I've been reading a book about the history of the KGB, and found a telling quote about how Stalin's Russia extracted confessions from their own "enemy combatants".
This is from the September 11, 2007 entry of my blog, notesfromthehovel.blogspot.com
I've been reading Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky's book, KGB - The Inside Story. Andrew, a Cold War historian, and Gordievsky, former head of the KGB's London Residency, provide an extremely thorough account of Russian intelligence from the Tsars up until the end of the Cold War.
Anyway, while reading about Stalin's purges of suspected foreign agents, saboteurs and subversives, (that is, non-state actors whom he believed posed a threat to national security), I came across this description of how Soviet agents obtained confessions for a 1930 trial of an alleged espionage ring. A former defendant provides by way of a 1967 deposition:
"Some... yielded to the promise of future benefits. Others, who tried to resist, were 'made to see reason' by physical methods. They were beaten - on the face and head, on the sexual organs; they were thrown to the floor and kicked, choked until no blood flowed to the head, and so on. They were kept on the konveier without sleep, put in the karster (half-dressed and barefoot in a cold cell, or in an unbearably hot and stuffy cell without windows), and so on. For some, the mere threat of such methods, with an appropriate demonstration, was enough." (Taken from Roy Medvdev, Let History Judge (1972), p. 127.
Stalinist Russia was one of the most brutal regimes in history, having put to death millions of its own citizens. It is greatly concerning, then, that the techniques they used to extract confessions seem oddly similar to the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the Bush administration has authorized for use against an analogous threat - non-state actors perceived to present a threat to national security. One would hope that techniques considered inhmane by Soviets in 1967 would not be acceptable to a free nation in 2007. Of course, one can argue that the value of the information we obtain from prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere is so valuable as to outweigh the brutality we inflict to pry it out. But the Stalin analogy is informative on this point as well.
This is so because although the techniques used to obtain confessions for the trial referenced in the above deposition were likely not out of the ordinary in Stalin's regime, in this particular instance, they were applied to innocent defendants. According to Andrew and Gordievsky, it is common knowledge within the KGB that the trial in question was a sham, the allegations fabricated. And yet, the mere threat of these tortures caused many defendants to confess - even when they knew a confession would almost certainly lead to death. That America's enemy combatants do not face the same countervailing pressure - a quick trip to the firing squad after confessing - makes it even more likely that whatever information is obtained through the use or threat of enhanced interrogation is unreliable. So it is disingenuous to hide behind a claim of necessity to justify these techniques.
Terrorists, who by definition are unable to defeat their enemy militarily, must hope that an enemy's fear will lead it to defeat itself. We have obliged. In response to a single terrorist attack, the self-proclaimed home of the brave has adopted the the brutally misguided pragmatism of an empire and ideology we spent a half-century trying to defeat, as well as a disregard for dignity shared by those who attacked us. Six years ago our nation had to choose - be led by our values or by our fears, and we opted for the latter. The sad irony, of course, is that by selling our national soul in the name of security, we have received nothing in the bargain.