I am probably preaching to the quire on this one, but torture, my friends, is bad. Let’s ignore my usual tirade on the obvious contradiction between the values this country was founded upon and the use of torture for national security.
Let’s just ask ourselves: “is this really the most time-tested, most effective, most efficient method of protecting the homeland?”
1) Time tested. No. Brutal interrogations are the stuff of actions movies and fox’s 24. In fact, a number of articles have uncovered that fact that the popularity of Fox’s 24 has done more to inform our interrogation techniques of late than historical analysis or psyche research, for example.
2) Most effective. No. This Atlantic Monthly blogger is right on with his post: Ripping off false-confession techniques is a great way to get false confessions. It’s like Enron: if the income isn’t real, the company will implode; guys, if the intelligence isn’t real: national security is at stake.
What is the cost of eliciting a false confession? Besides the humanitarian cost of torturing someone: there’s the monetary cost of setting up a clandestine scenario to house this practice. There’s the political cost of reducing good-will from the people of other nations, especially the nations who’s citizens we have been torturing. One day these torture victims will go home. They will tell their stories. Whether the backlash is violent, economic, or just a vague vibe of dislike, the US will lose out on tourist dollars, international contracts, and peace of mind, among other things.
And finally, there’s the opportunity cost: if you’re doing interrogation wrong and getting false information, you’re not doing it right and therefore not getting useful information. Simple, I know. These guys valued the potential information they were to eventually extract, so they tip-toed around it, they caressed it, they played chess for it. These heroes developed real rapport in order to extract real, useful information. WAKE UP SHEEPLE.
3. Efficient. Yes. It turns out beating someone silly is much more efficient than cultivating a long-term relationship. That is, as we said earlier, if your goal is to “break them” as opposed to “elicit truthful intelligence”. So in breaking people, toture is efficient. Especially water-boarding. Is it efficacious? Absolutely not. American lives are not saved. See point 2.
In conclusion: even if we were all presented with the urgent life-or-death scenarios that Jack Bauer faces on 24, we would be stupid to employ torture. And to clarify, we are not presented with those life-or-death scenarios, we’re presented with detainees of (at best) questionable guilt and we *do* torture.
I’m probably rambling here…forgive me. My mind turns to mush when I try to understand what we’re doing here. I feel like I’m on crazy pills, seriously.
