In a recent open thread, kos wondered why we're still discussing the effectiveness of torture. I've always been against torture on moral grounds and clearly it's against the law, but I think the effectiveness discussion is important to have. Simply put, morality and legality are things that can change over time, but effectiveness cannot.
Ultimately torture is not an effective means of obtaining accurate, actionable intelligence. It never has been and it never will be. The reason for this is quite simple: when tortured, you will say whatever is necessary to stop the pain, be it the truth or the lie your tormentor wants to hear.
Why you can't argue it on moral grounds
Inevitably, when we try to argue on legal or moral grounds it's far too easy to hide the immorality and illegality in the gray areas. In this case we have:
- the known torture of a handful of suspects
- some assurance that the suspects were all people we knew to be the "Bad Guys®"
- the torture was only applied because it was absolutely necessary
- the OLC authored memos that interpreted the law to say it's all okay
So, in the end, people can argue that it was all okay, we did a bad thing, but it was for the right reasons, and the law permitted it. That's what Cheney and all of the countless torture apologists who are supporting him are saying. But if we step away from that argument and simply discuss the actual effectiveness of torture, there's nothing gray about it. It either works or it doesn't.
The source of "enhanced interrogation"
The "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by our government were taken from the SERE program, a military program designed to help special forces soldiers cope with the torture tactics applied by our enemies. The tactics that SERE was based on were derived from Chinese guidelines on how to torture prisoners to extract false confessions.
Read that again. Not to get the truth. Not to find the secret location of the rebel base. No, they tortured to get people to tell them what they wanted to here. To confess to crimes they did not commit in the interests of propaganda.
All evidence that we've seen so far suggests that this is exactly what torture was used for by the Cheney administration. In fact it's always what torture has been used for throughout history. Breaking the will of the victim to get them to tell you what you want to hear. It just creates this illusion of being the truth.
The Cheney administration wanted to get a justification for an invasion of Iraq. So, they engaged in torture to extract the false confessions necessary to get the war rolling. It never had anything to do with getting real intelligence even if they deluded themselves into thinking that.
But, "wait," you say. Aren't there some times when we just HAVE to torture. Where it's such an imminent threat that we have no choice? No... Not really.
The ticking bomb
Many on the right wing will argue in favor of torture by suggesting that there are some circumstances where it's necessary and effective. The scenario they outline usually goes like this:
You have a terrorist in your custody. In the next day a nuclear device he planted is going to go off and destroy civilization as we know it. What do you do? What. Do. You. Do?
What always amuses me about the ticking bomb scenario is this odd combination of certainty and complete lack of knowledge. You know with certainty that the person in your custody planted a nuclear weapon, but you don't know where he planted it.
Did he tell you he did it? Maybe he's lying. Did another guy tell you? Maybe that guy's lying. Did you see him drive a truck into a building on video that you knew had a nuke in it? Well then go to the building and stop wasting your time pulling this guy's fingernails out.
Simply put the ticking bomb scenario never exists. Even if it did exist torture doesn't actually provide any assurance of getting the answers you need when you need them. The truth, if it exists, will be intermingled with lies both deliberate and unintentional. So no, this does not justify a policy of torture.
Conclusion: does not work. Never going to work
I look forward to the release of all of the information we supposedly got from torture. We will quickly find out that no new intelligence was gathered from torture and that the torture ultimately yielded tremendous amounts of bad intelligence. In the end though, the goal of Cheney was not to get good intelligence, it was to get the intelligence he wanted.
It's interesting to discuss the morality of torture, but ultimately as a simple practical matter, it doesn't make sense to torture so why discuss it's morality. The only reason you would do it is to extract false information, and well hell, if you're going to go that route, why not just make it up entirely?
Torture is immoral, but in the end, that's not why we avoid it. We avoid it because it all to easily creates short cuts to the facts we want rather than the facts we need. Rather than basing out intelligence on facts and verifiable sources, we base our intelligence on our
projections of how we think the world works. In the end, that's how you get into fighting the wrong war in the wrong country and undermining our national security. THAT is why it needs to be illegal. THAT is why it needs to be prosecuted.