Torture doesn't "work"

Those who justify or rationalize the use of torture (or "coercive interrogation" to use the preferred term that tries to get around the barbaric intimations torture still conjures in most American minds) are fond of worst-case scenarios of the kind that crop up conveniently often in the popular TV show "24."

If you knew there was a bomb planted that would go off in an hour and kill 10,000 (or 100,000) people, and you had the guy who you were sure knew the location, wouldn't you at least think of torturing him to squeeze the information out of him (or her) and save all those lives? Aside from the fact that nobody has ever described such a situation in real life, chances are it wouldn't work in real life the way it almost always conveniently works on "24." The dynamic would almost certainly be the opposite. If the guy knew he only had to hold out for an hour, he would almost certainly endure the torture that long, knowing he would win. If he "cracked," he would almost certainly deliver false information two or three times to give the bomb a better chance of actually going off.

I've known this for some time through talking to actual interrogators and reading. Now there's a 374-page report from the government's Science Intelligence Board that confirms, as this article summarizes, that "There is almost no scientific evidence to back up the U.S. intelligence community's use of controversial interrogation techniques in the fight against terrorism, and experts believe some painful and coercive approacjes could hinder the ability to get good information."

The writers of the book point out there has been almost no scentific research on interrogation techniques in 40 years, and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. With no reliable information available, U.S. interrogators "make it up on the fly."

Not only can the use of torture undermine the legitimacy of the government and its cause, but, as Col. Steven Kleinman, who was the Pentagon's senior intelligence officer for special survival training, wrote: "The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information." Subjects are more likely to tell the interrogator what he thinks he wants to hear, or anything to get the torture to stop, rather than the truth. Furthermore, Kleinman wrote, torture can confuse the perception of truth. Even isolation, a widely used tactic that some consider mild, causes "profound emotional psychological, and physical disconfort," and can "significantly and negatively inmpact the ability of the source to recall information accurately."

Given all this, the enthusiasm for torture among some Americans can most likely be chalked up to profound ignorance or, perhaps more troubling, a certain degree of sadism.