Why the CIA won't waterboard, even if ordered by the president
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
It might save lives. It might lead to mistreatment of many innocent people. How do you know which beforehand? If you can't know, are you happy with the abandonment of innocent until proven guilty?
Last, I've noticed an increasingly positive portrayal of torture in TV of late, say the last ten years. It's neater. The good guys seem to do it as a matter of course. It's more likely to be effective. Is this coincidental? Am I just watching the wrong shows?
IMO, I think we are going to start seeing more plot lines where torture results in bad Intel for dramatic tension.
However, because most people, even on HN, have a cognitive bias that forces them to prefer believing that their favored course of action has no downsides ("halo" bias), it has been popular to repeat the high-status meme that Torture Doesn't Work.
Which is true -- it often doesn't "work" for many of the reasons given. But sometimes it does.
Any position against torture that actually plugs into a consistent worldmodel will also accept that it does, in fact, sometimes work, and also have a way of appropriately weighing the ups and downs of any course of action without being tripped into rebranding every down as an up for the CoA you like, and up as a down for every CoA you don't like.
Not really the message I'd expect from a Disney movie.
On the other hand, a successful operation by French intelligence led to the FLN torturing a number of their members (based on forged documents), which started to denounce additional members, etc, resulting in the torture and execution of hundreds of loyal FLN members.
So, operationally, torture can work (but it's not a sure thing), and it has been part of (AFAIK) the toolkit of all counter-insurgency efforts to this day. The problem is that whoever uses it instantly loses the moral high ground.
This is a different way of looking at it than the usual ways of "it's all bad, illegal and should never to be used, ever" or "some forms are less bad and should be legal sometimes" and "only when there are lives saves should it be legal"
I'd rather have an america where some people die of terrorism, than one that I feel ashamed of.
To hell with the argument that we need to become evil in order to avert evil.
So, from a utility standpoint, it's far more likely to be useful for the Mob than any government.
The argument used matters to me, because if tomorrow it's proven that torture works, I still believe that civilized nations should be against it. If we hinge the argument on its utility, then when we lose that premise we lose the argument.
Even within the utilitarian framework (where "the ends might justify the means"), which you seem to be representing, you have to consider all of the "ends". Protecting innocent lives is only one of the considerations.
Of course I put protecting innocent life near the top of the priority list. But that doesn't mean I think it's right (or ever justifiable) to kill the families of suspected terrorists. That doesn't mean I think that Americans should give up the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 15th amendments of their Constitution (all of which could be claimed as barriers to "protecting innocent life.").
If you don't think "feeling better about yourself" is an accurate summary of the principle that you are placing above protection of innocent life in this hypothetical torture scenario, please word it in a way that you find preferable. Or was that what you were doing when you listed a number of American constitutional amendments?
So- you get that my definition of evil places actions on the same level as results- and I get that yours doesn't. I'm not sure that we can do anything but agree to disagree.
IIRC, a German police chief tried to torture a kidnapper to reveal the whereabouts of a child whose life was under threat. The police chief was charged even though the child's life was saved (I may have got the details skewed but I believe the key points are true).
It's incredible how quickly he's had a "change of heart".
individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence.
Still, the juxtaposition of operative viewpoints is... fascinating, to say the least.
On the whole it sounds like waterboarding has been added to the list of things the CIA continually swears it would "never do" -- like, you know, assassinating foreign leaders; getting into bed with torturers, death squads, drug runners and mafiosi of various stripes; spying on not just on American citizens, but on rival branches of the U.S. government itself -- but of course has kept on doing, and doing, and doing anyway, since its very inception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0
His point was that torture should be so abhorrent, that it should be in the same category as rape. Even by discussing it and debating the benefits or downside of it, we've lost quite a bit of ground in a civilized society.
For example nobody debates or discusses the trade-off of rape. It is obvious anyone who advocates for it is mentally ill, or vile and is shunned by others.
But merits of torture now are open for debate. Maybe it does find terrorist, maybe it works, or, like in this movie "Oh but see, it affects the torturers just as much, so they are suffering too, they feel guilty too, don't blame them too much ..." and so on.
Now clearly we've lost that battle because we've already engaged in it.
If you're otherwise fine with or at least accept war and its inevitable civilian casualties and the damage it does to people I don't see how you can be so against torture. Torture in that case is just a tool - you inflict violence to your enemies (instead of killing them) to potentially gain information.
Sam Harris wrote a piece on why torture can be the lesser evil in some cases: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-tortu...
We have collectively abolished many weapons and practices: chemical (e.g. nerve gas), technological (e.g. blinding lasers), or (e.g. booby traps), as well as many tactics (e.g. public executions). We held meetings (the Geneva/Hague conventions), and agreed these acts were too evil to continue. Now those choices are uniformly accepted as being progressive for our society.
War is hell. We do hellish things to the "other" side. Historically, the "other" side often ends up being on "our" side sooner rather than later (alliances+migration). Every so often we decide which actions are too inhuman to perform, regardless of what uniform the human is wearing (if any). Right now we are deciding on whether the secrecy and severity of physical and mental torture, with no representation or defence available, is on the wrong side of who we want to be.
While torture (and all other cruel punishments) have been common for many years, today it just isn't acceptable for many people anymore. Death is a better outlook then being tortured for days, weeks or even months without outlook at a future without being tortured.
War is the worst thing possible, but even wars have become less lethal and more "humane". The Geneva convention is not even 100 years old, before that plunder, rape and maiming and torturing where inseparable parts of war.
I hope most people don't "want" to go to war, but feel they are fighting a war for the greater good. Even isis isn't fighting a war because they want to have war, they are fighting for ideals and values. And the West is fighting for their ideals and values.
I can only recommend you to read "the better angels of our nature", it gives a much brighter picture of the future (and the present) then you seem to be experiencing.
Ah yes, the good old slippery slope argument...
Yes, why stop. We already have wars, as long as we have them, let's start drilling holes in people spines, sticking needles under their nails and so on. Qualitatively we already there so no need for outrage.
Of course. This is totally how the world works, and, in particular, how the American armed forces act.
Keeping government officials accountable for crimes is what will stop them from doing it in the future, not a sense of "duty", or even more laughable "international treaties" - as if that's going to stop a CIA agent from following a direct order from above.
No. Make it clear that they will be prosecuted for war crimes, and then actually do it after it happens. That's what will put an end to this. The same should go for abuses of surveillance powers.
Alternatively you ship them to a country that is more than happy to openly and gleefully torture.
But you never simply order your troops to torture. That would be politically stupid.
Sure. We outsource our torture after rendition to 'black sites' in places like Romania, Thailand, wherever.
This article and these official statements mean nothing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...
CIA director John Brennan does not expect to keep his job for long in a Republican administration.
That's pretty despicable and disgusting.
Have there been studies detailing the efficacy on these methods to obtain information that lead to the saving of lives?
E.g. if X people were subjected to waterboarding, what % of X revealed information that lead to derailing terrorist plots? And then we'd need a control group as well that wasn't subjected.
Edit - downvoted for what, trying to quantify this topic and weigh the pros and cons? Christ.
From what I remember, the consensus among professional interrogators is that torture is largely useless, because people go more or less instantly from not saying anything at all to making up any old nonsense that sounds vaguely plausible just to make the pain and confusion stop.
Psychological torture is even less useful, because people simply stop making any sense at all after a while.
The most reliable methods were based on extended conversations, with the interrogator pretending to be an equal and gradually persuading a prisoner to open up and/or reveal possible gaps in their story.
This kind of interrogation isn't fast, but the ticking timebomb excuse for torture has never been very convincing anyway.
Pain on its own is very unlikely to change the mind of anyone who's so indoctrinated they volunteer to take part in a mass terrorist attack.
I don't think studies of the nature I proposed are particularly hard to do, but they may be locked in classified status, so civilians wouldn't know.
I have no doubt that if torture had led to significant success stories, someone would have either announced it or leaked it to get some points for the pro-torture side.
"They communicated this to agency higher-ups in Washington, who nonetheless insisted on the use of the practice, and asked to watch it take place." I don't know what's more fucked up; to order torture, or to ask to watch.