Does Torture Work?
Former CIA Director Hayden and Bush's Attorney General Mukasey published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week that argued, in essence, that using torture works.
The fact that they, and former Vice President Cheney, are still making the argument is more than enough reason why President Obama needed to lay bare the "torture memos" that provided both the details and justification for the use of torture during the Bush regime.
As a country, we need to emerge from this debate having placed the argument that "torture works" outside of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse once and for all.
In considering whether "torture works" the first question is: what do we mean by "works"? Torture has been used for centuries to achieve a variety of goals. It has been used to force subjects to tell what they know, to confess to crimes, to renounce their faith.
There is little question that torture gets a response from its victims. That's why its practitioners find it "useful." But that is also what makes its results completely unreliable. It isn't hard for anyone to imagine that they would say pretty much anything to make the pain stop if they believed they were drowning, or if their joints felt they would break after they had hung by their arms for hours, or if they were repeatedly slammed against the wall, or if they had been left naked and shivering for hours in the cold and periodically showered with cold water, or if they had been confined in a small box for hours with insects. All of these were methods approved by the Bush Justice Department.
These are but the latest innovations in the tradition of ingenious, sadistic methods of inflicting pain and psychological torment. Over the centuries, torturers have invented machines like the rack to gradually tear apart people's limbs. They have used rubber hoses to beat the bottom of people's feet to a pulp. They have become adept at removing fingernails, and drilling on teeth without an anesthetic. They have learned to connect the exact amount of electric current a victim's testicles or nipples in order to inflict maximum pain without ultimately killing the subject. And of course there has always been the ever-popular old-fashioned beating. While these were not on the list of approved methods, they differ only modestly from those on the "approved list." All inflict excruciating physical or psychological pain.
It is precisely the fact that torture inflicts pain that makes it hard to believe the results of the intelligence that is gathered, or the truthfulness of a confession, or the sincerity of a renunciation of faith. That's why most professionals who specialize in interrogation reject the reliability of the information gained by torture, and why courts throw out confessions obtained by torture.
That in fact is why we have the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution - to prevent the coerced confessions that were commonplace in 18th Century Europe. Remember, the Fifth Amendment is not just about protecting the rights of the accused. It is also about protecting society from the coerced, false confession that leaves the real criminal on the street.
In fact in Chicago, just a few years ago, a particular police Lieutenant specialized in illegally obtaining false confessions by torture. The emergence of DNA evidence has since proved that many of the convictions resulting from those confessions were wrong - and the real criminals escaped justice.
Hayden and Mukasey would have us believe that only the "bad guys" were subject to torture. But of course we know that wasn't true - that hundreds of innocent people who were rounded up off the streets of Iraq were subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the contractors at Abu Ghraib. We know that many of the detainees shipped to Guantanamo were turned over to our forces by bounty hunters and were innocent of anything except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that didn't stop some of them from being subjected to various forms of "enhanced interrogation."
The fact is that once you go down the slippery slope of tossing aside the law and allowing some people to be tortured, there is nothing to stop each and every one of us from being the subject in the chair with the light glaring down that someone in authority has decided - mistakenly or not - is a "security risk."
There is only one thing that we know about torture that works for certain: torture debases us. It doesn't just debase its victims or those who perpetrate it. It debases all of us in whose name it is conducted. It debases us to others in the world - who lose respect for our values and grow to hate our society. But just as importantly, it debases us to ourselves. It debases our self-respect and our respect for the institutions that make us civilized human beings.
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean American writer and professor at Duke University. He is also author of Death and the Maiden. He also became an expert on torture. In the fall of 2006 he published a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post.
It still haunts me, the first time - it was in Chile, in October 1973 - that I met someone who'd been tortured. To save my life, I had sought refuge in the Argentine Embassy some weeks after the coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, a government for which I had worked. And then, suddenly, one afternoon, there he was. A large-boned man, gaunt and yet strangely flabby, with eyes like a child, eyes that could not stop blinking and a body that could not stop shivering.
That is what stays with me - that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell and the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory.It was his image, in fact, that swirled up from the past as I pondered the current political debate in the United States about the practicality of torture. Something in me must have needed to resurrect the victim, force my fellow citizens here to spend a few minutes with the eternal iciness that had settled into the man's heart and flesh, and demand that they take a good hard look at him before anyone dare maintain that, to save lives, it might be necessary to inflict unbearable pain on a fellow human being. Perhaps the optimist in me hoped that this damaged Argentine man could, all these decades later, help shatter the perverse innocence of contemporary Americans, just as he had burst the bubble of ignorance protecting the young Chilean I used to be, someone who back then had encountered torture mainly through books and movies and newspaper reports.
That is not, however, the only lesson that today's ruthless world can teach from the distant man condemned to shiver forever.
All those years ago, that torture victim kept moving his lips, trying to articulate an explanation, muttering the same words over and over. "It was a mistake," he repeated, and in the next few days I pieced together his sad and foolish tale. He was an Argentine revolutionary who fled his homeland and, as soon as he crossed the mountains into Chile, had begun to boast about what he would do to the military there if it staged a coup, about his expertise with arms of every sort, about his colossal stash of weapons. Bluster and braggadocio - and every word of it false.
But how could he convince those men who were beating him, hooking his penis to electric wires and waterboarding him? How could he prove to them that he had been lying, prancing in front of his Chilean comrades, just trying to impress the ladies with his fraudulent insurgent persona?
Of course, he couldn't. He confessed to anything and everything they wanted to drag from his hoarse, howling throat; he invented accomplices and addresses and culprits; and then, when it became apparent that all this was imaginary, he said he was subjected to further ordeals.
There was no escape.
That is the hideous predicament of the torture victim. It was always the same story, what I discovered in the ensuing years, as I became an unwilling expert on all manner of torments and degradations; my life and my writing overflowing with grief from every continent. Each of those mutilated spines and fractured lives - Chinese, Guatemalan, Egyptian, Indonesian, Iranian, Uzbek, need I go on? - all of them, men and women alike, surrendered the same story of essential asymmetry, where one man has all the power in the world and the other has nothing but pain, where one man can decree death at the flick of a wrist and the other can only pray that the wrist will be flicked soon.
It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, it has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question - does torture work? - when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.
I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress - such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 - are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.
I find these arguments - and there are many more - to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.
Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?
Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be the hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago's sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering ? *
* Ariel Dorfman, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, October 28, 2006
Robert Creamer is a long time political organizer and strategist and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.
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aren't there some memos from obama guys that say advanced interr. techniques did work to give intel from the "man-made disaster" fellows
Did the soviet gulag work, did the old guard of Iraq with its' liquidation system work in the long term, no. Neither did Pol Pots' system or Marcos and all the other save the country against danger policies by using what ever is required.
The primitive defence system is the basic and oldest humans have developed through their thousands of years of evolving.
It creats in the modern times enormous hatreds and the primitives must be removed from places where they can inflict damage if the specie is to survive the coming global problems which will require the cooperation of all working together in a unified effort when the cold north wind screams across the frozen barrens.
We can be glad ,for the frozen times will also re-freeze the methane. Though such is still years and years in the future.
The question should not be whether torture works. Im sure there are circumstances to support both sides. The question should be why do we as the great United States of America flub the rules when it doesnt convenience our self-serving agenda.
If we're going to break the doctrines of the Geneva Convention and United Nations, why join? Why not just be an entity onto ourselves and the rest of the world be damned? Forget rising above the immoral behavior of terrorist groups and rogue countries. Forget having alies and seeking support and cooperation from those countries who follow the rules of these organizations? Why not simply ignore all the rules and become one onto ourselves?
Oh, we did already? Humph, never mind.
Carry on.
If torture becomes acceptable to Americans, then the government will be able to extract a confession for anything out of anyone.
Is this what the conservatives want?
Torture is immoral.
I like torture if not for any reason then it is used on some really bad people. Who if they had the chance would cut your head off in a second.
You can't say it's all right to torture someone you hate without saying it's all right to torture someone you love. Somebody might even say there's a good enough reason to torture you. That's just the chance you take.
One thing that has always amazed me about conservatives support for torture and its allied procedures (special renditions, etc.), is that these are the very same wingnuts--the VERY SAME WINGNUTS--who are screaming about "losing our liberties.
Why do they suddenly think it is ok for any one person--it doesn't have to be the President even--to make that decision, to have that power? They scream libertarian slogans, and then they allow some bureaucrat to decide who to torture?
They claim not to want "the government" to control anything they do. Yet at the same time they want "the government" to decide who is a "bad guy?" How do they know "the government" won't decide that *they* are bad guys? Once you give "the government" that power, how do you know who it will be directed against?
It's because they no longer control the executive and administrative branches of the government. If they did, they'd still be asking liberals and moderates what liberties they've lost.
President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday. Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. The postive aspects of the interrogation was blacked out by the administration. Once again change that we can beleive in...but not for the better.
If you think it is better to torture people, even if doing so provides information, then please move out of my country to one that embraces your philosophy. Like, Germany, 1942.
Your statement that "The postive aspects of the interrogation was blacked out by the administration" is just the opinion of Dick Cheney, who has exactly as much credibility as you, that is, none at all.
Hopefully the Obama Admin. takes the gloves off and reveals those unreleased memos, as former Sen. Bob Graham has called for.
I think one can also obtain sinificant information if you torture suspected paedophiles, serial killers, rapists, drugdealers, girlfriends of drugdealers, petty thieves, grandmothers of petty thieves, corrupt politicians, people who hold an opinion that you don't agree with. So why stop at terrorists? Who decides to draw the line? Where to draw it, and when to draw it?
It is beyond ludicrous that the U.S. has been debating torture at all. What's the next debate for the next Republican Administration going to be? My fear is that it will be: "Is genocide ("cleansing of highly problematic subhumans") a legitimate foreign policy tool?
The madness has to stop. The Crazed Right cannot be permitted to redefine what humanity is.
The proof is in.
The White House torture program was created before there were any detainees. Before the war in Iraq began. The purpose of Bush's torture program was to find a link between 9/11 and Saddam, to find a justification to invade and occupy Iraq. Before the war began.
Rachel Maddow and Ron Suskind explain it all.
Part 1:
http://www
Part 2:
http://www
Please... MSNBC??!!
And she says, "...techni
People that believe this sort of stuff are scary... Where's the debate? Where's the counter point? There is none, it's MSNBC...
Wake-up, take a pill buddy.
'ingenious
Or, in the case of being the invading force in a foreign land (the agenda compromised, specious, and suspect, perhaps one should just get the hell out of Dodge, rather than trying to justify even more atrocity!
Good article by the way.
Whether torture works or not is really not the question. Rather there are two fundamental questions that citizens of the United States, and the government of the U.S., must answer with regard to this "dark side" business of torture. The first question is: SHOULD THE UNITED STATES ENGAGE IN TORTURE, using methods copied from the Chinese, North Koreans, Imperial Japan and other torturers in order to ensure our security? If the answer is YES, then the U.S. must go on record withdrawing from the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture as well as repealing several United States laws that ban torture. The second question: SHOULD THE UNITED STATES RENOUNCE ITS MORAL HIGH GROUND, against countries that systematically engage in TORTURE? I don't think we can have it both ways: condoning torture in the name of U.S National Security, while at the same time the U.S. remains as signatory to the Geneva Conventions, and the Convention against torture; as well as the most vocal critic of other governments that engage in torture.
We've got to flush the neocons' attempt to turn America into Sharon's Israel by using 9/11 to scare us into giving Bush a frightened carte blanche to "save" us by any means necessary. The neocons were fiendishly clever in trying to use the fear caused by 9/11 to make the public willing to abandon our most basic Constitutional values in the pursuit of security. The neocons rightly intuited that 9/11 was a sort of mini-Holocaust for the American public, so the neocons used the end of "Never again," as it is used in Israel, to justify virtually any means necessary to assure survival. Happily, the vast majority of Americans seems to have awakened from this neocon nightmare with a sense of total disgust over what was done in our name with the neocon ethic that the end of survival justifies any means to achieve it.
What on earth does Israel ahve to do with the decision in america to use or not use harsh interrogation techniques?
Many years ago I read a book called "Torture in the 80's", put out by Amnesty International, It talked mostly about S. America and S. Africa, (It was after all in the 80's). Forgive me for being a bit fuzzy on the details, I read it a long time ago; but it stated; (and the CIA did most of this research), that Torture to extract true confessions or info worked about 1% of the time. Engendering "Stockholm Syndrom" appearing to befriend the prisoner, isolate them from their support systems, "turning them", worked (I-seem-to
Torture DOES work, or I should say, it DID in S. America & S. Africa in cowing an entire poulation into more meek/submi
If torture works, (for info)1% of the time, why are we still having this discussion??
Read also Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" there are definitely some ways in which torture works, but not in the ways that are being discussed.
Reading about the Spanish Inquisition I can to the same conclusion. Torment and suffering and death was used as a means for the Church to subdue the masses and dictate behavior and seize wealth and resources.
torture or enhanced interrogation used to extract information about impending attacks is not the same thing as using it to get a confession.
The nuance shoudn;t be too hard for smart people to understand.
Yes, torture works: it works for the Al Qaeda recruiters preying on uneducated hopeless peasants, and it works on their funders and their fellow travellers to push on with their cause.
There's no simple solution, but Cheney wasn't even selling arms to the enemy: he was giving them away.
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