History of psychological interrogation and torture
Historian Alfred W. McCoy is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. The book is apparently tells the story of the CIA's decades-long development of psychological techniques for coercion. I haven't read the book yet, but YouTube has a video of McCoy lecturing on the subject at UC Santa Barbara and it's fascinating, scary stuff. MindHacks has a summary of McCoy's presentation, titled "A Short History of Psychological Terror." From the post:
Link to video, Link to MindHacks, Link to buy A Question of TortureMcCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 'Manipulation of Human Behavior' research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 'Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual'.
He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.
the latest
latest episodes
"no strong basis for their effectiveness"
It should come as no surprise that they missed 9/11 when they spend their time working and working on techniques that have no apparent effect.
Logic should dictate that if a suspect denies something and you torture him to within an inch of his life, he will admit to something that isn't true just to save his life (and even if he isn't in mortal danger-- how would he know for sure, it would sure SEEM like his life was at stake). Most survivors of Soviet prison camps tell the same story-- accused of a crime they didn't commit, interrogated for weeks, tortured, finally gave up and admitted to the crime just to end the terror.
Who are the real terrorists here?
McCoy's classic "Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia," is a must-read, as well.
When I was in the military I got a little taste of torture. Sleep deprivation works so well that you can get a person to tell you anything. Add some LSD and you can take a person's mind apart. Pain is not required, just time. We have ways to break anyone. Always have, always will. Because when someone has a secret you need, you'll get. Those are the rules of warfare.
More articles by Al McCoy:
Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research (Counterpunch)
The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib (Truthout)
#3
See #1 - the goal of any interrogation is to put just enough stress on the suspect that they would confess if guilty, but not enough that they would confess if innocent. Interrogations seeking information rather than confession have analogous goals - to extract true information, but not to drive the person to make up information.
And that's the problem with torture - the innocent confess, the ignorant pick up on cues from their interrogators (conscious or unconscious) to make up a story that will fit the interrogator's theory of the case.
" We have ways to break anyone. Always have, always will. Because when someone has a secret you need, you'll get. Those are the rules of warfare."
And when someone doesn't have a secret you need, but you've convinced yourself that they do, you'll get false information out of them. Then you'll waste time, energy, money, and probably human lives on a wild goose chase.
That's one of the reasons we (are supposed to) have rules against torture - not that torture fails to extract truth, but that it increases the rate of extracting falsehood by so much more.
Of course there are other reasons, like the fact that humans don't perform torture - and if we order our own people to do so, we steal the humanity of both the torturers and the victims.
@3 says: "Because when someone has a secret you need, you'll get."
Questions:
1) How do you know they have a secret you need?
2) How do you know that what you get is the secret you need?
Here are some well-known, uncontroversial facts:
1) Most people tortured by the organs of the state are innocent victims. This is a necessary consequence of the empirical fact that torture is exclusively applied to people who have not been convicted of any crime by a "public and speedy trial" whose purpose is to determine factual guilt or innocence.
2) Anyone can be made to say anything under torture.
It follows from this by logical necessity that most information gleaned by torture is what the torturers want to hear. Is is emphatically not "the secret you need" because most of the time the person being tortured doesn't have the information you want, and the rest of the time you keep on torturing the person until they say what you want them to, regardless of what secret truths they actually possess.
Anyone who wants to dispute this conclusion has to prove that torture is in fact routinely applied only to those who are known via an epistemologically sound judicial process to possess "the secret you need", AND has to prove that the torturers have sufficient information to recognize "the secret they need" when they hear it.
In fact, there is by definition no way they can know that something they don't know is what they need to know.
Unsurpisingly, history is replete with examples of false information obtained under torture ruining lives and creating cascades of destruction as people who enjoy torturing others use false information obtained by torture as an excuse to torture more people. Google "the affair of the poisons" if you're at all curious, or read up on the history of witch trials.
Just heard a bit on the radio about a Supreme Court Justice (not sure which one) stated that torture is only unconstitutional if used as punishment, not if it's being used for extracting information.
While I would recommend being very careful about slinging around phrases like "Who are the real terrorists", this is probably a good time for the USA to decide whether we're a "might makes right" nation now, or whether it's still important to consider ourselves the Good Guys. We're definitely in a state of moral realignment. Or at least some of us are, much to the horror of the rest of us.
torture is fun, that's why we do it
Alfred McCoy is an excellent scholar and teacher (i was lucky enough to take a few classes with him at uw-madison and they were fantastic) and was also interviewed on democracy now after this book came out if you are interested:
http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/17/professor_mccoy_exposes_the_history_of
so many words, let me extract:
"Now, one of the problems beyond the details of these orders is torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There’s an absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control."
see? Fun.
"a Supreme Court Justice (not sure which one) stated that torture is only unconstitutional if used as punishment, not if it's being used for extracting information."
Technically, that is correct. However, as signatory to the several Geneva Conventions, in the USA it's still illegal.
Like I've said before in this forum, they torture not to get information, but to get them to sign confessions that justify the war on terror. Example: They accuse you of being a member of Al Queda. You of course are not a member of the mostly fictional terror organization. Then they torture you for days on end. They ask again, "Are you a member of Al Queda?" "Will you stop torturing me if I say yes? Because I'll do anything if you'll stop waterboarding me." Sure they say, we'll stop, just sign this confession. Now they run to the higher-ups waving the confession as proof that the W.O.T. is working. This is the new America.
U.S. civilians killed by terrorism, foreign and domestic from 1980-2007: under 6,000. (this includes 9-11, Oaklhoma, Lockerby, etc...)
Soure: U.S. State department Website.
U.S. citizens murdered in U.S. by other Americans in 2006: 17,034
Source: FBI Website
So in 20 years less than 6,000 U.S. civilians are killed by terrorism. In ONE year, Americans murdered 17,034 of their own countrymen. And I'm suppose to be scared of who?
The war on terror is a joke. It is nothing more than a plot by the Bush Administration and all their rich defense contractor friends to bleed America dry, and it is working. 20 Billion dollars alone went to "Unidentified Foreign entities" for "miscellaneous items". How many more billions went to protect us from something that is less likely to happen than getting struck by lighting?
How about this, it's what I was taught and what I believe to this day: Torture is wrong, no matter who does it and why. It's just FUCKING EVIL. The intentional infliction of pain, terror, or fear of death by one person upon another is (to say the least) a denial of humanity. Who cares if it works or not.
hold on to that thought
@ Takuan #8:
Yup. People are sick and horrible. We build laws and religions to protect ourselves from the evil that lurks only within ourselves. Once you think that only the other guys are evil, you are open to letting the evil out of yourself.
And it feels good.
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the only book on the human condition you ever need read.
I can keep a lid on it because I don't pretend it isn't there. I look within, the Beast looks back.
I say: "No". Therefore, I am.
need a chaser, gonna go watch "Harvie Krumpet" again
A very nasty group of people has just kidnapped your child. They want a few million for the kid. They send you the child's finger just so you know they are serious. The police catch someone who "knows" who has the kid. You, the parent, get to decide if torture will be used to make this person talk. And you only have a very short time to extract the information.
I decide to torture the hell out of this person, not because I'm evil through-and-through, but just enough to get the job done. And I know how to do it so well that this guy will tell me everything I want to know. Torture works very well, and only "nice" people say different. Very few people can keep quiet while their finger nails are being pulled out.
#5:
I'd definitely add this reason for not torturing: if you torture their people when you capture them, they'll probably torture your people when they capture yours.
Congratulations Jeff! You just let your son die, because the police got the wrong guy, and you decided to spend your time ripping out his fingernails like the twisted little troll you are, instead of doing something that would actually help find your son. Good job getting your vicious thrills at the cost of a child's life.
Jeff, tell us how the police know this guy has that information? Did he confess under torture? Did they tell him the torture would stop if the confessed?
What if they decided to torture you, to make sure you didn't just kill the kid and make up the kidnapping? The parent is the main suspect in cases like that. Anything to get good intelligence, right?
Jeff:
Irish badge REVOKED!
:)
@#18
Looks like someone watched Man On Fire on too many times. It was fiction by the way, not a documentary. I'd love to see the statistics on how often someone's kid gets kidnapped, a finger mailed to them and the cops catch someone who knows where the child may be. You're living in your own sick little dream world. Why don't you just torture yourself if you like it so much.
Such deep thinkers. Who's to say the cop wasn't right? That his source wasn't correct? It's just as easy to play one side of this as it is the other. Kaiser, you know it all do you? You think you know how you'll act when the time comes? Good for you, we need kind people in the world. Unfortunatly we need a few un-kind people too.
My Irish badge has not been revoked. As a matter of fact, I have a family member in prison right now, still after quite a few years. He was ratted out by one of his own, who was tortured quite well by the British. You see, he was in the IRA and his little band of freedom fighters accidently blew up some children. Bad bomb. Were the Brits right to beat his IRA brother to near death? After all, the "bad" guys are in prison now because that torture was productive.
Jeff, the point is that the police can not know for sure what a suspect is withholding. Why do you think that's not the case?
Innocent people are arrested and convicted all the time. Torture is one of the ways they succeed in doing that. Psychological manipulation is another. DNA tests decades after the fact have conclusively exonerated people convicted of rapes, murders, etc. Why do you think it's impossible for the police to get something wrong when it's been conclusively proven that they can make mistakes?
People will confess and rat out others to escape torture. It doesn't make what they say true: it just means they'd rather go to jail than put up with more torture.
Japan enjoys an almost 100% confession rate after arrest
Ahh, seeing Jeff's post in the cop-hits-skateboarder video cleared it all up. He's obviously decided the police can do no wrong.
"" After all, the "bad" guys are in prison now because that torture was productive. ""
And we both know how many people have been falsely imprisoned or beaten or killed in Northern Ireland because of torture/interrogation that was less 'productive'.
Just because the Brits got one right this time, doesn't mean all the other times were justified.
Torture is a rare way to the truth. "Who's to say the cop wasn't right?" misses the point completely, that he MAY NOT BE right. At that point we are trading life for life.
Also, they are ALL bad bombs. Irish Badge Pending ;p