Cross posted at tpmcafe.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post detailing the techniques that John Yoo's recently declassified memorandum would allow military interrogators to use against detainees. Some of the more despicable methods included gouging out eyes, cutting off limbs, and pouring acid on the detainee. These methods are obvious, and that is perhaps why they are so despicable. The victims of these techniques would be permanently and horribly disfigured. If they survived the torture, they would be able to point to their bodies to explain what happened to them. That is why, even if an interrogator believed such things were legal, it is unlikely these techniques would be used.
Waterboarding and stress positions, however, are not likely to leave any lasting marks on detainees. "Waterboarding" is a form of choking with water in which a towel is forced into a detainee's mouth and water poured over the towel and into his or her throat. "Stress positions" can mean many different things including forced standing, lifting a person off the ground by handcuffs, or the use of restraints to keep a person in a specific position for a long period of time. These tortures are extremely painful and potentially life threatening, but unlike eye-gouging and acid, they leave no marks.
As Darius Rejali argues in his masterful book, Torture and Democracy, it is this fact that explains why modern democracies choose these specific tortures and why they are spreading around the world. The argument is simple: Democracies avoid scarring tortures because they are subject to public oversight. Furthermore, since the 1960s and 1970s, many authoritarian states have began adopting clean torture techniques because international organizations began documenting and exposing the use of scarring tortures.
It is not, however, a simple book. Rejali, an Iranian-American professor of political science at Reed College, is treading on dangerous ground. A work like this, if it is not handled well, is easily open to charges of bias from the right wing. One can easily imagine Bill O'Reilly accusing the author of 'blaming America first' and excusing the behavior of authoritarian regimes. Rejali ultimately succeeds because his book is even-handed, encyclopedic, thoroughly documented, and carefully reasoned.
Torture and Democracy can be split into two equally significant parts. In the first part, Rejali recounts the history of modern torture, and in the second, he discusses the continued use of torture and contemporary debates. Accurate histories allow us the opportunity to think clearly. Without knowing where specific tortures come from, how the tortures have been used, and how the techniques have spread, it is impossible to escape the dangerously mistaken folk histories that often dominate our public discourse on torture.
It is not the case, for example, that modern torture techniques originated with the Nazis. As Rejali documents, the Nazi regime had little use for clean techniques as its torturers were not likely to face prosecution. As a result, Nazi torturers often whipped, beat, and choked their victims. Similarly, the Soviets had no special techniques. Despite popular beliefs, Pavlov played no role in securing confessions for Stalin's show trials. Instead, the Soviets relied on methods that were well known to and used by police in the United States until the 1940s.
Specifically, Stalin's torturers relied on continuous questioning, sleep deprivation, bright lights, forced standing and forced sitting, clean beatings, and hot and cold rooms. The use of these clean techniques by the Soviet Union is consistent with Rejali's hypothesis about the public oversight of torture in democracies. The show trials were designed for international consumption, and to be effective propaganda, it was necessary that the defendants appeared to be confessing voluntarily. Evidence of torture would have harmed the credibility of the trials.
Furthermore, these and many other clean tortures did not originate with the Soviets or with the Nazis. Rather, many contemporary clean tortures are traceable to British military punishments and the practices of American slave traders. Slave traders had strong incentive to avoid scarring slaves in that scars might indicate to a potential buy that the slave was a disciplinary problem.
Despite documenting that many clean tortures originated with democracies, Rejali is very careful to limit the scope of this history. He strongly rejects the hypothesis advanced by Noam Chomsky and others which maintains that the United States acted as a universal distributor of torture techniques during the 20th century. Chomsky believes that the United States trained authoritarian regimes to torture, especially in Latin America, and consequently if it were not for the United States, there would be significantly less torture in world. Rejali examines and rejects this hypothesis because it is not supported by the evidence. There is no uniformity in the techniques used by the countries that the United States is supposed to have trained, and in many cases the techniques used by those countries have histories that predate U.S. training.
As he proceeds, Rejali continually clears away myths, folk histories, and baseless hypotheses. Electroconvulsive therapy is not related to electrotorture. No one was thrown from a helicopter in Vietnam. Torture cannot be conducted scientifically. It will always remain low tech. There are no "truth serums." This is the value of an accurate history. Torture is widely and rightly believed to be entirely unacceptable. It has thus become a taboo shrouded in myth and popular misconceptions. Those misconceptions grow as they are retold in movies and television which relish in violating taboos, and as they are passed down by interrogators and torturers. We must always be careful about the stories we tell ourselves.
Of course much of this does not touch on the most important issue: Does torture work? Rejali addresses this in the second part of his book and again approaches it with particular insight. This question--"Does it work?"--is behind the continued misunderstanding of torture in the public mind and the use of euphemistic language by the press. It is this question that turns torture into "enhanced" or "aggressive" interrogation. If torture works, then its use cannot be condemned entirely--if it works, it belongs on the continuum of acceptable methods of interrogation.
Rejali finds that torture does not work, but again, he avoids simple answers. Part of the problem with our public discourse on torture is an inability to get beyond theoretical moral arguments. One side argues that torture is never right. The other side argues that it might be necessary to save lives. One side adopts a deontological view, the other reasons by utility, and there is no way to bridge their theories. This is about as much as can be contained in a typical cable news segment. Rejali cuts through this morass by relying instead on social science and concrete evidence.
As Rejali argues, it is not a simple matter of whether torture produces intelligence or not. The issue is whether it is more effective than other means. The list of possible intelligence gathering techniques is not simply torture or no torture. Rather, it includes public cooperation, informants, and traditional investigative work such as examining documents, forensic evidence and the use of surveillance. Importantly, Rejali finds that torture is remarkably worse than these methods and because of its propensity for producing false information, torture is very likely to be worse than doing nothing at all.
The problem with the information produced by torture is that there is no way to know if it is reliable. A knowledgeable detainee will provide false information in order to deceive the authorities while innocent detainees will provide any information whatsoever in order to escape the torture. Interrogators have no effective means of distinguishing deceitful or false information from true information. Ultimately, any intelligence gained by torture must be independently verified in order to be of any use. In that case, it would be much more efficient to get the information from the independent sources in the first place. In this way, torture is an extraordinarily bad way of gaining information.
Perhaps as important as explaining why torture does not work, Rejali details how torture leads to the degradation of intelligence agencies' ability to gather information through traditional means. When information gather by torture is presumed to be accurate--when it is thought that "torture works"--agencies rely less on investigation and public cooperation and these skills atrophy. It seems then that torture is both a symptom and a cause of intelligence failure. It is often used when agencies are unwilling to use other techniques and it ultimately makes them incapable of using those techniques.
Furthermore, to oversimplify, Rejali concludes that any acceptance of torture leads to a slippery slope where the use of torture naturally expands and overwhelms intelligence gathering. Crucially, he explains why the slope is slippery--he explains why torturers cannot distinguish between different degrees of torture. I could not do justice to this argument and his evidence in this post. You will have to read the book.
Rejali, however, does not dodge moral arguments. Instead he subjects them to cool empirical tests. For example, he details the origins of the "ticking time bomb" argument in France's Algerian War. He shows how it's extensive rhetorical use by Israeli politicians lead to the torture of an Israeli fighter pilot captured by Lebanon in the 1990s. According to the Lebanese authorities, the pilot was a ticking time bomb. Finally, he shows the argument to be bankrupt: Following the attacks on the London Underground in 2005, the final unexploded bomb--an actual ticking bomb--was found through public cooperation and detective work, not torture.
Again, this is the ultimate value of this work. It moves us beyond simplistic platitudes, unproven assumptions, false beliefs, and theoretical arguments. If we are to overcome the Bush Era, we must clear our heads; we must rely on facts, science, and reason. We must banish not just our fears but the rhetoric of fear. Darius Rejali's work is an excellent step in that direction. It is required reading for conscientious citizens.
---------------------
Post Script: In his otherwise excellent article, Phillipe Sands describes waterboarding as the "the application of a wet towel and water to induce the perception of drowning." This is exactly the sort of language I wanted to address in my earlier post this week. Fundamentally, the description is accurate, but its construction hides what we are really talking about. "Application of a wet towel" does not denote the force used to stuff the towel in a person's mouth. Saying that the use of water "induces the perception of drowning" is to refuse to face the facts. People who are choked with water in this manner have the perception of drowning because they are in fact drowning.
This phrasing suggest that somehow their perception is false, and that because it is false the technique is mental. This is an important lesson: Drowning is painful, and pain is a mental phenomenon. By the logic of this phrasing, any torture, clean or scarring, should not concern us because all it does is produce pain. But it is that pain that is essential to torture; the pain is the reason we call it torture--it is the central feature of torture. We cannot afford to deceive ourselves in this way.
