Torture Does Not Work, as History Shows
“Torture works,” an American special forces major - now, needless to say, a colonel - boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men’s anuses - and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees - has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned - the “waterboarding” technique - before they could be seen by US investigators?
Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner’s eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said “waterboarding” was new? The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the inquisition.
Anther medieval print I found in a Canadian newspaper in November shows a prisoner under interrogation in what I suspect is medieval Germany. In this case, he has been strapped backwards to the outer edge of a wheel. Two hooded men are administering his agony. One is using a bellows to encourage a fire burning at the bottom of the wheel while the other is turning the wheel forwards so that the prisoner’s feet are moving into the flames. The eyes of this poor man - naked save for a cloth over his lower torso - are tight shut in pain. Two priests stand beside him, one cowled, the other wearing a robe over his surplice, a paper and pen in hand to take down the prisoner’s words.
Anthony Grafton, who has been working on a book about magic in Renaissance Europe, says that in the 16th and 17th centuries, torture was systematically used against anyone suspected of witchcraft, his or her statements taken down by sworn notaries - the equivalent, I suppose, of the CIA’s interrogation officers - and witnessed by officials who made no pretence that this was anything other than torture; no talk of “enhanced interrogation” from the lads who turned the wheel to the fire.
As Grafton recounts, “The pioneering medievalist Henry Charles Lea … wrote at length about the ways in which inquisitors had used torture to make prisoners confess heretical views and actions. An enlightened man writing in what he saw as an enlightened age, he looked back in horror at these barbarous practices and condemned them with a clarity that anyone reading public statements must now envy.”
There were professionals in the Middle Ages who were trained to use pain as a method of enquiry as well as an ultimate punishment before death. Men who were to be “hanged, drawn and quartered” in medieval London, for example, would be shown the “instruments” before their final suffering began with the withdrawal of their intestines in front of vast crowds of onlookers. Most of those tortured for information in medieval times were anyway executed after they had provided the necessary information to their interrogators. These inquisitions - with details of the torture that accompanied them - were published and disseminated widely so that the public should understand the threat that the prisoners had represented and the power of those who inflicted such pain upon them. No destroying of videotapes here. Illustrated pamphlets and songs, according to Grafton, were added to the repertory of publicity.
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia and Italian scholars Diego Quaglioni and Anna Esposito have studied the 15th-century Trent inquisition whose victims were usually Jews. In 1475, three Jewish households were accused of murdering a Christian boy called Simon to carry out the supposed Passover “ritual” of using his blood to make “matzo” bread. This “blood libel” - it was, of course, a total falsity - is still, alas, believed in many parts of the Middle East although it is frightening to discover that the idea was well established in 15th century Europe.
As usual, the podestà - a city official - was the interrogator, who regarded external evidence as providing mere clues of guilt. Europe was then still governed by Roman law which required confessions in order to convict. As Grafton describes horrifyingly, once the prisoner’s answers no longer satisfied the podestà, the torturer tied the man’s or woman’s arms behind their back and the prisoner would then be lifted by a pulley, agonisingly, towards the ceiling. “Then, on orders of the podestà, the torturer would make the accused ‘jump’ or ‘dance’ - pulling him or her up, then releasing the rope, dislocating limbs and inflicting stunning pain.”
When a member of one of the Trent Jewish families, Samuel, asked the podestà where he had heard that Jews needed Christian blood, the interrogator replied - and all this while, it should be remembered, Samuel was dangling in the air on the pulley - that he had heard it from other Jews. Samuel said that he was being tortured unjustly. “The truth, the truth!” the podestà shouted, and Samuel was made to “jump” up to eight feet, telling his interrogator: “God the Helper and truth help me.” After 40 minutes, he was returned to prison.
Once broken, the Jewish prisoners, of course, confessed. After another torture session, Samuel named a fellow Jew. Further sessions of torture finally broke him and he invented the Jewish ritual murder plot and named others guilty of this non-existent crime. Two tortured women managed to exonerate children but eventually, in Grafton’s words, “they implicated loved ones, friends and members of other Jewish communities”. Thus did torture force innocent civilians to confess to fantastical crimes. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper found that the tortured eventually accepted the view that they were guilty.
Grafton’s conclusion is unanswerable. Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA’s “waterboarding” did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him.
–Robert Fisk
© 2008 The Independent
But if they confess, then they were guilty, right? So it’s all okay.
The link between torture and information exists with little modern controversy in vivisection.
Ironically, torturing the guilty is seen as more objectionable these days than torturing the innocent.
It is only natural that we would eventually get spill over from academia and the use of torture in halls of education to the use of it as publicly acceptable against foreigners.
What goes around, does tend to come around.
But we are probably a ways removed from seeing a return to public executions and being hanged, drawn and quartered.
I’m convinced that from the top down - Bush, Cheney, CIA officials - none actually believe torture works, ie provides accurate information.
Instead, torture “works” for several other reasons.
Of course, torture of one terrorizes the many, and that is ceratinly one of the purposes - to terrorize the Middle East.
But more importantly, I believe torture is being used to cover up the crimes of the Bush administration. Clearly they were complicit with so-called “Al Qaeda” in the 9-11 attacks.
By torturing those who know too much, BushCo scrambles their brains to the point they are no longer capable of testifying against Bush & the Company. Instead of reliable witnesses they become discredited suspects.
And torturing the “evil ones” has great PR value with the red-meat crowd of Reich-Wing “Christians” by inflicting here on Earth the pain they would expect the “evil ones” to suffer in the fires of Hell. So it “proves” BushCo’s “sincerity” in dealing with the “evil ones,” thus further covering up BushCo’s complicity
Plus, of course, GW already showed his love of torture when he was a kid blowing up frogs with firecrackers in Texas, and when he was an officer in his fraternity at Yale, punishing inductees by burning them with red-hot coat hanger wires.
Torture works so many different ways. But, of course, getting true statements from detainees has nothing to do with it.
Torture is done for two reasons: to terrorize a target population and because they government can.
Civilised people don’t get it. Torture works as a morale booster for the “folks back home”. It’s like rape. It makes them feel big - they are hurting the enemy. That’s why so much “entertainment” features “heroes” who torture. In the dark underworld of the human psyche, the need is to see the enemy feel pain.
NateW - reason three: to distract from the ecomonic stealth transfer of all resources into a few moneyed, and now international, hands.
The application of torture by the US forces has been most practical and effective in the War of Terror. It just depends on what ends the administration had. In the middle ages the Pope sanctioned the witch hunts in Northern Europe as a counter offensive to the budding reformation. With neighbour against neighbour and old scores being settled the church’s power grew far beyond the means of any small malcontents.
The fact is that the CIA and other forces know perfectly well that torture does not provide usable intelligence, but it does provide two valuable side effects. The first and I believe the principle value to the US was to create an enemy where there was none. For every one man you torture you make 100 others hate you and all the more justification for them to do anything to get your tyrannical ass out of town. In short, it tends to divide the world into “them” and “us” and so justifing force.
The second effect is on the side of the torturer. He gets to like it, the power that is. It is like being a God having the power to give suffering and death to other “creatures”. Again it reinforces the “them” and “us” by necessarily dehumanizing “them”.
For fifty years Israel along with US complicity has played the victim of terror, using the desperation of Palestinians and their acts, or acts attributed to them, as excuses for tyranny, permanent occupation, illegal settlement, torture, murder, humiliation and every other form of aggression. Like a psychological warfare in which after long enough the Palestinian appears to be actually beating his own head against the wall, and the Israelis can pretend to the outside community that they wish they would stop and live in peace. It worked only because sufficient ignorant Israelis can see Palestinians as something less than human, to be trodden on, walled out and deprived of any human rights.
The successful experiment has now been expanded by the US to the rest of the world. The priming of the pump was 9-11 and 7-7, plus the odd myth and fable with bad not-so look-alike videos, and not much else as evidence, but some rousing nationalist rhetoric and Hollywood staged political drama. These events, I have no idea who ordered them or how they were carried out. Certainly we do not know all the facts but it is absolutely sure that they had nothing to do with the million innocent Iraqis who have had to die or the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who died plus the millions upon millions made to suffer.
What Americans don’t seem to realize is that there is no “war on terror”. There never was. America just needs a war, any war to justify the unjustifiable expenditure of 2 trillion dollars. But it is all based on lies. There are more people that would freely admit they believe in aliens than there are who are or would be terrorists. Why not have a war on Martians. Think of the “usable” intelligence one could get with a little water-boarding here.
Torture is a way to get others to hate you so much that they do something about it. Then you can call them “terrorists” and you can say, “You see, that is why we are at war, to protect ourselves”. The New World Order and the New American Century and all the other grand ideas of global domination and imperialism depend on terrorism and torture and the innocent being manipulated by the psychology of hate. That is tyranny. Don’t be seduced by America’s War of Terror. It is a delusion based on a lie hidden in an enigma designed to control you.
Tragic that this argument is still going on. Does torture work? Depends on what you think torture is *for*.
I don’t think torture has much to do with obtaining information. I don’t suppose it ever has been. There are better ways of doing that. Rather, as Fisk suggests, I think torture is used to send a message: that you will get your way, by fair means or foul; to make it clear that any kind of rebellion or resistance - even dissent - will not be tolerated; and, as Noam Chomsky says, to “maintain credibility”.
Torture is primitive and brutal, and anyone who refuses to condemn it utterly is unworthy of the title “civilized”. Even the famous “ticking bomb” scenario so beloved of Sam Harris and Alan Dershowitz does not justify the use of torture (to take just one counterexample, what if our captured terrorist agrees to spill the beans if we give him a million dollars and a house in Monte Carlo? Are we seriously supposed to say “no way! let’s put a Black and Decker through his knees” instead?).
Torture is done for revenge, not for expediency. The tortured person takes the place of those we hate. The expediency issue is just an excuse.
Just Curious: Thank you Robert Fisk, you are a treasure.
But the thrust of the article and the post’s is that torture just “does not work.”
Well what if it did? What if it was quite effective, demonstrably so, as an intelligence gathering tool. “helped save lives”
Would we still abhorr, condemn and seek to prohibit it?
“If it worked?”
Mike Peters:
Of course it works. It is not that torture is not effective. It is, but at the wrong thing. It produces and compounds unreliable intelligence and does not save lives but in fact causes deaths by acting on faulti intelligence and the blow-back caused by torture. Causing the blow-back is often the intention.
In the School of the Americas the CIA instructors encouraged Latin American or Indonesian etc. strong arm dictators’ thug militaries to use torture techniques, particularly to foster the underlying instability in their countries which in turn would make that same dictator continually dependent on US military and “technical” support.
Any properly trained military interrogator or intelligence officer will tell you that there are many very much more effective ways to get a prisoner to cooperate without resorting to torture.
Ethnic cleansing works, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons work, but as in torture the consequences of using such methods, both on aggressor, and on the aggressed, are so abhorrent that we must always condemn and prohibit their use, to save not only our lives but our reason for living.
“That’s right, its come to this…its come to this…and wasn’t it a long way down…wasn’t it a strange way down?” Leonard Cohen
I understand our fearless leader loved to torture small animals as a kid. Figures. One sign of a future serial killer…which I do believe GWB qualifies as with over a million deaths on his hands. He just figured out how to get others to do all the work. I suspect the CIA tapes were made for his viewing enjoyment.
I pray for his and his associates enlightenment
but I fear it will be a long time coming…if ever.
Torture doesn’t seem to me to be terribly effective against people who are willing to fly planes with thousands of gallons of gasoline in their wings at 500 miles an hour into skyscrapers. But torture, especially if it is made public, is most useful in frightening and terrorizing the at-home political opposition. Is there anyone out there who hasn’t darkly imagined getting off a plane at some airport somewhere, being detained, and then extraordinarily rendered?
plantman13, yes and after torturing animals as a kid he attained (national) notoriety in college for defending his fraternity’s practice of branding ‘inductees’ back’s with coat hangers.
Our president dismissed the brands which left a D shape on the skin (not his though) as being “no worse than cigarette burns.” (A form of torture! What a portent of things to come.)
Sadist, Sociopath, Psycopath, Homicidal Maniac and Yourrrrr President of the United States; Ladies and gentleman, The Little Chimp That Could!
And don’t gorget the Salem witch trials….
waterboarding has long been in our memory from the very first colonies.
Most of the American Television that I see reeks with sadism.
It appears to me that sadism has been encouraged by mass media in its endless escalation and sensationalizing murder, calamities, and war.
I want to give torture a benefit of doubt, Let’s give it one last chance, let us try torture on Bush and Cheney.
It will be up to the next elected government to sort out our current batch of war criminals. I should think having our present government wandering in the desert for forty years with only one eyeball between them has a nice biblical ring to it.
Does the Bush administration believe that all nations are permitted to use “enhanced interrogation” techniques? Are the USA’s enemies permitted to subject U.S. citizens to “enhanced interrogation”?
I’m not being sarcastic. I haven’t been able to find an answer to this.
Does the Bush administration see itself as establishing ‘new’ international norms through its ‘new’ interpretation of international laws and treaties?
Or is the right to use “enhanced interrogation” (or outsource it) a right that the Bush administration only claims and asserts for itself?
Has any U.S journalist ever posed this question to any Bush administration official?
Torture nation that we are now,is not too surprising. I think of the redemptive torture and murder in the Christian narrative. The Roman state sponsored torture and murder of Jesus is twisted into a story of showing humanity how much God loves us.
State sponsored torture and terrorism is, as the story goes, a way of saving humankind from ourselves. It isn’t a big leap to see the rationalization here. It certainly is part of our mythology and informs our behavior.
We know torture doesn’t work for information, but apparently is does work to fool the people into thinking we are fighting a war on terror when in fact most of the terror events are hatched and perpatrated by our own government agencies. eg. 9/11
It’s just a distraction and a sick joke designed to amuse our warped leaders.
“Torture is done for revenge, not for expediency. The tortured person takes the place of those we hate. The expediency issue is just an excuse.”
I would add one other thing, lizard. For the Bush administration, it makes them look to too many people like they are totally committed “to keeping the American people safe,” even though simple logic says that because it makes so many more enemies, it ultimately makes us less safe. It’s like the case with a bully - at first he or she gets away with, but eventually the victims, or their friends, find a way to take out the bully. People might be intimidated for a while, but their goal will always be payback.
And in the case of America’s indulging in torture, it strips us of any moral stature we might have enjoyed. It is hideous, and the question What if it works? is a moot hypothetical because it doesn’t. If it did, there would be a basis for discussing it, in the same sense that one discusses the concept of a just war (a concept that I still reject, because the best one can say regarding WWII is that it should never have happened, and all the major powers played various roles in its occurrence, but once it came, the Axis had to be defeated, and so the allied soldiers were heroes. But it was not a good war - there are no good wars. It was just a war which, when various interests foisted it on humanity, the forces of ruthless imperialism had to be beaten back. Unfortunately, the winners have not been free of some of the same despicable behavior.)
Mike Peters asked would we still oppose it if torture worked to get accurate information, since the article and discussion was based on the fact that it doesn’t. Your question calls attention to the discussion above which has started to sound as if people are opposing it only because it doesn’t work, rather than that it is evil. This is an issue of moral importance that I am glad you brought up. I would have to say that I would oppose it regardless.
The discussion makes me think of those who argue against the death penalty because we can’t know for sure that not a single innocent person would be executed. Some of us believe it is always wrong and so oppose it under any circumstances, even for the guilty.
Thanks 4thefuture, that certainly was the gist of my post.
Whether or not it works is a moot point to an enlightened mind(set), the question itself a step in the wrong direction.
Torture does nothing more than kill, maim or terrorize a person. Rarely is the REAL truth found. During WW II, most all of our valuable info from prisoners was gathered via eavesdropping.
I wonder if this item will get past Robert Fisk’s apparent mental block re: the official 9/11 story:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 1, 2008
10:17 AM
CONTACT: Center for Constitutional Rights
Riptide Communications, Inc., 212.260.5000
CCR Says Suspected Use of Torture Undermines Credibility of 9/11 Report
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - January 31 - The Center for Constitutional Rights is outraged by new information that reveals that much of the information contained in the 9/11 Commissions Final Report regarding the planning and execution of the terror attacks on New York and Washington was supported by information gained from torture, including water boarding.
The analysis from NBC News shows that more than one quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Commission’s Report refers to controversial interrogation techniques, including information in the Report’s most critical chapters, those on planning and executing the attacks. Remarkably, Commission staffers and Executive Director Philip Zelikow admitted that though they were skeptical of the intelligence reports, they did not make any inquiries regarding cross-examination techniques.
CCR President Michael Ratner expressed shock at the revelations stating, “If the Commission suspected there was torture, they should have realized that as a matter of law, evidence derived from torture is not reliable, in part because of the possibility of false confession…at the very least, they should have added caveats to all those references.”
“The Commission’s heavy reliance on tainted sources reinforces the notion that we as a nation have not yet come to terms with the reality that the U.S. engaged in torture,” he added. “Until we do so, we undermine our credibility in the eyes of the world as a nation of hypocrites.”
CCR is currently seeking to preserve evidence of the torture of their client Majid Khan, a former CIA ghost detainee now held at Guantanamo. While held at a CIA black site, Majid was subject to hours of torture, which only stopped when he agreed to sign a statement that he wasn’t allowed to read.
“The effect of our government’s reliance on secrecy and torture not only shames the U.S. in the eyes of the world, but sacrifices our freedom and security here at home,” said Vincent Warren, the Executive Director of CCR.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
What is also terrifying is that not only some segments of the public but also our elected officials are taking their cues on torture from a fictional character to justify their ignorance and fears and passing it off as policy that will affect future generations of Americans for a long time to come.
It is the ultimate in hubris to think that our “enemies” are so weak-mined to succumb to torture but not “our brave boys”. Advocates of torture are the truly weak-minded ones. A society that relies on torture to get at some truth will not know it if it bites them in the ass.
Can anyone think of ANY example from history where information obtained by torture was instrumental in defending democracy?
I can’t think of one. Torture has never been used by democracies to protect freedom. It has only been used by empires to combat resistance by rebellious subjects.
Torture, as it has been used for at least the last five decades, isn’t necessarily about extracting information but about terrorizing whole groups of people who either politically or idealogically disagree with the torturer. The whole reason we are torturing people in Iraq is so we can induce the neo-liberal economic and militaristic agenda of the neo-cons.
The prisoners in Gitmo and Abu Grhaib are being turned into vegetables so they will no longer be able to oppose anyone’s will. Most will never walk out on their own and will never be able to function without an instituion.
If you really want to know what is going on read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” It’s all about the money and Globilization. Neo-cons are insane and should be hung in public.
WHAT FOOLS: I can’t get that “King Lear” image out of my mind! What an imagination you have! Just deserts indeed for these wonders of compassion, altruism and a leadership vision!
LUCITANIA & OLD RASCAL: Excellent posts.
PODHERTZ says, “It appears to me that sadism has been encouraged by mass media in its endless escalation and sensationalizing murder, calamities, and war.” That observation is so true and it creates a sense in viewers that these images somehow constitute the NORMS. I gave up TV 16 months ago but date a guy that likes it, so if I am at his house, it tends to be on. The images shock me. I watched a few minutes of the “hit” show “Deal of No Deal” and rolled over laughing at its blatant obscenities. People practically salivating over a metal box with a sum of money in it; a surreptitious phone call from a “banker” offering them a deal on something never earned. Then there are the constant crime shows, detective shows that now offer quite a visual display of the criminal’s fine art; and the awful forensic shows that make the public into voyeurs observing the entrails of murdered persons, standing back on the shores of scientific realism as they seek to solve the crime, piece by macabre piece. Sadism indeed! When I point this out to my companion, younger and never exposed to particularly progressive politics, he says I am being too sensitive. I endure this feeling like Dianne Fossey observing a society of animals and trying to make sense of their behaviors. Or maybe it’s Margaret Mead watching the mores of a group that’s never been “civilized.” Civilization and a make-war economy are antithetical. So long as the wealthiest nation (now in debt) invests its human and fiscal treasure in the ways to make war, it loses its soul day by day. To prop up the aging warrior rendered dead on his lost soul, all these media infusions of sensation are being added to the nation’s virtual corpse. In a way, all these shows represent the metaphysical looking glass into the dying collective self, as the US plays the role of criminal around the world.
Why did the US capture and torture a lot of low-level suspects (with little or no information), yet give orders to shoot and kill on sight many high-level enemy leaders?
That alone makes it seem the intent for torture was for other reasons than to obtain information.
They seem in an awful hurry to shut up- on sight- the people up who may actually have something to tell them. Why is that?