The Sadists Are Back
Once again the usual suspects are back on the talk shows proclaiming that torture works and the Shrubbery was responsible for finding bin Laden.
The standard hypothetical for justifying torture is the ticking time bomb. The claimed piece of information was the nom de guerre of a courier that bin Laden trusted, al Kuwaiti. Bin Laden was located 8 years later. Bombs use clocks, not calendars.
When information takes years to be useful, time is not a major concern in the process. In this case, al Kuwaiti would lead people to look for someone with ties to Kuwait, not a Pakistani Pashtun who happened to have been born in Kuwait, probably because his father was working there at the time.
From the beginning, torture has been used to coerce confessions, not to provide useful information.
Another problem with torture is the reality that it reduces the chance of the enemy surrendering. If the enemy believe they will be tortured or killed, they will continue to fight even after the point when it is obvious they will lose.
13 comments
“… needs careful and analytical handling to sort wheat from chaff.” – Duffy
Shorter Duffy: If you already know the information, torture is a great way to obtain the information.
Still shorter Duffy: torture turns me on.
Oh come on now, Steve. I don’t think that Duffy sits in his easy chair with his curry (curry because that’s the only semi-edible food item available in those dank dreary isles) gloating at pictures of dead darkies and imagining what it feels like to torture people like that. I’m SURE that Duffy does that :twisted:. In his heart of hearts. Duffy wishes he had been born an S&M mistress so that he could do that sort of thing personally without being arrested…
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The technical intel word for that view, Mr. Duff, is “bullshit”.
The US studied the efficacy of torture for decades following World War II, and the universal conclusions of all of those studying it was that it consistently produced coerced confessions, the stated medieval goal, and nothing else. The “networks” were rolled up in the standard “catch one person and throw everyone they know in prison”. The Diary of Anne Frank would have been very short indeed if torture worked.
In Eastern Europe, the Soviets used the Communist resistance organizations that fought against the Nazis to identify and eliminate all of the other resistance organizations.
I went through SERE Level D [SEALs only get Level C], and other specialized courses because of my primary job in the military. I know what was considered a real threat at getting real intelligence, and it is the same techniques that are taught to military interrogators. Those techniques do not involve torture in any way, shape, or form, and they have been proven effective in both the military and law enforcement. The information gathered is good and clean enough to be presented and accepted in civilian courts.
Torture does not work, and never has, which is why it is not admissible in any court, hell, even the Inquisition finally admitted it didn’t work, and that was centuries ago.
Mr. Duff, you have just presented an example of a coerced and false confession to prove torture worked. You have lost it.
Fact, truth, that is the goal of an interrogation, or any other intelligence activity. Lies are easy to get – just talk to a conservative.
Mr. Duff, my sources are classified, and are only available to people with both a need and right to know, as I was as a linguist [Russian] and interrogator in the Air Force component of the National Security Agency. After I left the military, I was in law enforcement as a criminal investigator.
When you are seeking to try people in court, the apparent goal in the “War on Terror”, it makes a great deal of difference whether any intelligence or information that is gathered is not tainted by criminal action, which torture is under both US and international law.
Tricking or forcing a false confession has no value in intelligence, only in propaganda.
A good intelligence interrogator is only interested in the truth, and you can’t get the truth with torture. Real intelligence relies on real facts, not on fantasies conceived by a subject in hopes of ending the pain. The US intelligence community has wasted man centuries of time tracing down false leads produced by torture. I worked the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces portfolio, where a mistake could result in a large, glass-lined, radioactive hole. I haven’t noticed any of those, so I think the methods I was taught and used were effective, and torture was never even considered.
“Well, for a brief time I was actually an army interrogator and so I do know a little where-of I speak!” – Duffy
How brief, Duffy? And do we need to ask why you were removed from that position, or can we assume that your participation in incidents like the one you braggingly describe got you put on report by your superiors, who, to no one’s surprise, actually WERE interested in the truth of the “confessions” you obtained by force or by guile?
Getting someone to “confess” is not hard. The means for doing that have been known at least since the Middle Ages. But “confessions” like that do not constitute intelligence in any meaningful sense of the term. You want to bring a spy or an agent before a court, have them convicted and imprisoned for life or executed? You’re going to have to do a lot better than faking the carbon copies (how old are you, anyway, Duffy?) of a QM receipt. These days, even the worst court… hell, even the U.S. Supreme Court, in its current conservative configuration… looks askance at “evidence” of that sort. Let me put this bluntly, Duffy: you are lying about this incident. Torture or guile not only did not “work a treat” for you; it was probably the very act that got you booted from the case.
I have no first-hand knowledge of Bryan’s intelligence credentials. But based on everything else I’ve read… and I do mean everything… about obtaining information by interrogation, his descriptions ring true, and yours, Duffy, stink like rotten fish. When will you realize that this has nothing to do with your politics, Bryan’s politics or even my politics? If you plan to continue irking us in threads, you’re going to need to curb your pathological tendency to lie.
Duffy, intelligence-gathering is not a game: if you’re involved in it for some perverse pleasure of being clever, rather than for the sole purpose of obtaining reliable information, you could do the Western world a favor by switching to plumbing as your primary occupation. At least plumbers help people get rid of shit…
It appears the thing you two are forgetting is what nation Mr. Duffer did this for. What nation was infamous for show trials of political dissidents with coerced confessions of being a spy in the pay of the West?
Yes, Steve and Bryan, based on what the Duffer wrote above, we now have firm proof that he is a Soviet defector to the UK who, prior to his defection, was a Soviet interrogator gathering evidence for their “show trial” system.
Of course, the vast majority of those coerced confessions were bunk. But that didn’t matter to the Soviets, they just wanted an excuse to send critics of their regime to the gulags. If you’re trying to solve actual real crimes rather than just get rid of a dissident, on the other hand… well. Not so useful, since I can guarantee that if subjected to sufficient waterboarding any of us here would confess to murdering President Abraham Lincoln, despite the rather awkward fact that none of us are over 150 years old…
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Similar to Bryan, almost all of what I did was/is classified. And as Bryan (and everyone else I’ve ever spoken to or heard speak on the subject who *actually* does know what they are talking about, Bryan’s comment sums it all up succinctly.
The technical intel word for that view, Mr. Duff, is “bullshit”.
Exactly correct. Only two kinds of people use and condone torture. Those who enjoy it, and those who don’t have a clue. All I can say is from my personal experiences (especially in Cambodia), is that the KR used torture either to get people to confess to something they most probably were not guilty of, or to terrorize people. And some who were captured admitted as such. My team had to befiend people we would much rather have instantly killed, so that we could get them to tell us what we needed to know. We hated it, but knew it had to be done, and it worked. And we discovered that a few of them originally had been normal people, forced to do things because they had families and they only way they could continue, was to shut every good thing out of their minds, and become the bastards they had to be. Some say (who are ignorant) that they should have just said *no* and been executed. But it doesn’t work like that. If they had said *no*, they would have been executed for sure, and their families and entire village. Once we discovered this, all we had to do was protect their families and/or village, and they told us everything they knew and even helped get payback on their former master’s! And *THAT* is how it works! By the end of the year, word had spread far and wide, and we had KR guerrilla’s looking for us to surrender if we would help their families. In the end, that what finished the KR reign of terror in Cambodia, not all the lying Politicians who take credit for doing nothing but making things harder than they needed to be and getting in the way! And it was the same in other places I served. Not everyone who does evil was evil to begin with, and not everyone who appears to be a goody-goody or a saint, actually is!
“Anyway, in one last effort allow me to repeat myself, slowly and clearly: …” – Duffy
To paraphrase Einstein (at least it’s attributed to him), “Insanity is [saying] the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Duffy, remember who you’re talking to here. At least two among us have actual intelligence backgrounds (not your kind, the kind you get from reading cheap paperback fiction), and even those of us who don’t are a lot less naive than anyone who actually believes, as you claim to believe, that torture obtains information. It is pretty obvious that you have never “walked the walk” nor are you willing to learn from those who have. Why should we bother hearing your tall tales… again?
You’re a fraud. Repeating yourself one more time at best reinforces that fact. Spare us. Spare yourself. Face it: you enjoy the idea of torturing people. Face this, too: you’ve never done it except in your dreams.
Now go play in your own sandbox.
Well, for a brief time I was actually an army interrogator …
it would be irresponsible of me not to speculate 🙂 but perhaps your career was brief because the “information” you acquired was useless.
Awe, pull the other flipper. Next you’re going to inform us that you are actually the Queen of England!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Mr. Duff, intelligence gathered by torture ranks right down there with rumor. A true “intelligence picture” requires hard, provable facts. Those facts have to be accepted by the toughest and most skeptical court in the world, “intelligence analysts”, because it is often the difference between life and death for large groups of people.
Torture results in wedding parties being bombed, and flocks of sheep being incinerated, not in the degradation of the offensive capabilities of the enemy. If you torture an intelligent man, he will provide information that is almost guaranteed to blow-up in your face.
When the people in charge go around and pick-up everyone wearing a Seiko watch, don’t try to sell me on the idea that they know what they are doing, or that they are effective. If torture was effective, the majority of those sent to Guantanamo wouldn’t have proved to be innocent of anything. GITMO was touted as holding the “worst of the worst”, and yet, reasonable investigation proved that the majority were guilty of nothing. That’s the “success” of torture.
“Actually it was counter-intelligence, …” – Duffy
Bargain counter intelligence? (H/T Peter Schickele, who wrote about a “bargain counter tenor.”)
Give us a break, Duffy. Or at least find another tall tale.