very able post, Jonah Goldberg has replied to my torture post. I’ve just put up a response to this at The Corner, and given that this conversation is also going on here, I’ll put it here as well.
Jonah –
Thanks for the thoughtful comments on the post.
You say:
I would put it to you that if there is a burden of proof for defenders of these practices to define “what works” there is also a burden on those complaining of torture to define torture.
I didn’t “complain of torture”, and I don’t believe that the claims I made in my post require me to define torture in the rough sense that I think you mean here – that is, to answer the question of whether things like waterboarding are torture. Let me explain why.
I’ll start by defining terms and establishing some terminology. Purely for the purpose of labeling, I’ll take the list of what I assume all parties to the debate would agree is torture (e.g., bamboo under the fingernails, beating a prisoner with a club until he has brain damage, etc.) and call this set of techniques, collectively, Torture 1. Purely for the purpose of labeling, I’ll take the list of what I understand to be considered torture by some but not by others (e.g., waterboarding, “walling”, etc.) and call this set of techniques, collectively, Torture 2. In a rigorous discussion, we would make a complete list for each and fine-grain each item on each list down to physically-defined action-steps (e.g., waterboarding is so many ounces of water delivered through a cloth of this description in such and so manner for no more than this many seconds up to this many times per week, etc.), but I assume this description is sufficient for a blog discussion.
I think that the question of “What is torture?” can be usefully simplified, again for the purposes of a blog discussion, to the question “Is Torture 2 really torture?”. As you noted, I did not take a position on this in my post. This was purposeful. I think this is an important question, but I have not done the necessary work to enable me to hold an informed opinion on it. At a minimum, there are numerous technical questions that would be required to form such an opinion (e.g., “What are the long-term psychological effects of waterboarding?”, “Are psychological effects relevant to the legal governing definition of torture?”, etc.) that I haven’t studied. But I don’t think that one has to answer the question of whether or not Torture 2 is “really” torture in order to draw the conclusions that I did in my post.
I think I made two key claims in that post: (1) When judging the purely instrumental effectiveness of torture we need to consider its strategic rather than merely tactical impacts (I defined these in the post), and (2) The burden of proof should be on those who propose to change the long-time U.S. practice of not managing systematic torture as a matter of policy. I think each of these is true even if we consider only the techniques labeled Torture 2.
Let me take them one at a time.
When judging the purely instrumental effectiveness of torture we need to consider its strategic rather than merely tactical impacts. Technically, accepting this statement doesn’t require me to define torture in any way, since this is logically true when considering any action from dropping an atomic bomb to brushing your teeth. However, in order for one to accept that it is a practical, rather than merely theoretical, requirement, I believe that he must accept that it is reasonable to believe that the non-immediate consequences are potentially significant. Consider Torture 2. Do you dispute that the non-immediate consequences of these specific practices comprising Torture 2 are potentially significant? I think that the fact that they have already created a gigantic controversy is prima facie evidence that they are. And I don’t think that the argument that it is the awareness of these actions that creates the problem changes this conclusion, since even if one intended to keep them secret, there is always the realistic possibility that they will become known (once again, proven recently by example). So unless I’m missing something, I think that this first statement should be accepted, and with practical rather than merely theoretical significance, even if we’re only talking about Torture 2. I don’t really see this as in any way controversial (though obviously, identifying, dimensioning and weighing the importance of these potential non-immediate impacts and coming to a conclusion about net benefits can be very controversial).
The burden of proof should be on those who propose to change the long-time U.S. practice of not managing systematic torture as a matter of policy. I will state as an assertion of empirical fact (subject to correction) that prior to the GWOT the federal government of the United States of America has not previously had a formal, legal system for administering Torture 2 to captured combatants for the purpose of eliciting information in the modern era. (Note that this does not mean that ad hoc extralegal Torture 2 activities, not to mention Torture 1 activities, have not been conducted by American troops in this period. I assume that both have been done by every army in every war in history.) All of our primary adversaries (defined as Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union) have conducted Torture 2 (again, not to mention Torture 1, and lots of other horrible activities) systematically as a matter of policy. We have defeated each of our primary adversaries.
So, we have a settled policy of not conducting Torture 2. At a minimum, restraining ourselves from doing this has not prevented us from defeating prior fearsome adversaries that are willing to do it. We shouldn’t assume that prior government leaders were idiots, or somehow didn’t understand that they were giving up a tactical advantage by foregoing Torture 2, and we should therefore accord some weight to their opinions – especially since they were the guys who managed to win all those wars. All of this does not imply that we must not change our policy, but it does seem to me that those who argue that we should change it need to demonstrate why we should change.
So my argument about the burden of proof does not rely on any assertion that I make about a specific list of practices comprising Torture 2 passing some test for being “really” torture, but instead relies on the assertion that these specific practices have not been conducted systematically as a matter of policy in the modern United States. I am looking to tradition, settled practice and the wisdom of our forebears for guidance in a difficult situation. Among other things, this strikes me as the obviously conservative approach.
You then go on to make the point that maybe my assertion of empirical fact is incorrect. In essence, that we have been doing these kinds of things, but simply kept them secret (and you also raise the more speculative question of whether if we could keep such activities secret, whether or nor we have done so in the past, that we might avoid many of the long-term costs of Torture 1 and/or Torture 2).
First, I think it is important to segregate the cases of “legal, but secret” from extralegal. I skipped all three years of law school, but I’ll use a layman’s working definition of legal in this context as something like “authorized and funded by Congress and undertaken by the Executive in accordance with the powers granted under the Constitution”. By illustrative example, “the OSS boys” being “funded and overseen by Congress with a defined chain of command running up through the Executive branch to the President, and having a defined set of procedures and bureaucratic oversight for Torture 2 vetted by lawyers, for which equipment and facilities are provided by the relevant authority” would be something that I mean by legal. On the other hand, “a small team of OSS agents that has just parachuted into occupied France holds a gun to the head of a German soldier and demands to know where the fuel depot is, and then fails to report what they did once they get back to base” is what I mean by extralegal. I assume that lots of extralegal Torture 2 has happened throughout modern American history. The statement that there might have been some secret, systematic and legal Torture 2 infrastructure in the modern United States is, by the definition of “secret”, a statement that can never be falsified – you can’t prove a negative – but I’m pretty skeptical about the capacity of the U.S. government to keep secrets like that over a long period of time. As both you and I have said, however, I would welcome more information on whether such a secret, legal infrastructure was deployed by our government in modern history.
re: strategic cost, the shorter version (from my comment on Conor’s post):
re: Jonah — America is not a State, it is a suspicion: about Government, about Politics, about Majorities, about Religion, about Alliances, and belatedly, about Raw Capitalism. That’s what conservatism is all about: conserving the suspicion of power, of Man, conserving the institutional checks and balances that give it effect.
Conservatism is not what Jonah is doing.
— Sargent · Apr 23, 03:23 PM · #
The weight is on the person to defend why a practice that the US has previously defined as torture is no longer torture when the US practices it. That is the point in a nutshell and allowing people to try to make arguments that do not address that point really should be a significant issue.
— Adam S · Apr 23, 04:01 PM · #
I begin to see the extent of the amorality of Jim’s arguments, which is actually very helpful. Still I am unconvinced.
Again, Jim is being conspicuously agnostic about the moral culpability inherit in what he calls “Torture 2,” but let us consider morality for a moment. Implicit in Jim’s formulation is that there is a line that public policy can cross where it negatively affects public perception of the perpetrators of that policy. Crossing this line, Jim says, can be strategically disastrous even if it is tactically advantageous, and care should be wrought in balancing between the two. “Torture 1” clearly crosses this line in a way that any tactical advantages it provides are overwhelmed by the consequences of public perception.
“Torture 2” needn’t cross that line as far “Torture 1” does to have similar effects on public perception. But there is still good reason to determine why it crosses that line, and those reasons have to do with intrinsic morality. That is, if “Torture 2” really is as bad as its detractors say it is, then by Jim’s amoral calculus, the clearest expedient is to abolish it. But if upon investigation and debate we find that “Torture 2” is not as bad, that it is not really torture at all, but “Stressful Yet Non-debilitating Interrogation Method X,” then the clear cause of crossing that line is not anything immoral in SYNDIM at all, but rather hyperbolic propaganda, so that the best course might not be its abandonment, but its rigorous defense.
It may be that it is strategically more advantageous to give in to the force of that propaganda rather than fight it, but I doubt it, especially if you adopt Jim’s position of taking the long-term strategic view. For if you let the loudest voice determine what crosses the line, morality be damned, then you have abandoned society to provocateurs and the mobs they incite. I could battily aver that life imprisonment, or mandatory schooling, or some other silly thing, is torture, but it should not be up to my defendants to explain why I am wrong. It should be up to me to explain why I would believe such a thing at all.
A rigorous debate over what ought to cross the line is a prerequisite for considering whether such line-crossing has any weight.
— Blar · Apr 23, 04:07 PM · #
I wonder….why it was secret? I mean…if the threat that we would torture was supposed to be some sort of WoT deterrent, tit-for-tat, we treat you like you treat us…..How could the adversary know about it if it was secret?
I think….the ONLY reason for classification was so that the American People didn’t actually have to get their noses rubbed in torture. Sure, some people would have sanctioned it post 9/11.
But some people would have objected.
When the first tiny leaks came out….I myself couldn’t believe it…..it was incomprehensible.
America doesn’t torture.
— matoko_chan · Apr 23, 05:17 PM · #
Don Knuth has a list of “infrequently asked questions”
Here
Question 3 is perhaps the most pertinent to the discussion on torture:
“Is my country not strong enough to achieve its aims fairly?”
— Johnny A · Apr 23, 06:02 PM · #
Jim,
I am afraid I still am not convinced by your appeal to the question of strategic utility, and your assertion that the burden of proof somehow lies on the shoulders of those without an obscure correlation on their side.
On the first point, the existence of a controversy is not evidence that there is any meaningful strategic effect. One needs to construct some plausible mechanism with concrete bad effects. To put it bluntly, America has suffered through a whole bunch of really bad press in its history, some of it deserved, other parts of it not. Until shown otherwise, why shouldn’t I consider this just part and parcel of the world’s reaction to anything America does, with negligible effect? I think that the burden of proof out to rely on those who are asserting adverse strategic consequences. Seventy years of awful press have yet to damage Israel strategically, unless we are going to define strategic effects at an absurdly low threshhold.
On your second point, What if in August 1945, Harry Truman has said “America has won several wars in its history, including a couple of really vicious ones against great powers. In none of these wars did our leaders require the mass murder of civilians. The burden of proof is incumbent on me before I drop the atomic bomb.” I submit this would be an awful way to tackle the question. The situation was unprecedented, and the cause of American victory in other wars was unrelated to whether or not murdering civilians is an effective way to win wars. Whether or not such a tactic is efficient, necessary, or worth the costs ought to be evaluated on a case by case basis. The same goes for the moral case. Appeals to past authority are only effective when there is a clear connection between the source of authority and the subject of debate, which is not the case in situations of amorphous strategic and tactical effect.
Finally, I state again—considering the question in this amoral manner biases the debate in favor of torture 2. You have carefully bracketed the moral question, and I am sure you feel you have good reasons for doing so. But any debate on this issue will reveal that—viewed purely in utilitarian terms—the benefit of these practices is always at least ambiguous enough to allow those to justify them because they MIGHT be beneficial. And since we have just spent some amount of time establishing that the utility of these practices is extremely relevant, this becomes a powerful argument. Obviously this is not a concern if torture2 is not in some way immoral. But I believe it is the morality of these practices that makes the question salient, and that it is not very helpful to bracket it.
— Brendan · Apr 23, 08:06 PM · #
brendan:
In effect, I think “status quo bias” should be more appropriately named “rational status quo preference”. Practices that evolve in a society should be assumed to vicariously adaptive for that society in its competition with other socities, though subject to refutation through evidence (shorter version: I’m a libertarian conservative).
My point about prior American military success was not to “prove” that therefore this practice contributed to success (as per each of my posts), but to address proleptically the potential objection.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 23, 08:25 PM · #
Jim,
thanks for responding to my stubborn objections again. I doubt we are going to convince each other of the value of our approaches, but I appreciate the continued engagement. As a fellow libertarian conservative, I dig on your views about adaptive practices, though I think you are applying the concept rather ham fistedly in this case. Enjoying your work as always.
— Brendan · Apr 23, 09:00 PM · #
All the evidence suggests that torture does not work for the purposes of gathering intelligence!
This debate worries me for several reasons.
First, the suggestion (possibly mendacious) by some commentators (Goldberg, McArdle, etc) that that there exists some kind of ambiguity around the question of the efficacy of torture for the purposes of intelligence gathering is wrong. There is no ambiguity, and this fact is accepted by experts today, and was recognised by many states who actually practised torture in the recent past (e.g. fascist era Japan). Torture has a particular function, and that function is to produce confessions.
This particular line has its own strategic function for the torture apologists: it keeps open the possibility that torture can be used again in the future. “Oh, if you don’t want to torture, that’s fine, just so long as we all agree that it does actually work.” The understanding is that those of us with the testicular fortitude required will one day again need to torture for the purposes of protecting our society.
It is, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, bollocks on stilts.
Second, there is no qualitative difference between the set of torture techniques used by the CIA and the hypothetical “worse” but unspecified (basically, whatever is left) set of techniques that uncivilised, unlawful regimes use.
Third, the arguments used by the torture apologists are self-cancelling: it isn’t torture, torture works for the purposes of intelligence gathering, the people being tortured deserve it. Why aren’t they advocating the use of torture in more instances, since it is so effective?
— vimothy · Apr 23, 09:28 PM · #
I’m also annoyed by the seemingly widespread idea that “torture”, and what constitutes torture, is a matter of opinion, potato potahto, and not a legal term with a clear and simple definition in international treaties that the US has signed and ratified.
— vimothy · Apr 23, 11:26 PM · #
And Brendan, I think your argument is flawed: there is no need to postulate imaginary worlds where this will not have a strategic effect. The world we are in is the subject of debate, and in it we are fighting a war in which Muslim public opinion is the centre of gravity of our enemies. This is simply, inevitably, a massive strategic error.
— vimothy · Apr 23, 11:46 PM · #
There is a reasonably clear standard for torture defined by the United Nations Convention against Torture that the United States signed and ratified by 1994.
— jackal · Apr 24, 02:30 AM · #
Vimothy,
1. The case against the effectiveness of torture, as I understand it, is two fold. First, anyone who actually has useful information can usually be induced to give it up by normal methods of interrogation. Second, someone subjected to torture will say anything, which will result in bad information in addition to any good information they might give up, especially if the torturer has preconceived notions about the information he is looking for.
I think the flaw here is that there are cases a) where time constraints do not permit normal methods, b)there are hard cases not amenable to normal methods and c) it is possible to conduct interrogations without willfull misconceptions, and then to check the intelligence against other sources.
And indeed, the empirical record bears this out. The French used torture to great tactical effect in the battle of Algiers; they cleaned out the Casbah. Of course the French lost in Algeria, but this is not because they tortured anybody, they lost because they lost the countryside. Similar instances are available in the rest of the history of counter-insurgency: the British in Palestine and Kenya and the Israelis in Lebanon to name just a few, all successfully exploited information gained from coercive interrogation.
Now one can always argue these people could have got better information using normal methods, and you cannot prove a negative. But they were also faced with limited time horizons for tactical exploitation, and often with fanatics who held information they needed and were not inclined to give it up—exactly the purported situation we face with terrorist hard cases. And these countries applied torture and got tactical results.
Absolutely none of this justifies the methods that were used. But going down the effectiveness road will lead any fair-minded interlocuter to cases like these. And by the very act of going down this road, a huge rhetorical concession has been made.
2. If we accept the notion of Islamic public opinion as the “center of gravity” in this war, we are doomed to failure. Before 9/11, back before our standing took such a dive in all the pew surveys, the islamic world was generating hard-core terrorists. It did not take torture to get them to launch attacks on the WTC in 1993, the Cole, our embassies in Africa, etc. Similarly, a decades long charm offensive is not going to win this kind of person over. Islamic identity politics combined with the pressures of modernization is going to generate a certain percentage of whack-jobs for a very long time, regardless of what we do.
This is all by way of contesting your claim that the damage to our public stature has had an important strategic effect. If we conceive of the “war on terror” as a global counter-insurgency, it surely has, but in that case we are strategically doomed already. If we conceive of it as a problem of how to contain the operations of actual terrorists, it matters next to nothing. One could of course posit other ways this damage to our image has hurt us, but I think they would strain to be connected to this important second project.
— brendan · Apr 24, 11:10 AM · #
Brendan, thanks for the response.
On the use-value of torture, you make several errors. The first error is general – “And indeed, the empirical record bears this out.” – It does not. The empirical record is very clear: torture is not efficacious for the purposes of intelligence gathering. I refer you to, for instance, the work of political scientist Darius Rejali (respected academic expert on torture), who complies lots of data in his comprehensive “Torture and Democracy”. His unambiguous finding is that torture is not an efficacious method of intelligence gathering.
Alternatively, heed the words of USArmy Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, speaking at a DoD briefing for the release of Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations, which explicitly bans all of the illegal interrogative techniques practiced by the CIA on “high value detainees”. He was asked by a journalist if proscribing these techniques will harm the military’s ability to gather intelligence. The General said, “That’s a good question. I think — I am absolutely convinced the answer to your first question is no. No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that…. Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been — in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices, in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of legal, moral and ethical, now as further refined by this field manual. So we don’t need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them.”
Or, listen to FBI Director Robert Mueller, interviewed for an article in Vanity Fair last winter. Mueller is asked “have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?” His response: “I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”
FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, writing in an op-ed for the NYT yesterday noted that, “There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.”
I am not accusing you of dishonesty, but it is patently obvious that Goldberg, for example, has no idea what the evidence says, and as such has no business making pronouncements on the efficacy of torture. (His evidence is laughable, paper thin).
As a general rule, torture does not work, if by “work” we mean is efficacious for the purposes of intelligence gathering. Torture works insofar as we are interested in producing false confessions.
I really recommend Rejali’s book. It is sometimes necessary, to use a metaphor from William Burroughs, to see what is on the fork that we are being fed with, to see our lunch naked. Read it; it will change your mind – it changed mine. Don’t allow these idiots to fool you into believing a lie.
On a specific level, the French experience in Algiers contradicts your hypothesis. It does not support it. The Battle of Algiers turned only after the officer responsible for the torture of prisoners, Paul Aussaresses, was replaced by Col. Yves Godard, who actually understood intelligence work – his network of informants gave France the edge it needed.
Finally, the heuristic you construct that purports to show an instance where torture could be justified is circular. The heuristic resembles nothing other than the extremely weak argument Baybee advanced in his now infamous memo: “The interrogation team is certain that he has additional information that he refuses to divulge. Specifically, he is withholding information regarding terrorist networks in the United Stares or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas.”
We know now that this is false (see the Soufan op-ed), but more importantly, the logic is highly dubious. Any lawyer worth his salt would destroy this defence. The interrogation team could only be certain that he had this knowledge if it knew it for a fact, in which case interrogation of any sort is unnecessary.
Just so for your hypothetical: if you know for a fact that the informant is withholding specific information, you do not need to interrogate them. If you do not know for a fact, then torture will tell you exactly nothing because eventually the prisoner is only going to tell you what you want to hear.
Furthermore, your assertion that time constraints might prevent “vanilla” interrogation methods from being useful is the opposite of what is the case. Since torture produces excess false positives, torture for intelligence gathering is massively time consuming (see remarks of FBI agents in the VF article mentioned above).
[Thoughts on strategy to follow…]
— vimothy · Apr 24, 03:19 PM · #
“His evidence is laughable, paper thin.”
It amounts to, “because Hayden said so”.
— vimothy · Apr 24, 03:30 PM · #
“You make several errors”
And I apologies for my own: typos love me.
— vimothy · Apr 24, 04:14 PM · #
Sorry, poor attmept at humour.
On the strategic level, allow me to present you with a counterfactual: US strategy in Iraq. Given your premise (that public opinion is not the Jihadists centre of gravity, that it makes no difference what Muslims think), Petraeus’s success in reducing violence and increasing security in Iraq must be totally illusory, yes? In fact, the General’s strategy must be utterly incoherent.
And allow me to disabuse of at least one notion, that the non-abuse of prisoners prior to 9/11 didn’t make a significant difference.
From Jane Mayer’s definitive account of the history of extraordinary renditions, in the New Yorker:
A more elaborate operation was staged in Tirana, Albania, in the summer of 1998. According to the Wall Street Journal, the C.I.A. provided the Albanian intelligence service with equipment to wiretap the phones of suspected Muslim militants. Tapes of the conversations were translated into English, and U.S. agents discovered that they contained lengthy discussions with Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy. The U.S. pressured Egypt for assistance; in June, Egypt issued an arrest warrant for Shawki Salama Attiya, one of the militants. Over the next few months, according to the Journal, Albanian security forces, working with U.S. agents, killed one suspect and captured Attiya and four others. These men were bound, blindfolded, and taken to an abandoned airbase, then flown by jet to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees. Two other suspects, who had been sentenced to death in absentia, were hanged.
On August 5, 1998, an Arab-language newspaper in London published a letter from the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in which it threatened retaliation against the U.S. for the Albanian operation—in a “language they will understand.” Two days later, the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing two hundred and twenty-four people.
I’m sure you have read Wright’s The Looming Tower and so know the role of torture by the Egyptian government in feeding the Islamist insurgency there. Doesn’t seem to have done the US any favours in Iraq. Nor did it do the British any favours in NI. Strategically, at least in our media-saturated world, torture is always epic fail. Always.
— vimothy · Apr 24, 04:45 PM · #
So let me sum up. Torture is, incontrovertibly,
Strategically disastrous;
Tactically incoherent;
Highly illegal;
Totally immoral…
— vimothy · Apr 24, 04:53 PM · #
Jim,
This is the most clarifying writing on the subject I have encountered. More please.
— Tom_Meyer · Apr 24, 05:51 PM · #
Vimothy,
Despite the excellence of your post, I can’t stop myself from giving some response—especially unnecessary since we both clearly agree on the immorality of torture. But first I should give you some satisfaction,
1. I have not read the rejali book, but after skimming through it on google books, it looks like I need to. If he really can produce an open and shut case, then all to the good—the case becomes worth making and my argument falls apart.
2. But that is really what he will need to do; my argument is much narrower than that torture can work, its that even the possibility of it working concedes a lot of territory in the debate. My great fear is that my making this an argument about efficacy will leave enough ambiguity that people will justify it on grounds of uncertainty, i.e. Some small chance of success X massive consequences of a terrorist attack= worth a shot.
3. I suppose we could quote people supporting certain positions back and forth for quite a while—a great many people in the CIA are saying the opposite. The problem with personal experience is that everyone on both sides suffers from motivated bias.
4. On the strategic question, I don’t think the Iraq example is relevant. In the first place, I suspect Petraues’ gains are indeed ephemeral and illusory. In the second place, even if they are not, they have little enough to do with public opinion. The tactics Petraues has implemented are all about trading population security for intelligence, which is hardly the same thing as convincing the public that we are good folks—I believe Iraqi opinion polls still reflect quite poorly on us. Moreover, the JSOC high-value targeting machine out west has hardly been making the U.S. more well loved, but Anbar remains under control because the tribal sheiks have been bought off.
The model here seems to be that winning a counter-insurgency is about “winning hearts and minds”, and that the war on terror is a global counter-insurgency. Perhaps this is true (though I think such wars are considerably more complex), but the extent of its truth is why counter-insurgencies are almost impossible to win. A global counterinsurgency is exponentially more difficult. The task of containing terrorists is much easier, and has a tenuous connection to public opinion.
— Brendan · Apr 24, 07:34 PM · #
Brendan, once again thanks for your response.
I fear that I am not explaining myself properly. My claim — the claim that best fits the evidence — is not simply that torture does not work particularly well, but that it is counter-productive, i.e. that it is actually harmful to the process of intelligence gathering. Consider, for example, the “former senior C.I.A. official” quoted in David Rose’s Vanity Fair article: “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” Really, and which 90 percent would that be? I believe the technical term for the result of the excess false positives torture produces is “a complete waste of everybody’s time”.
But of course, we know this. No professional wanted to torture prisoners because they all know it is useless. You say that you can produce people who say that it produced actionable intelligence, that it works, I produce evidence that it doesn’t, experts who say it doesn’t, and reasonable people will just have to agree to disagree: you say potato, I say po-tah-to. However, let me make a prediction. You have not, yet, produced any kind of testimony from scholars or practitioners claiming that torture works. But that is not simply because you have not had cause. The wider reason is that nobody believes it: it is a claim without credibility. It is not true that a great many people in the CIA are saying it. And consider the people who actually are claiming that torture works (ignore for a moment – for as long as possible – the pundits like Goldberg): policy makers, lawyers and executives. None of them are experts; none of them are in the field; none of them participate in interrogations. And every single one has his reputation and possible liberty at stake. (I believe that Donald Rumsfeld and Doug “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” Feith deserve prosecution – they are war criminals and traitors to America and its ideals. Bybee should be disbarred at the very least. No CIA agent should be prosecuted).
And so, the origins of this policy, ably pieced together by Phillipe Sands in “Torture Team”, make a lot of sense. I mean, was the FBI clamouring for torture? Was the CIA? No. Policy makers demanded it; duplicitous lawyers found a way to make it legal; everybody else had to lump it. The average G.S.-13 didn’t want to do it then, and doesn’t want to do it now. Military intelligence didn’t want to do it. The FBI didn’t want to do it. They don’t train to be torturers. They know it doesn’t produce usable intelligence. Rumsfeld wanted it. Feith wanted it. That’s the reason – the sole reason – investigators used torture. It is totally insane, but there it is. We threw away our most dearly held values at the capricious whim of a few idiot bureaucrats. I feel utterly ashamed.
Not only is it harmful to intelligence gathering and investigation, it is impossible to regulate. We can see this from the fact that the CIA failed to even keep to the guidelines given in the OLC memos. KSM was waterboarded 183 times in the space of a single month. That exceeds the permitted number by 200 percent. (His treatment, by the way, described in detail in the leaked ICRC report, was horrific). And we can see it in the inevitable leakage of the techniques to military intelligence officers in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. And finally, let us make a prediction, based on past experience (cf. “Torture and Democracy”): the torture has not finished. Just as it migrated to military intelligence interrogators and prison guards, so it will continue continue its journey as these individuals return home and get jobs in the police and security services.
— vimothy · Apr 25, 10:59 AM · #
Let me say something about the expected value of torture. You write,
“Some small chance of success X massive consequences of a terrorist attack= worth a shot”
The premises are wrong. Torture destroys the value of the prisoner as a source of intelligence – literally, since that is its purpose. Furthermore, the cost of torture, in terms of false positives that have to be worked through, is huge. Finally, your framing of the question in terms of expected value is misleading in that it implies that as torture might produce actionable intelligence and as the stakes are so high, it has some value. But anything might produce “some small chance of success”. Big deal. We could send the terrorists to holiday camps. The issue is how to maximise the variable, not whether or not it exists. Is the expected value of torture higher than that of standard interrogative techniques?
— vimothy · Apr 25, 11:33 AM · #
Re Petraeus strategy in Iraq, you are incorrect. It is pop-centric COIN. Public opinion is precisely the issue. Read Galula before passing go. First law of counterinsurgency: “the support of the population is as necessary for the counterinsurgent as for the insurgent”.
— vimothy · Apr 25, 12:06 PM · #
A key point about the claim of tactical effectiveness of torture (or lack therof) has been missed here.
Many current proponents of torture/enhanced interrogation etc. claim that it works simply because some currently high ranking people say it works.
From Jonah Goldberg:
“I think the letter from Blair, the additional testimony from Hayden and Mukasey, as well as other reports should suffice that something very useful — i.e. actionable — resulted from these methods.”
Hayden and Mukasey are both interested parties – of course they are going to say it worked.
This stands in contrast to what the experts say: that torture is an extremely poor tool for gaining reliable tactical information.
If history is any guide the information that was gotten via water boarding etc. will contain some incorrect or deceptive info, some not relevant and some accurate. At the time of extraction there is simply no way to know which is which. Bottom: information gained through torture is according the the experts unreliable.
See “Torture and Democracy” and other works.
The word of an interested party is not considered reliable either. A coach who has given his team a diet of horned toads is of course going to claim it works. We should not take his word for it.
This line that “top people claim these methods (torture) worked hence we know they worked” sounds an awful lot like “top people say Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction” hence we know they do. Top people like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tony Blair etc.
— Chicago Man · Apr 29, 03:39 PM · #