Midterm reading
I have a midterm coming up on Tuesday; I am reading the course text, Design and Control of Concrete Mixtures.
It's a little dense.
(Yeah, ~2000 kg/m^3 dense)
[ducks]
Anyway, I think that it might not be a great idea to watch depressing documentaries when you're a bit stressed out and the weather outside is mostly grey-slop-from-the-sky. However, I did end up watching the Frontline episode "The Torture Question" online--about Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and the Administration decisions on loosening the bounds of interrogation techniques. Both interesting and depressing. Some of the information I had heard before, either from the New York Times, or Mark Bowden's Atlantic Monthly article ("The Dark Art of Interrogation") as well as his follow-up piece, "Lessons of Abu Ghraib." (note: those links probably won't show up for people who don't subscribe to the Atlantic. Let me know by email if you really want to read the articles.)
I'm afraid that I'm probably unlike most of my left-leaning friends, in that I'm not sure I can categorically declare 'we cannot let our forces use coercive interrogation techniques, period (i.e., "torture lite".. what a turn of phrase)' from a moral high ground. The canonical 'ticking bomb' scenario (i.e., you capture a terrorist who knows where an armed bomb is planted) is incredibly hard to argue against, in its purest hypothetical form (i.e., you know you have the right person, and you know that he knows where the bomb is). However, the institutionalized use of torture can quickly become a standard method, as Bowden writes:
In certain rare cases keeping a prisoner cold, uncomfortable, frightened, and disoriented is morally justified and necessary; but the danger in acknowledging as much has always been that such abusive treatment will become the norm. This is what happened in Israel, where a newly introduced regime of officially sanctioned "aggressive interrogation" quickly deteriorated into a system of routine physical abuse. (The Israeli Supreme Court reissued a ban on all such practices in 1999.)
More importantly, however, I would argue against use of torture due to its lack of effectiveness. I have heard it termed 'the crack cocaine of counterinsurgency warfare'--it is incredibly effective at first, and then becomes useless, if not worse than that. Of course, the reason is that with each interrogation sweep, you will be capturing people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. People who are brothers/uncles/sons of the general population whose 'hearts and minds' you're trying to win. Great.
Second, as the Frontline episode points out, extreme methods result in bad intelligence--even the Soviets, who had few qualms in practicing these techniques, admitted as much. People will say whatever it takes to get out of the interrogation situation.
Hmmm. That was really more than I intended to post about. Back to studying concrete.
posted by Bats @ 6:11 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
There's a book called "ordinary people, extraordinary acts" which looks at state-endorsed torture in Northern Ireland, India and the United States, and concludes that due to a combination of the last two dates, it's just not *useful* -- as well as missing any chance of moral high ground. Worth a read.
josakana
This is it, right?
"Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture"
How is it that otherwise normal people can become part of the institutionalized practice of torture? That's the question driving this unusual, extremely well-reported book. At the Chicago Reader, Conroy spent years reporting on the kind of torture that happens not in exotic locales but in his own backyard--in Chicago's police precincts. Curious and troubled by what he found, he decided to explore the ordinariness of brutality through three separate incidents of torture--in Israel, Ireland and Chicago.
Yeah. Preach it, brother.
From what I've seen, even the death penalty fits into this general pattern. It intuitively sounds effective, and it's hard to deny its appeal and even philosophical appropriateness for certain extreme cases. Yet, when it's applied in reality, it quickly gets extended way beyond the extreme cases envisioned in armchair flamefests, and it doesn't seem to have any verifiable deterrent effect.
And I've read that ultimate analysis of carpet-bombing of Nazi Germany showed about the same thing.
Seems like this class of phenomena needs a name. "You make a deal with the devil, and he gyps you and walks away laughing."
The main argument I've heard about the ticking bomb scenario is that soldiers, terrorists and even gangsters are trained to withstand 18 hours or so of torture before breaking. So if the bomb was already ticking, it went boom before the torture got you an actionable answer anyway.
On a different note, in reading up on Guy Fawkes day this weekend I noticed that Guy and his co-conspirators were tortured into naming names as well as confessing to all their crimes (and probably then some). Sounds like they really did rat out all their co-conspirators, and likely also ratted out a few Jesuits that weren't in on the plot but that the King wanted to get rid of because they were making trouble anyway.
The other argument against the ticking bomb scenario is that you have some decoys who'll point (if they're tortured) at the wrong place.
I actually found the NY Times's perspective on this reasonably believable last week; they said it in text like [paraphrase] "we are not so naive as to assume that someone in the ticking time bomb will wind up unbruised. But we think it's important to make the point nonetheless." I think this falls into the necessary illusions category: even if it's not 100% true, saying, "we will neve use torture" is better than saying, "we routinely use torture." Soon, it starts to get like the situation with the death penalty, where 15-year-old kids wind up on Death Row.
[I would prefer not to even think there's much possibility of the US using torture, period; sensible people inside the military have pointed out that it's bad policy. But Cheney-ites seem to want to dehumanize their fellow people as much as possible.
Have I mentioned, recently, how glad I am to be living in Canada these days? You weren't here when I first got righteously indignant about torture in the US, but it wasn't pretty.
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