Torture Yet Again
Jason Kuznicki on Nov 18th 2005
Frequent interlocutor Mark Olson has cast doubt on my claim that torture doesn’t work, writing, “I don’t think I’ve seen data to that effect from anyone who has access to the data and has done a careful study to verify that assumption or not.”
His challenge is demolished by Jim Anderson, who posts a devastating reply here. He cites an online U.S. military document, which concluded based on extensive research that torture is on balance both ineffective at gathering intelligence and harmful to the societies that practice it.
(Olson’s reasoning here is quite parallel to one of his earlier claims, which was that no one had ever codified the rules of proper interrogation, and that the propriety of various methods was therefore a completely open question. In reply to that claim, I noted how the U.S. Army had indeed codified its interrogation methods, giving detailed instructions for all aspects of the process, and that these findings were even available on the internet.)
With that said, I have a few more observations on the subject. What follows is partly a theory of torture and partly a look at some episodes in history that support that theory. I also offer some book recommendations, too; it wouldn’t be Positive Liberty without book recommendations.
I argue here that torturing detainees is not only morally wrong, but that it is far more likely to elicit false information than true, and that separating the one from the other is a task that few torturing regimes have ever performed successfully. Indeed, I will argue, the mere use of torture makes them ill-equipped to do so. It’s not so much that “forceful interrogations” will “never” produce correct information, as Mark Olson somewhat inaccurately distills my position, but rather that any true information is almost certain to be mixed in with and outweighed by a consistent narrative that matches the torturer’s own expectations.
Torture comes from a Latin word meaning “to twist,” and this origin is apt in more ways than one. Torturing twists physical bodies; it twists the minds of those who practice it; it even twists the proper relations between mind, knowledge, and nature. Let us start with the following premise, no matter how repellant you find it: Torture works. If you treat a captive humanely, you will usually get nowhere (note that this is empirically false, as over 90% of captured detainees will cooperate and provide meaningful information spontaneously).
But if you do hold to the premise that torture works, then it only follows that torture works on the margin as well: Torture someone a little, and you get a little of the truth. Torture him more, and you get more of the truth. Torture until he can take no more, and you get everything. Pain brings the desired result, while lack of pain does the opposite; this is the premise that you implicitly accept when you begin to torture.
No wait — stop right there. What is the desired result? Torturing demands that the torturer know in advance more or less what he wants to hear. It declares, at a level almost beneath the implicit, that the truth will have two characteristics: First, it will be produced by pain; second, it will be apparent enough that the individual actually applying the pain will be able to shape his practice to the degree that his victim conforms with the (expected) truth.
Because torture tends to produce answers that the torturer expects to hear, and because the act of torture itself implicitly calls into question the evidence gathered by more humane methods, torture should be used neither as a primary nor as a supplemental method of interrogation. Real intelligence-gathering demands thoughtful consideration of statements that may or may not be true. Applying torture, however, demands spot judgments by the individual inflicting the pain, because the continued application of pain (or not) demands them.
But in what other activity is truth so obvious when it appears? In torture, the answers to the hardest questions of all become far too easy: When does one begin to apply the torture? When one has not yet heard the expected reply. And when does one cease to apply the torture? When one has heard exactly what he expected to hear. How does one know that one has heard the truth? It takes a certain combination of pain, and prejudice, and wishful thinking.
Mind substitutes for reality, and expectation takes the place of truth. To torture another human being does not require coldness or callousness; on the contrary, it takes a hot conviction that the tortured man is guilty, and that he will soon give up his secrets. This conviction alone makes torture seem reasonable; without it, the act becomes mere pointless cruelty, even lower than sadism.
The very act of torturing produces the apparent evidence of the victim’s guilt within the one who tortures — Why would any sane person do such a thing, if it were not to redress the very greatest of crimes? Surely the one being tortured must be guilty, because I, the torturer, am a decent person, and decent people do not do this to the innocent. If he has not yet talked, the fault must be my own; it can only be that I have not tortured him sufficiently. I will torture, then, because he is guilty, and continue to demand information.
Lest this all seem farfetched, I propose some historical examples.
Let us first consider the so-called burning times of the Renaissance and of the early modern era. It is a common misconception to think that the witch craze began in the early medieval period; on the contrary, during the so-called dark ages, witchcraft trials were forbidden. During this era, canon law held that witchcraft was a foolish but powerless superstition, and to kill witches was itself a crime. Only in later centuries were witches declared to possess a genuine demonic power worthy of punishment.
Medieval law enforcement agents were far more likely to fear — and to torture and persecute — heretics and Jews, to whom they ascribed a number of fearful acts: Both of these groups were said at times to gather in nocturnal rituals where they devoured human infants, live, boiled, or roasted, where they held sexual orgies, and where they plotted evil against their Christian neighbors (More on these beliefs can be found in R. I. Moore’s short but influential book The Formation of a Persecuting Society
Although medieval heresies were real, and although they usually involved substantive doctrinal disputes with the Church, those who stood accused of heresy during this era were almost invariaby made to confess to cannibalism, Satanism, and sexual deviance. Doctrine often had little or nothing to do with the official trials — a situation quite unlike later medieval and early modern heresy proceedings.
During this early era, witchcraft was a thing quite apart from heresy and was treated altogether differently. How did one recognize a practitioner of magic, whether efficacious or not? The answer had always been perfectly obvious: In many communities throughout Europe (though certainly not in all), a witch was an individual, usually a woman, who seemed to have more than the normal share of insight about the future, who knew more than most about medicine, who had a knack for birthing children or for quieting uneasy animals. A witch might show up in one’s dreams or be spotted near the fields when your cattle fell ill; she might be seen muttering oddly to herself or display strange epsiodes of somnambulance, which she claimed later not to remember. She might avoid church or behave bizarrely when she went. Quite often she was a stranger or a traveler; given the ethnic diversity of Europe at the time, it is unsurprising that many travelers seemed so eccentric to the locals.
Initially, though, and particularly in early medieval times, European common folk made relatively little fuss about these eccentricities.
In this early era, witches were odd, superstitious people on the fringes of society, although sometimes they did have the power to hurt — or to help — the rest of the community. In modern terms, we would likely say that many of them were mentally ill; others we might think were not fully Christianized or were adherants to various indigenous folk beliefs (Scholarly consensus holds that these beliefs did not constitute any unified oppositional religion, but that they nonetheless existed in many parts of Europe. There never was a unified witch cult, as some researchers once speculated).
At some point between the late medieval era and the Renaissance, however, interrogators ceased asking heretics whether they ate babies and cavorted with Satan; instead, and for reasons that historians still debate, they began asking this question of witches. Quite obediently, the heretics stopped eating babies and cavorting with Satan; with scarcely less obedience, the witches took up the actions that the heretics had left off.
To all of the odd spiritual beliefs and practices that pervaded the culture around them, religious law enforcement agencies eventually supplied a single unifying explanation: These people had had commerce with the devil, who had given them supernatural powers to spread misery and fear throughout the world. Satan preferred women, because they were more likely to give in to his (usually sexual) temptations, and he invited them to participate in nighttime rituals that looked suspiciously like the rites that the heretics of earlier centuries had also supposedly conducted. (For more on this connection, see Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons
Exceptions to the model always existed; it is a little-known fact, for instance, that in Iceland 90% of convicted witches were men. Sometimes whole villages seemed to be filled with the devil, while others could go decades or centuries without incident. Yet while differences were certainly present, the most remarkable thing about the witchcraft belief was not how much it changed over time and place, but how little.
Confessed witchcraft was so uniform because those who prosecuted it expected to find crimes of a certain type, and because they employed torture to find them. Books of demonology, inquisitors’ manuals, and, in time, the confessions of previous witches all established the pattern of questioning that was used again and again in subsequent trials. Suspects knew that if they answered affirmatively to the questions put to them — and if implicated others in their alleged deeds — then they stood a good chance of going free. Refusal to confess meant extraordinary pain followed by a greater likelihood of execution, often after another individual, also under torture, had independently accused this other victim in the hope of saving herself.
Now, at least to the best of our knowledge, neither heretics nor witches ever actually did the things of which they were accused. Yet for hundreds of years, first the one and then the other continually confessed to doing them. They confessed because of torture and the persuasive threat of torture, which often has the very same twisting effect on information. The odd, the mentally ill, and those of unconventional religious belief all eventually figured it out: Answer in the affirmative to all the questions posed, supply a few details of your own, and the pain will stop. After a time, everyone knew what a witch was; everyone knew how to play the game; and when the time arrived, everyone played along.
Carlo Ginzburg’s extraordinary book The Night Battles
At that time, however, Church inquiries into the practice wrought a change in the events reported by the self-described Benandanti. Through repeated questioning and persecution, including the use of torture, their stories came to resemble the official witchcraft narrative that was already quite standard by that era. Whatever they had been before, the Benandanti became witches.
All of this may seem far removed from the present, so let’s step forward a bit.
Even the Nazis, who presumably tortured with enthusiasm, were unable to find any significant information about the plot to assassinate Hitler. As Jim Anderson writes, “If torture works, we don’t yet have solid evidence to prove it.” I am grateful to him for pointing out this report; it clearly bears further reading. I would only add that powerful evidence shows that torture is positively harmful to intelligence gathering and a risk to national security, even aside from all moral questions.
Consider also the Soviet Union, whose interrogation practices we have apparently been emulating in questioning our own prisoners. What then of Darkness at Noon
They confessed these things not because they were guilty, but merely because this is what the torturers expected to hear, and because this is the result that torture almost inevitably produces. Whether the victim is a criminal or an innocent, the story is almost inevitably the same, and it corresponds to the worst fears of the interrogator, not to any real picture of the world around us. The historical record is overwhelming, and many similar stories could be added to the ones I have given. But then, why this strange insistence on reconsidering the methods of Nazis, and and witch-hunts, and Soviet show trials? Why do we even want to look like them, when appearances too must be safeguarded if we are to win the struggle against terrorism? That’s what puzzles me most right now.
Filed in The Barracks, The Bureau
12 Responses to “Torture Yet Again”
Jason, I don’t intend to defend torture here, but I am going to question your analogy between torturing heretics and witches and torturing someone with knowledge of terrorist activities today. I think your argument that torture just makes the person tell the interrogator what they want to hear is not universally true for the simple reason that sometimes what the interrogator wants to hear may coincide with the truth. In the example of inducing a heretic to admit to eating babies, clearly the interrogator’s presumptions are untrue and the heretic will admit to it just to stop the torture. But the situation is different in today’s situation.
Let’s say they have captured someone fairly high up in Al Qaeda, someone who has valuable knowledge that could predict a future attack or identify sleeper cells, safe houses, and so forth. This is not at all farfetched, I’m sure you’ll agree. So in this case, the interrogator knows the type of information they want to hear, but not the specifics of it - we want them to name names, give us specific information about the identification of his fellow terrorists, where they may be, how they get their orders, where they hide, how they slip into this or that country, how they get the financing for what they do, and any number of other things. In this case, if the person being tortured just tells the person what they want to hear, is that not a good thing? They can then check out the information and see if it is accurate. The captive knows this, and therefore is more likely to tell the truth to avoid being punished for giving false information.
I’m not convinced by the argument that torture never works in getting valuable information. I think there is a strong principled argument to be made against it, and a strong practical argument to be made against it in all but the most extreme of circumstances, and a strong practical argument to be made against it based upon how our actions might induce worse reactions. But I don’t think this type of practical argument is terribly compelling.
Let’s say they have captured someone fairly high up in Al Qaeda, someone who has valuable knowledge that could predict a future attack or identify sleeper cells, safe houses, and so forth.
How do you know that this person knows anything, and how do you know when they’ve told you all they know and have started spinning stories in hopes of getting the pain to stop?
How do you know you’re not torturing the wrong guy?
Phillip Birmingham wrote:
Probably the only way you know is by whether the information turns out to be correct. If he identifies a cell in a safehouse and you go there and find them, the information is confirmed. You probably can’t know in advance whether he has useful information or not, though you obviously want to be as certain as possible that you’ve got the right person. Again, I’m not arguing that we should torture; I’m arguing that it’s likely not accurate to argue that torture never gets you reliable or important information.
I also understand that Jason is not arguing that it never gets you accurate information, but that it is impossible to tell whether it’s accurate. But it seems to me that this is a problem you have with any type of interrogation techniques - the only way to know for certain if the information is true is to follow up on it and see. It can’t be known in advance, only in retrospect.
Has anyone brought up the point that Al Qaeda is modularly organized, so nabbing and torturing one terrorist is of limited utility in bringing down a separate cell?
My own response to Ed’s question is as follows.
Imagine that you capture three prisoners: One is a top al Qaeda operative. The other is a mid-level operative. The third is an innocent.
You torture them all until each of them reveals details of an al Qaeda operation.
Quick — with your limited resources, which lead do you pursue?
Now consider that the overwhelming majority of people captured will turn out to be innocent. Consider further that the true information of mid-level operatives will very likely be dismissed when their torture-induced exaggerations are also thrown out.
Giving false information under torture is common because giving information that seems true to the torturer results in less pain in the here and now; by contrast, the threat of punishment from false information is remote, and when an individual is under severe psychological stress, they are likely to revert to exactly these sorts of short-range judgments.
I have no doubt that torture often results in giving false information. I don’t deny that at all, nor do I condone torture. I just don’t think it’s true that torture is not at all useful for getting accurate information. The difficulty, as you correctly note, is in separating truth from falsehood because it is so often accompanied by false information.
Jason,
In your example of the three suspects and which information you follow. You follow the one which has corroborating data gathered from other means. All of you methods of gathering data are flawed. Surveillence, eavesdropping, electronic measures, satellite data, snitches/informants, interrogation and other methods all are subject to the same problem, i.e., a bad signal to noise ration. There is a preponderance of false positives and false negative signals. You follow the leads which have independent corroboration form different channels. You look for coincendence and matching names or events derived from numerous sources (and of course your foe knows that’s what you are looking for just to make it interesting). If your subject spills names that is just one set of data to put into the mix.
I think Ed has it right when he says that there are principled arguments against using coercive interrogation, effectiveness just isn’t it … at least based on the argument that the subject will only tell what the investigator asks. There are dozens of different sources of data arising form the mass of intelligence data in this conflict. Each has a cost, a quantity and quality of data associated with it. I’m not sure why it seems that people assume that our own intelligence gathering personnel aren’t aware of this and have not evaulated this with a eye to the fact that in figuring the “cost” of coercive interrogation (just as any technique) often the dollar is the least important consideration.
I’d also note, that in the 2nd paragraph where you claim that I said
What I actually wrote was nobody had a “metric” for measuring against one another the effects of coercion. This related to my “NFL Lineman” comment, which you also had misread (or more likely I had poorly expressed). My contention is that nobody has provided a metric, that is a methodology of measurement, to compare or quantify the stress induced by techniques and application of coercive interrogatiion. I didn’t claim nobody had rules or standards. But that we have no methodology for comparing thumbscrews to the rack to sleep deprivation to sensory deprivation to tickling with feathers to my in-laws tone-deaf singing. Which is worse? How much worse? How can they be compared in an intelligent fashion? They can’t because we have no metric by which to gauge them.
Sorry, I don’t know why that went “bold” text like that, it didn’t in the preview.
I readily admit that neither the Soviet Union nor Nazi Germany nor Red China (to give another example of torturing regimes) ever relied solely on torture to obtain their intelligence. But while the witchcraft persecutions are an extreme example, I find that they are a good one nonetheless, both becuase they show the remarkable lengths to which an undoubtedly innocent tortured subject will go — and because they illustrate what the method does in virtual isolation, where its particular effects can be studied alone.
You both raise good points about corroborating evidence, but do remember that “corroborating evidence” is itself of a mixed nature, with some of it true and a great deal of it false, and it is not always obvious which parts of it are genuine. It makes no sense to introduce into the mix a kind of noise that is particularly likely to be appealing.
The poor record of intelligence gained by torture in all eras of history speaks for itself, and if you still choose to believe that it is effective, I would challenge you to rethink the Soviet example in particular. The Soviets were quite often highly sohpisticated gatherers of intelligence — they stole the nuclear bomb from us, for instance — yet they were led badly astray in policing their own, and forced confessions were almost certainly the reason behind it.
Why we would want to emulate such a failed policy is entirely beyond me, even from the narrowest and most purely practical standpoint (and make no mistake about it, we are indeed emulating exactly the Soviet methods). But beyond the more narrow question of practicality, we must consider that we are engaged in a war of ideas, and every bit of true information extracted by torture (and sorted out from the noise who knows how) will embolden our enemies and give doubts to our friends: How much information have we lost through these policies, in the informers who might have told the United States what they knew, if only they still had faith that the U.S. was a trustworthy and honorable country? We will never know the answer to this question, but it should be kept in mind all the same.
Mark: I have no idea what happened with the bolding. I don’t see it when I look at the source HTML at the Positive Liberty admin panel, and I suspect it must be a problem with the plug-in.
You should also read this as an example of the inefficacy of torture. Note that it’s not from the middle ages or the Soviet era — It’s about the CIA interrogating top al Qaeda operatives, and it supports exactly what I have been saying above. Here is a short but very important excerpt:
A friend of mine, who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam, commented that torture to gain info (as opposed to a confession) only works if you have at least two people that you know are privy to the desired info … then you can tell each that it’ll continue until they agree.
Otherwise, the victim will say anything. One POW, for instance, tortured for aircraft training secrets, described a series of “confidence building maneuvers” (such as flying loops at unsafely low altitudes) that he figured would kill off at least some of those trying it.
He added that the NV theories of brainwashing derived from the Russians and Pavlov, who had noted that his dogs learned more quickly after they nearly drowned in a flood and were thus stressed. But Pavlov’s dogs did not blame him for the flood. The friend said “They meant to brainwash us, and they did. We started in disliking communists. We ended by hating them and wishing we could kill them all.”
There is also the problem of what torture does to the torturers.
Is it right to take your own citizens and require them to go against everything your society stands for, to do things to another human being that make them monsters? TO require them to make the mental adjustments needed, and then send them back into civilian life?
It’s enough of a problem with soldiers who have trouble with killing and PTSD, and theirs is a socially sanctioned action. Few disagree that if someone’s shooting at you that you shoot back.
Would you be willing to say at a dinner party, “Me? I torture people, I damage them mentally and physically, deliberately over days and sometimes weeks. We call it “enhanced interrogation”, but of course it’s torture, just like Saddam used to do. But we are the good guys so it’s OK.” I suspect that there wouldn’t be many repeat invitations!
Either someone is going to be damaged by doing this - learning to treat others as subhuman and learning to ignore or even look for their distress - or they don’t need to learn, they already do it. Is it sensible to then put such people back into civilian society in that condition? Is it just to damage them that way?