An unrefutable case against torture
By Thoreau
I should have blogged this earlier, but over the weekend the WaPo ran a piece by a former military interrogator who oversaw more than 1,000 interrogations in Iraq. This guy refused to torture anyone, and instead worked by building rapport with the people in custody. Yeah, yeah, it sounds all soft and squishy and liberal hippie traitor and all that, but it actually worked. OTOH, torturing Afghan taxi drivers to death seems not to have worked. So, you know, if you want to find the ticking time bomb, take that into account.
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Comment by Eric the .5b —
December 4, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
This whole issue just makes me feel frustrated and sickened.
This approach is how we questioned Nazis during WW frickin’ 2…and the things the administration has authorized? Back then, we tried and shot people who did those things to our personnel.
I’ve made a point of saying variations on that right to the faces to people who weasel about or excuse torture. It’s made a bit more of a dent in those people than merely pointing out the inhumanity of it. A bit.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
December 4, 2008 @ 2:44 pm
The FBI interrogator who was assigned to Sadddam Hussein when he was in American custody said the same thing.
He got the point where Saddam was showing him the poems he wrote, and asked what he thought.
I like John McCain’s answer: “Because life is not ‘24.’ ‘Tell me where the bomb is!’ ‘No!’ Bang! ‘I’ll tell you!’ It doesn’t work like that, my friends.”
Good answer.
Comment by Thoreau —
December 4, 2008 @ 2:50 pm
Yeah, I don’t get why people are willing to abandon legal and ethical concepts that served us well against Commies and Nazis.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
December 4, 2008 @ 2:59 pm
…and served them so poorly.
What scares me is that the NKVD wasn’t trying to get true information, they were trying to get confessions. The SERE training, on which waterboarding is based, was meant to train soldiers to resist giving false confessions.
Comment by a guy —
December 4, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
irrefutable.
Sorry, couldn’t help it.
Comment by Nell —
December 5, 2008 @ 11:39 am
The pseudonymous ex-interrogator raises the most fundamental point about interrogation, which is that the moral and effective approach is to build rapport rather than the CIA-developed coercive model of ‘debility, dependency, and dread’ (DDD).
Even the older Army Field Manual is, to a large extent, based on the CIA’s DDD model of coercive interrogation. This is a point made in Chapter 2 of Joseph Margulies’ book Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, which gives an incisive and lucid account of military interrogation. Margulies makes clear the points in Army doctrine which risk stepping over the line into torture and coercion, and the important role of the Geneva Conventions and two ‘tests’ in the Field Manual in preventing that.
It is precisely these lines that the Rumsfeld Pentagon wished to erase with their 2005-6 revision of the Field Manual (and their earlier official renunciation of the Geneva Conventions for people taken prisoner by the U.S. in the “war on terror”). They intended for the new appendix M, which authorizes torture techniques of prolonged isolation with sensory and sleep deprivation, to be classified. They intended to remove the ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” and other restrictions imposed by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
In the end, the revision was unclassified in its entirety. Appendix M’s authorization of “touchless” torture techniques makes clear why Rumsfeld and company wanted it classified.
Regrettably, most anti-torture advocates, who were effective in raising the alarm during the process of revision, were not sufficiently critical of the new manual when it was finally published in September 2006 (“Important questions remain” being the strongest response I can find.) Sen. Wyden’s aide speaks for many people who’ve been involved in the struggle to rein in executive-branch torture:
In fact, it was not universally agreed, but the near-silence from the official human rights community following publication, preoccupied by the effort to bring the CIA under the law and the Geneva Conventions, allowed the bar to be moved.
Comment by Decline and Fall —
December 7, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
Nell,
The main problem with Bush’s torture policy isn’t the Army Field Manual, it’s the fact that non-military entities (CIA, DIA, FBI, etc.) are, by executive fiat, exempt from its prohibitions. I was involved in the writing of that Field Manual, and I can tell you that the editors were most concerned with drawing a firm line in the sand regarding the legality of various approach techniques.
As for the “DDD” vs. Rapport model, it’s a false distinction. Rapport can be positive or negative–you have a different relationship with your spouse than you do with the cop who pulls you over for speeding, but you definitely have rapport with both. And while it’s true from my experience that the positive approach works much better than the negative, as an interrogator you have to be able to raise the tension in the room and let the detainee know that you’re the one in charge.