This is a follow-up post to the Zero Dark Thirty post in which I address one of the assertions that's arisen among the debates around the film.
One truism that opponents of torture (I'm one of them, if you couldn't tell) often throw into their arguments is the idea that "torture doesn't work." They usually mean that torture is a relatively ineffective intelligence-gathering mechanism. While this is true, I think it misses much of the picture of how and why torture is used by states, so I decided to write out some thoughts about that, culled from half a lifetime of what some might consider an unhealthy obsession with torture and how it works.
First of all, it should be said that even if torture worked perfectly as an intelligence-gathering mechanism, it would still be perfectly fine to be against it on moral grounds. But in my opinion, people who ask "Does torture work?" are only asking half the question. The follow-up question must be, "Work for what?" When you ask that question, you are asking why states actually use torture, not why they say they do.
I would argue that there are three basic purposes--overlapping and not mutually exclusive--for which torture is used. I am focusing primarily here on the use of torture by "armed bodies of men"--states, police, armies, etc. I am sure you can find examples that fall outside these categories, but probably not many. These purposes are:
1. intelligence
2. confession
3. social control
Let's examine them one at a time.
1. Intelligence. This is the use that is most frequently invoked to justify torture--in particular, the idea that certain people cannot be dealt with through "normal" interrogation methods and will only give up information under torture.
Here intelligence should be distinguished from confession. Intelligence is getting information from the prisoner that the torturer does not already have. Confession is the torturer starting with a piece of information and getting the prisoner to agree that it's true. More about the difference later.
Can you get accurate intelligence using torture? Sure. But not as reliably or as easily as you might think. People will resist betraying friends, family and comrades, or compromising a political project for which they made have risked their life and sacrificed a great deal. Often they will resist ferociously. This notion--that torture can be resisted and many people have done so--challenges one of the central myths about torture, the "perfect weapon" or "everyone talks" myth.
Consider an anecdote from Vietnam: A Television History, a fascinating PBS miniseries made in the 1980s, when the Vietnam War was still relatively recent. In one segment, the filmmakers interview an American GI and a female Vietnamese National Liberation Front fighter who were both POWs and were tortured. There stories, intercut, are almost identical--"this is how I was captured, this is what they did to me," until the end. The American GI ends his story with something along the lines of "and finally, they got me to say more than name, rank and serial number." The woman from the NLF ends her story with "but no matter what they did, I would never tell them anything, because I was fighting for my country and for freedom."
The point of this story is not to show the American soldier as "weak." It's to show that political belief, and particularly the struggle against oppression, is an enormously powerful motivator that has the potential to be stronger than any amount of violence. (Torturers often underestimate this power because they refuse to acknowledge that their opponents might have legitimate political grievances that are worth fighting and dying to rectify.) In struggles for political freedom and national liberation in particular, the interrogation itself can become an episode in the struggle for freedom, a focal point in which the entire political and societal conflict is concentrated down into a battle of wills between two people in a room, and in which all the accumulated bitterness of a lifetime of oppression can be turned into a weapon against the oppressor, who suddenly appears in his most concentrated and fully monstrous form in the person of the torturer.
Of course, the ability to obtain accurate intelligence through torture also depends on the torturers being able to detain the "right" people, ie. people with some intelligence to give. At this, torturers tend to be notoriously bad, arresting scores of "innocent" people who have no intelligence of value to provide. When you torture these people, they have no recourse but to lie, saying anything they think their torturers want to hear. When torture is used on a mass scale, this means that the intelligence agency is overwhelmed by a wave of "false positives," fake leads which inevitably lead to the arrest of more innocent people, in a positive feedback loop of information that is utterly useless from an intelligence point of view but results in the shattering of many minds, bodies and lives. Arrests of this type may in fact be quite useful for other reasons, such as discussed in point 3, but from a strict intelligence-gathering perspective they are a waste of time and resources.
What all this adds up to is the reality that, as an intelligence-gathering tool, torture is at best a very blunt, imprecise and time-consuming instrument. In his extensive study Torture and Democracy, political scientist Darius Rejali surveyed detailed police and military records from the Battle of Algiers, the brutal French counterinsurgency campaign against the Algerian independence movement, in which torture was used extensively. He concluded that for every actual intelligence lead obtained through torture, French authorities tortured another 15 people who had no information of any value, arresting up to a third of the Algerian population of the city over the course of the campaign. (Rejali 483)
2. Confession. I mentioned earlier in this post that confession must be distinguished from intelligence as a goal of torture, because the process of seeking a confession operates differently.
"Confession" can encompass a wide variety of things: confession to a crime that authorities believe you have committed, admission of membership in a banned political organization or of participation in banned political activity, etc. In each case, the torturer begins with a pre-determined "crime" and stops when the prisoner admits to having done it.
Torture works reasonably well for getting confessions. If you are being tortured and are told it will stop if you just sign this piece of paper, there is a reasonable chance that eventually you will sign it. The Stasi, the East German secret police, could boast of a 90% confession rate at Hohenschonhausen, their main detention center in Berlin. (This was aided by the fact that the Stasi maintained such an intense surveillance regime that there was often no doubt in the prisoner's mind that by the time they were arrested, the Stasi knew every detail of their "crime," however minor, and there was little point in resisting. Still, even under this regime, there were people who did not confess.)
Whether the confession is true or false is irrelevant here. In fact, torture works great for getting false confessions--see, for example, the Death Row 10, Black men who were tortured in a Chicago police station, some into confessing to murders that they did not commit. (It should be noted that in this case as well, not every suspect was successfully tortured into signing a confession.)
A specific problem occurs when the line between "intelligence" and "confession" gets blurry--which it does all the time. While torturers may claim, and even themselves believe, that they are interrogating purely for intelligence, they come to the interrogation with all sorts of biases that color what kind of information they expect to hear.
This happens almost by definition in the torture process. Why? Because professional torturers--the kind of people who choose this line of work and keep at it--tend to bring with them a high level of ideological investment in a particular worldview: an absolute belief in the goodness and rightness of the mission of the body (state, army, police etc.) on whose behalf they are doing the torturing, and an associated belief in the profound evilness, maliciousness and otherness of the people they're torturing. Professional torturers, by and large, are not born sociopaths; they are ordinary people who believe they are doing the right thing. If you are torturing people all the time, you need some mental bulwark against the reality of what you're doing in order to maintain your own sanity. You have to justify torture somehow, and political zeal is a particularly robust moral intoxicant. But this means that torturers have all kinds of biases about "us" and "them" and about the type of information the expect to get from prisoners.
A short example from Chile under Pinochet (also drawn from Darius Rejali's book) illustrates this point: the Chilean secret police arrest a woman who was a political activist and demand to know who helped her hide. After much torture, she admits that it was a group of nuns from the local convent who sheltered her. Her torturers keep going, refusing to believe that representatives of the Catholic church, whom they believed to be on the side of the state, would ever help an activist.
Torturers' generally crappy ability to separate truth from lies is further confounded by the fact that one of their deeply-held biases can be the very idea that torture is infallible and therefore intelligence obtained through torture must be accurate. Which brings us back to the "false positives" question.
3. Punishment, deterrence and social control. This motive for torture may or may not be explicitly stated, depending on the nature of the regime, but I would argue that it's always there, whether the torturers are themselves conscious of it or not.
In dictatorships, occupations, and other scenarios of explicit control by force, it is often stated quite plainly. So you have Rabin saying "break their bones," about Palestinians during the first intifada (he can claim to have meant it metaphorically but it was interpreted literally enough); you have talk of "teaching a lesson," "extracting a price," "softening them up," "showing who's boss," and various other iterations of the rhetoric of dominance and punishment. You have endless variations of the sentiment expressed by a French paratrooper during the Battle of Algiers:
Like all uses of force to maintain dominance, sometimes torture works great for this purpose and other times it completely backfires and only fuels more resistance. Which way it goes depends on numerous factors, many of which are in the hands of the resisters and the general population and not the torturers.
Societies that consider themselves democracies may be loath to admit this motivation for torture, but it is there. It is why torture can never be fully extracted from imperial dominance. You can never have empire without torture for long, because they operate on the same logic. If you dominate countries and whole populations by force, some members of that population will resist, and it follows that you will also end up dominating individuals by force.
This is the piece that's missing from most mainstream debates on torture--the understanding that American torture arises from American imperialism, and to get rid of one you must dismantle the other.
For much more on this topic, see the encyclopedic and invaluable:
Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
One truism that opponents of torture (I'm one of them, if you couldn't tell) often throw into their arguments is the idea that "torture doesn't work." They usually mean that torture is a relatively ineffective intelligence-gathering mechanism. While this is true, I think it misses much of the picture of how and why torture is used by states, so I decided to write out some thoughts about that, culled from half a lifetime of what some might consider an unhealthy obsession with torture and how it works.
First of all, it should be said that even if torture worked perfectly as an intelligence-gathering mechanism, it would still be perfectly fine to be against it on moral grounds. But in my opinion, people who ask "Does torture work?" are only asking half the question. The follow-up question must be, "Work for what?" When you ask that question, you are asking why states actually use torture, not why they say they do.
I would argue that there are three basic purposes--overlapping and not mutually exclusive--for which torture is used. I am focusing primarily here on the use of torture by "armed bodies of men"--states, police, armies, etc. I am sure you can find examples that fall outside these categories, but probably not many. These purposes are:
1. intelligence
2. confession
3. social control
Let's examine them one at a time.
1. Intelligence. This is the use that is most frequently invoked to justify torture--in particular, the idea that certain people cannot be dealt with through "normal" interrogation methods and will only give up information under torture.
Here intelligence should be distinguished from confession. Intelligence is getting information from the prisoner that the torturer does not already have. Confession is the torturer starting with a piece of information and getting the prisoner to agree that it's true. More about the difference later.
Can you get accurate intelligence using torture? Sure. But not as reliably or as easily as you might think. People will resist betraying friends, family and comrades, or compromising a political project for which they made have risked their life and sacrificed a great deal. Often they will resist ferociously. This notion--that torture can be resisted and many people have done so--challenges one of the central myths about torture, the "perfect weapon" or "everyone talks" myth.
Consider an anecdote from Vietnam: A Television History, a fascinating PBS miniseries made in the 1980s, when the Vietnam War was still relatively recent. In one segment, the filmmakers interview an American GI and a female Vietnamese National Liberation Front fighter who were both POWs and were tortured. There stories, intercut, are almost identical--"this is how I was captured, this is what they did to me," until the end. The American GI ends his story with something along the lines of "and finally, they got me to say more than name, rank and serial number." The woman from the NLF ends her story with "but no matter what they did, I would never tell them anything, because I was fighting for my country and for freedom."
The point of this story is not to show the American soldier as "weak." It's to show that political belief, and particularly the struggle against oppression, is an enormously powerful motivator that has the potential to be stronger than any amount of violence. (Torturers often underestimate this power because they refuse to acknowledge that their opponents might have legitimate political grievances that are worth fighting and dying to rectify.) In struggles for political freedom and national liberation in particular, the interrogation itself can become an episode in the struggle for freedom, a focal point in which the entire political and societal conflict is concentrated down into a battle of wills between two people in a room, and in which all the accumulated bitterness of a lifetime of oppression can be turned into a weapon against the oppressor, who suddenly appears in his most concentrated and fully monstrous form in the person of the torturer.
Of course, the ability to obtain accurate intelligence through torture also depends on the torturers being able to detain the "right" people, ie. people with some intelligence to give. At this, torturers tend to be notoriously bad, arresting scores of "innocent" people who have no intelligence of value to provide. When you torture these people, they have no recourse but to lie, saying anything they think their torturers want to hear. When torture is used on a mass scale, this means that the intelligence agency is overwhelmed by a wave of "false positives," fake leads which inevitably lead to the arrest of more innocent people, in a positive feedback loop of information that is utterly useless from an intelligence point of view but results in the shattering of many minds, bodies and lives. Arrests of this type may in fact be quite useful for other reasons, such as discussed in point 3, but from a strict intelligence-gathering perspective they are a waste of time and resources.
What all this adds up to is the reality that, as an intelligence-gathering tool, torture is at best a very blunt, imprecise and time-consuming instrument. In his extensive study Torture and Democracy, political scientist Darius Rejali surveyed detailed police and military records from the Battle of Algiers, the brutal French counterinsurgency campaign against the Algerian independence movement, in which torture was used extensively. He concluded that for every actual intelligence lead obtained through torture, French authorities tortured another 15 people who had no information of any value, arresting up to a third of the Algerian population of the city over the course of the campaign. (Rejali 483)
2. Confession. I mentioned earlier in this post that confession must be distinguished from intelligence as a goal of torture, because the process of seeking a confession operates differently.
"Confession" can encompass a wide variety of things: confession to a crime that authorities believe you have committed, admission of membership in a banned political organization or of participation in banned political activity, etc. In each case, the torturer begins with a pre-determined "crime" and stops when the prisoner admits to having done it.
Torture works reasonably well for getting confessions. If you are being tortured and are told it will stop if you just sign this piece of paper, there is a reasonable chance that eventually you will sign it. The Stasi, the East German secret police, could boast of a 90% confession rate at Hohenschonhausen, their main detention center in Berlin. (This was aided by the fact that the Stasi maintained such an intense surveillance regime that there was often no doubt in the prisoner's mind that by the time they were arrested, the Stasi knew every detail of their "crime," however minor, and there was little point in resisting. Still, even under this regime, there were people who did not confess.)
Whether the confession is true or false is irrelevant here. In fact, torture works great for getting false confessions--see, for example, the Death Row 10, Black men who were tortured in a Chicago police station, some into confessing to murders that they did not commit. (It should be noted that in this case as well, not every suspect was successfully tortured into signing a confession.)
A specific problem occurs when the line between "intelligence" and "confession" gets blurry--which it does all the time. While torturers may claim, and even themselves believe, that they are interrogating purely for intelligence, they come to the interrogation with all sorts of biases that color what kind of information they expect to hear.
This happens almost by definition in the torture process. Why? Because professional torturers--the kind of people who choose this line of work and keep at it--tend to bring with them a high level of ideological investment in a particular worldview: an absolute belief in the goodness and rightness of the mission of the body (state, army, police etc.) on whose behalf they are doing the torturing, and an associated belief in the profound evilness, maliciousness and otherness of the people they're torturing. Professional torturers, by and large, are not born sociopaths; they are ordinary people who believe they are doing the right thing. If you are torturing people all the time, you need some mental bulwark against the reality of what you're doing in order to maintain your own sanity. You have to justify torture somehow, and political zeal is a particularly robust moral intoxicant. But this means that torturers have all kinds of biases about "us" and "them" and about the type of information the expect to get from prisoners.
A short example from Chile under Pinochet (also drawn from Darius Rejali's book) illustrates this point: the Chilean secret police arrest a woman who was a political activist and demand to know who helped her hide. After much torture, she admits that it was a group of nuns from the local convent who sheltered her. Her torturers keep going, refusing to believe that representatives of the Catholic church, whom they believed to be on the side of the state, would ever help an activist.
Torturers' generally crappy ability to separate truth from lies is further confounded by the fact that one of their deeply-held biases can be the very idea that torture is infallible and therefore intelligence obtained through torture must be accurate. Which brings us back to the "false positives" question.
3. Punishment, deterrence and social control. This motive for torture may or may not be explicitly stated, depending on the nature of the regime, but I would argue that it's always there, whether the torturers are themselves conscious of it or not.
In dictatorships, occupations, and other scenarios of explicit control by force, it is often stated quite plainly. So you have Rabin saying "break their bones," about Palestinians during the first intifada (he can claim to have meant it metaphorically but it was interpreted literally enough); you have talk of "teaching a lesson," "extracting a price," "softening them up," "showing who's boss," and various other iterations of the rhetoric of dominance and punishment. You have endless variations of the sentiment expressed by a French paratrooper during the Battle of Algiers:
"Given the manner in which the arrests [of Algerians] were performed, a majority of those who passed by the Villa [a makeshift torture center] had no information to give. That wasn't important. One of the objectives of the use of torture was to remind Algerians that, by definition, they were considered accomplices of the FLN. In principle it was necessary to humiliate them so that they know that the army has all the rights, without any limitation and that they, the victims, had only to submit." (Rejali 487)Torture as social control works on an individual and a societal level simultaneously. For the individual, it is punishment for resistance, and sometimes, for mere existence as a member of an oppressed group. For a society, it is a blunt reminder of the social order, the most graphic and vicious enforcement of the dominance of one group over another, and a warning to potential resisters of the consequences they face.
Like all uses of force to maintain dominance, sometimes torture works great for this purpose and other times it completely backfires and only fuels more resistance. Which way it goes depends on numerous factors, many of which are in the hands of the resisters and the general population and not the torturers.
Societies that consider themselves democracies may be loath to admit this motivation for torture, but it is there. It is why torture can never be fully extracted from imperial dominance. You can never have empire without torture for long, because they operate on the same logic. If you dominate countries and whole populations by force, some members of that population will resist, and it follows that you will also end up dominating individuals by force.
This is the piece that's missing from most mainstream debates on torture--the understanding that American torture arises from American imperialism, and to get rid of one you must dismantle the other.
For much more on this topic, see the encyclopedic and invaluable:
Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
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