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pecuniumBecause I spent much of today playing "whack-a-mole" at HuffPo.
Why?
Because George Bush admitted to more crimes.
Specifically he said he'd had Khalid Sheik Mohammad tortured, and would do it again.
He said he'd do it to, "save lives," but we know that's a myth; the myth of the honest answer.
The Washington Post had a recent article explaining that very thing (which anyone who has been reading me for the past six years... hence the growing collections of prize tickets from playing whack-a-mole with the torture mongers and apologists, has known for oh... six years, or so).
Dan Froomkin has a nice wrap up on the subject, but the money quotation is probably this:
Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.
That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.
Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."
What a surprise. Beat on someone and he tells lies. Those lies can't be corroborated (or disproven) and limited assets to chase down plot and threats are diverted into blind alleys of wasted effort.
And George Bush, says he'd do it all over again, "to save lives."
Arrogant, ignorant, asshole.
Ok, so what does this mean? It ought to mean we try him, haul the evils he caused to happen into the harsh light of day, and (in a just world) sentence him to live the rest of his (I'd hope very long) life in prison.
If not, we can hope he is foolish enough to accept an invitation to Spain.
For really poetic justice someone might, while he's visiting Poppy in Kennebunkport, decide to invoke the "Noriega Doctrine" his father created, and swoop in and kidnap him to the Hague.
None of those, sadly, are going to happen. Therefore I shan't buy the champagne just yet, but a person can dream.
Why?
Because George Bush admitted to more crimes.
Specifically he said he'd had Khalid Sheik Mohammad tortured, and would do it again.
He said he'd do it to, "save lives," but we know that's a myth; the myth of the honest answer.
The Washington Post had a recent article explaining that very thing (which anyone who has been reading me for the past six years... hence the growing collections of prize tickets from playing whack-a-mole with the torture mongers and apologists, has known for oh... six years, or so).
Dan Froomkin has a nice wrap up on the subject, but the money quotation is probably this:
Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.
That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.
Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."
What a surprise. Beat on someone and he tells lies. Those lies can't be corroborated (or disproven) and limited assets to chase down plot and threats are diverted into blind alleys of wasted effort.
And George Bush, says he'd do it all over again, "to save lives."
Arrogant, ignorant, asshole.
Ok, so what does this mean? It ought to mean we try him, haul the evils he caused to happen into the harsh light of day, and (in a just world) sentence him to live the rest of his (I'd hope very long) life in prison.
If not, we can hope he is foolish enough to accept an invitation to Spain.
For really poetic justice someone might, while he's visiting Poppy in Kennebunkport, decide to invoke the "Noriega Doctrine" his father created, and swoop in and kidnap him to the Hague.
None of those, sadly, are going to happen. Therefore I shan't buy the champagne just yet, but a person can dream.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 02:50 pm (UTC)Now that the current president has made details of the procedures used public, Mr. Thiessen is free to reveal other details that were classified. It seems the interrogation methods were designed to fall short of being legally torture, while still giving subjects something they could resist until they had decided they'd "had enough".
According to Thiessen:
You, of course, are free to declare Thiessen a liar. I suspect you will. This comment is not for you, because your mind is made up and mere facts are irrelevant. This comment is for those who might read you and believe yours is the only side of the story.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 06:59 pm (UTC)I see you have (though this is no surprise) stated my problem with you: This comment is not for you, because your mind is made up and mere facts are irrelevant.
When faced with two people of differing views you have chosen the one whom you like the answers of. Those who don't share that view (Myself, Chris Mackey, The FBI, The Justice Dept. Hans Scharff, The Inquisition) are closed minded, or lying.
Thiessen has some very good reasons to hold that what he did wasn't torture (and his formulation, "not legally torture" is telling), they don't have a whole lot to do with the facts.
That, "stunning" thing Zabudayah mentioned is irrelevant. The US teaches it's troops the same thing. Hold out until you can't; then tell what you have to.
The implication that this makes torture needful is nonsense, because the actual ability to avoid giving things up isn't about faith/ideology, and the problems with torture (that it's a useless system for gathering accurate data) don't change.
If they talk, at all, they will give up information. If they are tortured, lies will get into the mix.
As you say, my arguing with you is pointless; here or elsewhere, but there are those who will not see the failures in your argument, nor realise the compromised state of those you appeal to as experts.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-05 08:14 pm (UTC)So "torture" works.
Do you really mean to argue that detainees always tell the truth if they're not "tortured"?
An exercise in futility (fytte the first)
Date: 2010-06-06 04:42 am (UTC)Look at China. Guy confessed, to a capital charge. The victim wasn't dead.
The thing I keep saying, and which you keep trying to pretend you are in a better position to know than I am; because really, how many years have you spent studying interrogation and torture? I will wager, at long odds, I know more about torture, and how to apply it, than you do. I know I have more experience at interrogation than you to. I know more people who have done the job.
I have personal acquaintance with more torturers, and almost certainly more with people who have been tortured.
But you don't care; you have this narrative in your head that torture, "works", and, if what you want is for people to answer the questions it does "work". What it doesn't do is get reliably honest answers.
Ask Stockdale, ask McCain. Look at what they "gave up". I forget which of them rattled of baseball players as names for people in his squadron. That got some reprieve. As fibs go, it was good and bad. They were names which might be cross-checkable. That's bad (for values of bad that involve trying to keep the enemy from torturing you some more for telling provable lies).
It's good because it's a list of names he could remember.
As to the question of "truth if not tortured," stop trying to be obtuse. You know that's neither what I said, nor what I meant. If a prisoner wants to lie, she will lie. If I torture her the odds of lies go up (because the odds are she knows nothing).
If I have enough prisoners, and I don't give them incentives to lie, then I can sift for the truth. And, the simple fact of the matter is, most people tell the truth. Even more than that, most people are horrible liars. Absent encouragement they can't tell the same lie repeatedly.
If I don't have a narrative I am chasing down, then the lies won't match, and I can drop them from the list of potential theories/facts. I can stop chasing them.
If, however, I have a story to pursue, and I am willing to beat it out of someone, the lies will converge, and they will look true. I will have no good way to drop them from the mix.
(continued)
Re: An exercise in futility (fytte the first)
Date: 2010-06-06 04:44 am (UTC)On balance, I will take my utilitarian argument (that I can get good info without torture; and that even if torture is capable of getting honest answers, non-torture is more reliable, and faster) and my moral argument (that it's wrong, and the specious argument that it saves lives; invalidated by the utilitarian argument), and stick to that then to join Conservatives (such as yourself) who aver "Liberals" don't have, i.e. a moral absolute, and then say that the word torture is used too much, and the deed not enough in reference to things they decried when the N. Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians and the N. Vietnamese did them.
Which, as I have noted elsewhen, makes you a torture monger. That you misrepresent my position, comes; from years of interaction, as no surprise. It is, actually, completely in keeping with the rest of your actions. The mass of evidence is against you; you present an abstract; from a small number of people, who most certainly have reason to wish torture works (or at least was legal), and offer it up as refutation of a position I don't hold (i.e. no one ever tells the truth when tortured; which is not my argument), and then get offended because those who know, and argue from that knowledge, that torture, is both a moral wrong, and functionally useless, are "insulting your intelligence." You, elsewhere, say that the position of those who oppose torture is lazy, that we aren't willing to contemplate the level of dirt we need to get on our hands to keep our civilisation. Please.
That is, of course, the same sort of strawmanning you decry in that post. It, as you say you don't suffer gladly, is an insult to our intelligence (which is more favorable than calling it a willful lie. I am not actually willing to rule that out, all things considered, but I shall be charitable enough to do no more than publicly entertain the concept; since if I don't, someone else might).
Really, there isn't anything more to say.
You have a belief, on either a desire to torture; for reasons incomprehensible, or a willingness to accept the opinion of a compromised minority; in the face of centuries of evidence the contrary. You are either unable to understand the position of those who disagree with you, or perfectly willing to mis-represent them in an attempt to make them refutable.
Those are the reasons your arguments don't sway me. I have experience which contradicts the accounts you appeal to. I have corroboration of that experience from people I know, and respect; from several nations. I have an (overwhelming) textual record with which my experience, and those accounts are supported.
Against that I have you complaining that a small handful of guys who tortured people are saying they got good info, and I won't cop to them being right.
Hrmn... Faced with a rebuttal like that, why yes, I guess I'll just forget all that other stuff and jump on the torture apologist bandwagon.
Or not
no subject
Date: 2010-06-06 07:56 am (UTC)If somebody who knows you're in the Resistance is arrested by the Gestapo, are you going to act as if torture didn't work?
If you know one of your squadron's pilots is down in North Vietnam, are you going to assume he can keep safe all the secrets in his head?
These aren't bets you can afford to lose.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 05:37 pm (UTC)I wrote my side of the ongoing argument in an open letter (http://ritestuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/open-letter-to-interrogater.html) on my blog, and you're welcome to read it for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 07:00 am (UTC)Gathering information?
Creating fear and terror to cow the population of an occupied territory? (Niccolo Machiavelli, that byword for devious politics, said things about that, including the importance of a Prince not being hated.)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 02:46 pm (UTC)Any or all of the above. It depends on who's using it.
Terry only addresses the context of extracting information, which is understandable. But the notion of an interrogation as a quest for truth, rather than obtaining the necessary pretense for some sort of justice theater, is a fairly recent invention, a few centuries old at most.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 07:34 am (UTC)You're just throwing up amoral legalistic quibbles. You seem disconnected from the reality. You're playing in the Tarentino sandbox.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 02:58 pm (UTC)Then it's a silly definition. When feeding a man feet-first through a shredder (a-la Saddam Hussein) is equated with sending a child to its room for a "time-out", the word "torture" becomes meaningless.
Terry is welcome to support his definition with a cite, or to admit that he was engaging in hyperbole.
Or, even to admit that in interrogator circles, "coercion" is synonymous with "torture", at which point his definition ceases to clarify.
Translation: "You're throwing up objections for which I have no substantial answer, so I'll throw dirt all around and hope people think it's meaningful."
No, you don't get to play that way.
I have serious moral objections to taking a loathsome practice like torture and watering it down by lumping it together with "time-outs". When people start having to ask "do you mean 'torture-torture' or 'just a little torture', the word loses is power to shock.
Whether Terry likes it or not, there is a line between real torture and a "time-out". Whether this line falls above, below, or somewhere in the middle of the list of "enhanced interrogation techniques" is something on which good people of good will can disagree. Terry loses his claim to a reasoned argument when his defense of his position is to call those who disagree with him stupid and evil.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 04:57 pm (UTC)God alone knows what you'd call a D.I. at Parris Island.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 05:02 pm (UTC)"Any physical or mental coercion -- ANY" would certainly include the D.I. at Parris Island.
Your choices are to accept that under the definition Terry uses, both the "time-out" and the Parris Island D.I. are torture, or accept that Terry is engaging in argument by tendentious redefinition.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 06:57 pm (UTC)No, no, actual reading comprehension is also an option open to us.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 07:32 pm (UTC)What am I missing in those six words?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 04:40 am (UTC)What am I missing in those six words?
... most of what pretty much everyone - not just Terry - who has done any amount of interrogation OR dealing with prisoners or war OR being one has had to say on the topic pretty much, well, ever?
You might as well argue that me going to aikido and getting dropped on my ass by an acquaintance is the exact equivalent of a stranger hauling off and hitting me for no reason at all on the street. And for pretty much the same reason: in one of those scenarios I have reason to believe both that this behaviour is intended to benefit me, by improving my technique, and that should it ever go one inch beyond what WILL benefit me, someone will step in and help me.
And that's before we consider the fact that in BOTH of your examples, you're not talking about behaviour that is intended to produce accurate information. You have in fact produced two examples in which the intended result is compliance - which torture will produce.
Compliance does NOT, however, produce reliably accurate information. It produces all the information your subject has and quite a lot s/he doesn't and a side order of 'shit s/he thinks you want to hear'.
You seem to want to argue that because it is possible to get accurate information via torture it works - talking of definitions pulled out of one's ass. Sure it's possible.
It is just not possible to figure out which bits those are, of all the stuff you'll get.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 05:20 am (UTC)I find your reference to "actual reading comprehension" deeply ironic.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 05:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 05:29 am (UTC)You admit the lack of citation you refer isn't an actual lack, but rather a rhetorical trope (unless you decided at this remove, after year of citation that this time it was worth your time).
I'm not willing to continue allowing you to be a dishonest actor.
So, not because I am incapable of dealing with dissent (certainly years of forbearance here ought to prevent such a charge from having traction), but rather because you admit to dishonesty in your practice, I'm putting paid to your account and closing the book on you.
(frozen) Fytte the penultimate
Date: 2010-06-08 06:56 pm (UTC)It's a straightforward interpretation of Terry's definition, linked from the "open letter".
"Any physical or mental coercion -- ANY" would certainly include the D.I.
at Parris Island.
Nonsense. You ignore that I keep citing the source of my definition: The Geneva Conventions of 1948 [a ratified treaty, therefore in equal stature with the Constitution; supported by the International Convention Against Torture [signed by Reagan, ratified; and so also of equal standing} and the War Crimes Act of 1996 {passed by a Republican Congress} US Code TITLE 18 PART I CHAPTER 118 > § 2441)
Then you ignore that this definition is one which relates to prisoners. The Recruit (be it Parris Island or Ft. Leonard Wood) isn't a prisoner. He can, actually, get out of the situation (it's hard; because the gov't doesn't like it, but the option is there). The prime difference is the recruit knows what is going on. She is certain the Drill isn't actually going to kill her. She knows it will end. Remove those certainties; that sense of being in this place, as this time, suffering these things as an active participant, with agency, and it's a different game altogether.
And things, which in that context I have no practical, nor moral, quibbles with (which I might even favor), change nature; and become torture. But this is nothing knew. I've addressed this in the past.
Terry only addresses the context of extracting information, Um... No. I've written a lot of words on the subject; no small number of them about the practical problems, but I've also written a fair bit on the things torture is good for (extracting confessions, controlling a populace, etc.).
As to this the notion of an interrogation as a quest for truth, rather than obtaining the necessary pretense for some sort of justice theater, is a fairly recent invention, a few centuries old at most.
Are you seriously trying to argue that only those ideas which are older than a couple of centuries are worthy of being supported? Leaving aside the going on more than 1,000 year evidences that torture doesn't work; as exemplified in the practices of the Inquisition, that opens a huge can of worms. It, taken in the way you try to take make a "logical extension" of my position, means the US is a wasted effort. Freedom of religion is a wasted effort (we can go back to burning witches and heretics as the stake). The right against self-incrimination (to bring it back to the topic at hand) is a wasted effort.
It's not an actual argument; it's an appeal to authority; and a weak authority (time/tradition), because it fails to address the actual usefulness, or morality, of the subject.
(frozen) Fytte the last
Date: 2010-06-08 06:57 pm (UTC)You dislike the ways in which I perceive, and so portray, those who advocate for torture. Be they fools who ignore the evidence of those who have done interrogations (from the Inquisition, to the present), in favor of presidential speechwriter and politicians, or those whom I say favor evil (like Eugene Volokh who values it as a social control).
I only lose the claim to a reasoned defense if my accusations of stupidity, and evil, are being made ad hominem. If I said torture doesn't work because Pol Pot was an evil man. then yes, you are right, that's not reasoned argument.
If, however I said, Joseph Stalin liked to use torture, which (for reasons x,y,z, we know to not work, and for reasons a,b,c, which are evil in their ends), and therefore he was either ill-informed, stupid, or evil. I have made a reasoned argument that he is, at least one of those things.
Whether Terry likes it or not, there is a line between real torture and a "time-out".
Whether you like it, or not, I have never argued otherwise.
Whether this line falls above, below, or somewhere in the middle of the list of "enhanced interrogation techniques" is something on which good people of good will can disagree.
There is a caveat in there, which, I think, is telling. People of good will. We disagree. So the question is really, whether, or not, we are people of good will. I'd have to say, from more than a decade of watching you argue; on any number of subjects, in much the same way, I am not certain you are a person of good will.
Terry loses his claim to a reasoned argument when his defense of his position is to call those who disagree with him stupid and evil.
It may hurt your feelings to that your support for torture puts you in a camp with Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein and any other number of stupid and evil people, but that's not my problem.
You're the one advocating torture.
(frozen) Re: Fytte the last
Date: 2010-06-08 07:01 pm (UTC)I am not quite to the point of being done with you; but I am tired of repeating myself, as you repeat the same trope (Look, this person; who has an incentive to lie disagrees with you. Admit you are wrong, or admit you are blind to the evidence, etc., etc., etc..)
I've let you speak your piece, but I have only so many walls to bang my head against, and hitting the same one, the same way, shows either that I am unable to learn, or that I enjoy it.
So, my place, my choice. I'm tired of it.
I'm done.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-07 07:10 pm (UTC)If you know one of your squadron's tankers was captured in El Sadi by those guys in the HUMVV, are you going to assume he can keep safe all the secrets in his head?
You're right, they aren't bets you can afford to lose. On the other hand, they're irrelevant to this discussion, because they're the same bets whether it's the Nazis (or our allies in that war, for that matter) or the NVA, or those of us in the so-called civilized world who (usually) follow the rules.
You always *plan* for the worst in these games, because it happens sometimes. I see no evidence in your arguments that torture makes the worst more likely to happen, however (except to the tortured, of course).
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 07:20 am (UTC)That's the problem. There is "evidence" out there, some in still-secret files, and it is enough to assauge any doubts that the torture-mongers might have.
One of the points of SERE training is to give the potential captive a framework for resistance. They know how much time they need to buy. So you torture people, and eventually they start talking, and you can say "torture works".
It looks like an example of "correlation is not causation" to me.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 05:53 pm (UTC)a rational opponent will change their plans once they know that someone with knowledge of those plans has been captured.
Hence, even if torture gets accurate statements about operations previously planned, it still doesn't "work". Torture will not produce militarily useful information.
That's multiple utilitarian arguments plus moral arguments.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 07:37 pm (UTC)I was paralleling your arguments to show that the method of interrogation doesn't bear as strongly to the argument as the "we need the tool" people want it to, provided it has a reasonable chance of working.
I go from there to "Hmm, someone who did this for a living says that the 'less evil' way works, for (and if I misquote him, I hope he won't mind much) 'convinc[ing] this guy to give us the information we need to kill his buddies'" (which I think anyone reasonable would consider a higher barrier than 'convinc[ing] this guy to give us the information that will stop him from killing my buddies') and say that given that we don't need the tool, and it's wrong to use it, WTP?
People have this idea that "only torture will work." They have yet to give me a convincing demonstration of that. And anyway, the chance of me being in a terrorist attack is about one-hundredth that of me being hit by a car crossing a random street, and I do that 14-odd times a day. I don't seem to need torture to make that chance half as likely; why should I do anything about something 1% as likely? Especially when it compromises my and my country's principles?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 07:00 pm (UTC)Because interrogation DOES work.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-08 08:13 pm (UTC)1: Someone who has information has been captured.
2: If they give up that information, plans will be disrupted.
3: Change plans.
It doesn't matter how the information gets to the enemy, what matters is the enemy might obtain it.
One does not plan for what the enemy will do, but for what they can do.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 05:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-09 05:28 am (UTC)Interrogation does work. If the person is interrogated and gives up the info, then it's known. Since interrogation gives reliable information it will be acted on.
Torture might, it might not (depends on a host of factors, not least how big the information stream is; which is why it isn't useful as a system, but I've said that; repeatedly).
Regardless; the assumption becomes the plan is compromised.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-13 02:28 pm (UTC)Yes, your statement "interrogation doesn't work, either" is true, as long as one or more of the following is also true:
1. Your adversary realizes that someone with information on current operations has been captured. (certainly not guaranteed if your adversary is a loosely connected group or has poor communications)
2. Your adversary realizes that Terry's 3-step procedure should be implemented. (professionals are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs)
3. Your adversary implements Terry's 3-step procedure properly. (sometimes decision-makers make bad choices)
4. The person you captured isn't aware of more information than your adversary realizes (for example: you capture Bill, who was scheduled to be part of Operation Delicate Thunder - adversary changes plans for that, but adversary fails to take into account that Bill's roommate Dave was involved in planning for Operation Momentary Reason, and Bill & Dave discussed Momentary Reason from time to time).
5. Your information-gathering goal is ONLY concerned with what your adversary's current plans are.
I want to address #5 in depth, because it's probably the single most important of the items I've listed.
If the organization doing the capturing has any analytic capabilities, even if your adversary ALWAYS effectively changes their plans as soon as any bit of information about the plan drops into your hands, you will get information you can use from interrogation. And that information will be more useful, because it's far less likely to be corrupted with false information that will inevitably show up if you use torture.
For the benefit of those readers who don't know much about intelligence analysis, I'm going to list the sorts of useful bits of information about the adversary that you may be able to get from interrogation: how they are organized, the way they plan, techniques and procedures they use, their vulnerabilities, what they do for logistics.