Not only are torture techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced stress positions evil, they don't work very well for interrogation. Jacques Vallee talked about that on BB last year in his provocative essay, "Waterboarding's curious corollaries." This week's New Scientist also considers the efficacy of torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" (CIDT). On the heels of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Obama established the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group to study and practice "scientifically proven" techniques to interrogate without torture or CIDT, which are illegal.
"Beyond torture: the future of interrogation"The idea that coercive interrogation works rests on an untested and largely unsupported framework, says Shane O'Mara, director of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. On the face of it, the coercive model for interrogation seems like common sense: there is information that the interrogator wants to know and the subject holds but doesn't want to give up. The interrogator applies some pressure to break down the defences put up by the subject, who then spills the desired information. "You see this model repeatedly in movies and TV series such as 24," says O'Mara.
Whether it really works like that is questionable, however. "Everything we know shows that the ability to accurately retrieve information is severely impaired under conditions of extreme stress," O'Mara says. Studies on soldiers, for instance, have shown that manipulating sleep, food and temperature produces severe effects on memory, even when people are willing to give up information.
In a recent paper, O'Mara outlined the problem (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 13, p 497). Both torture and CIDT flood the brain with stress hormones such as cortisol and the catecholamines, with potentially profound effects. Three regions are especially affected: the hippocampus, which is important in retrieving long-term memories; the amygdala, which forms part of the fear network; and the frontal lobes. Disturbances of these regions are likely to kick in during coercive interrogation, particularly if such questioning continues for weeks or months.
In addition, prolonged stress could also lead to the creation of false memories based on information and supposed facts presented by the interrogator. This phenomenon, known as confabulation in psychiatric jargon, is also found in people with frontal lobe disorders. "These people are not consciously making stuff up or trying to lie," says O'Mara. "But they have difficulty discriminating between genuine memories and those that don't bear any relationship to events they have experienced. Though the occurrence of confabulation in torture victims is more speculative, it's a marked possibility."
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Hey McFly you bojo, waterboards don't work on hover.
False. They work terrifically well: they produce bad intelligence that was determined-upon before the torture, false intelligence that in the torturer's mind legitimizes said torture. Stop repeating this meme! The torturers weren't trying to get "good" intelligence: they did this on purpose.
THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS!
*sigh* No. There are five.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRT*
You don't understand. Sure, we know, a lot of what these ppl say during interrogation is jibberish and nonsense.
That is exactly why we have to do this to a lot of them.
So we can cross check what they're saying, and if some of em say the same shit, well then that's gotta be the real shit, innit?!
Ignoring the ethical implications of your suggestion, no multiple people corroborating the same story under torture does not speak to its accuracy. The torturers involved are going to be feeding certain facts to the prisoners, both on purpose to try and nudge the prisoner towards the answer they are looking for, and by inadvertently through the nature of their questions. The result is that different people under the same stresses may tell similar stories when trying to come up with something to make the pain stop.
Torture is both ethically and pragmatically unsound.
Torture may not be a good way to extract information, but it sure does cause pain and fear.
If we cause enough pain and fear ... maybe people will be too scared to do ... whatever it is that we don't want them to do. Kind of like the death penalty, but without the death.
Of course! When they see what we'll do to people who may not even be guilty of anything, they can just imagine what we'll do to people who actually are guilty! I'm sure that will work just as well as the death penalty has in stamping out violent crime.
For the record, I agree with Tdawwg. The only information they were ever interested in getting is information that would justify their actions.
Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident, wrote, an intelligence service free to torture soon "degenerates into a playground for sadists."
@karlJones, you make it sound like fear of punishment works. Like all the drivers that never ever speed again after getting a speeding ticket?!
And, along with great pain and fear comes great anger and desire for retaliation. Torture produces desparate people with nothing to lose happy to carry a briefcase dirty bomb in a town near you (and me).
it's too bad that the US hasn't ratified treaties against this sort of thing.
oh, wait...
Interrogration? Where's the grate?
Sure, Karl, because we executed someone once, and all murders ceased immediately thereafter, didn't they?
Both you and Marcel either misunderstand, deliberately ignore, or worse, are advocates of torture because the idea of meting out suffering and misery to others excites you in some way.
Doesn't it? Really? You can be honest here.
That it can be done in (supposedly) carefully measured doses makes it somehow antiseptic, and the fact that someone else is doing it in your name completes things, keeping your hands clean at a comfortable distance while vicariously taking pleasure in the pain of others.
No one captured in battle (or a raid) has meaningful information after 48, or at most, 60 hours. And before you bring up the tired "ticking bomb" scenario, let me remind you that if a bomb is set to go off in an hour, all your victim needs to do is hold out for 59 minutes and 58 seconds.
No, torturers and their apologists are simply sadists, delighting in harming others under cover of "authority" and "national security" and similar misbegotten umbrellas. They do it because someone, somewhere, gets off on it.
Prove me wrong if you can.
Fixed.
Whoa Cowboy. Between the multiple ellipses and the waffling "maybe", I think our friend, Mr. Jones, just may have been employing sarcasm. I think the BB community is pretty solidly on the Torture is Inexcusable side of the fence.
Where are the double blind trials that measure the efficacy of waterboarding, eh?
I want a 50%/50% mix of innocent control subjects to be waterboarded along with real terrorists, and I want the torturers not to know the difference during those trials.
We could accomplish that by having US troops offer a bounty to the locals for each 'terrorist' they hand over - then there'd be a financial incentive to provide innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong tim along with some no-doubt genuine terrorists. We could send them all to be tortured at Gitmo.
oh wait...
My government may not have gotten any new useful information from all that torture, but it's sure been effective at freaking me (and a lot of others) out.
Which I have to suspect was part of the plan all along.
If this is the future of interrogation, it wouldn't be that bad-- people've been torturing for millenia, and it's probably no more effective now than then.
Now, when the day comes that you can be strapped into a sufficiently advanced MRI and your interrogator can tell when you're lying, that's when it gets scary.
"Whoa Cowboy. Between the multiple ellipses and the waffling 'maybe', I think our friend, Mr. Jones, just may have been employing sarcasm."
Yes, I was being ironic/sarcastic.
Pain and fear of more pain does not make people obedient -- it makes them rebellious.
Do we actually know that anyone was waterboarded? Perhaps the government knows it is cheaper (and less messy) to get the desired societal effects without actually torturing anyone. The government is the real terror-ist.
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