Thread: The Most Effective Interrogation Technique

"i wonder how those bastards stay sane after doing this type of crap."

A lot of vodka and morose sense of humor is all I can figure.

Fear was no excuse to condone torture - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com

Fear was no excuse to condone torture

BY CHARLES C. KRULAK AND JOSEPH P. HOAR

In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.

But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to ``the dark side'' continue to assert -- against all evidence -- that torture ``worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cheney applauded the ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' -- what we used to call ``war crimes'' because they violated the Geneva Conventions, which the United States instigated and has followed for 60 years. Cheney insisted the abusive techniques were ``absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.'' He claimed they were ``directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy . . . It worked very, very well.''

Repeating these assertions doesn't make them true. We now see that the best intelligence, which led to the capture of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was produced by professional interrogations using non-coercive techniques. When the abuse began, prisoners told interrogators whatever they thought would make it stop.

Torture is as likely to produce lies as the truth. And it did.

What leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did recently, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee, and the former vice president winks and nods, it matters.

The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. Rules about the humane treatment of prisoners exist precisely to deter those in the field from taking matters into their own hands. They protect our nation's honor.

To argue that honorable conduct is only required against an honorable enemy degrades the Americans who must carry out the orders. As military professionals, we know that complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.

On Aug. 24, the United States took an important step toward moral clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.

The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies. Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence, yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Cheney's. They concluded that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and harms U.S. national security.

On this solemn day we pause to remember those who lost their lives on 9/11. As our leaders work to prevent terrorists from again striking on our soil, they should remember the fundamental precept of counterinsurgency we've relearned in Afghanistan and Iraq: Undermine the enemy's legitimacy while building our own. These wars will not be won on the battlefield. They will be won in the hearts of young men who decide not to sign up to be fighters and young women who decline to be suicide bombers. If Americans torture and it comes to light -- as it inevitably will -- it embitters and alienates the very people we need most.

Our current commander-in-chief understands this. The task force recommendations take us a step closer to restoring the rule of law and the standards of human dignity that made us who we are as a nation. Repudiating torture and other cruelty helps keep us from being sent on fools' errands by bad intelligence. And in the end, that makes us all safer.

Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.

A couple of econ profs are writing a paper on torture- they've got a few posts on the subject on their blog. I expect Shek's seen it already, since I found it via Marginal Revolution.

Originally Posted by Jeff Ely

The Limits of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”
January 20, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: game theory, terrorism, war | by jeff
Sandeep and I are writing a paper on torture. We are trying to understand the mechanics and effectiveness of torture viewed purely as a mechanism for extracting information from the unwilling. A major theme we are finding is that torture is complicated by numerous commitment problems. We have blogged about these before. Here is Sandeep’s first post on torture which got this whole project started.

A big problem is that torture takes time and when the victim has resisted repeated torture it becomes more and more likely that he actually has no information to give. At this point the torturer has a hard time credibly commiting to continue the torture because in all likelihood he is torturing an innocent victim. This feeds back into the early stages of the torture because it increases the temptation for the truly informed victim to resist torture and pretend to be uninformed.

In light of this it is possible to say something about the benefits of adopting more and more severe forms of torture, waterboarding say. A naive presumption is that a technology which delivers suffering at a faster pace would circumvent the problem because it makes it harder to resist temptation for long enough.

But this logic is backwards. Indeed, if it were true that more severe torture induced the informed to reveal their information early, then this would only hasten the time at which the torture ceases because the torturer becomes convinced that his heretofore silent victim is in fact innocent. So credible torture requires that those who resist the now more severe torture must find compensation in the form of less information revealed in the future. In the end the informed victim is no worse off and this means that the torturer is no better off.

Once you account for that what you are left with is that there is more suffering inflicted on the uninformed who has no alternative but to resist. And this only makes it more difficult to continue torturing once the victim has demonstrated he is innocent. That is, the original commitment problem is only made worse.

The Limits of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” Cheap Talk

Other torture posts:

Torture “Confessions” are Cheap Talk Cheap Talk

Torture: Incentive Compatibility Cheap Talk

When Would We Learn What We Got From Torture? Cheap Talk

Originally Posted by melvinchen

torture may not always work against a well-trained intelligence/special ops operator.

It depends on the profile of the captive...if its a high-rank/high-profile person, having prior intelligence on his background/family/address/names of family members can be useful.

For others, it takes abit of time to figure their weak spots...

So you've tortured people? How many were special ops? How many were high-ranking? What nationality were they? What kind of counter-interrogation techniques were they trained in?

Originally Posted by TopHatter

I've long suspected the Cheney was delusional about the whole torture thing.

And now a former Commandant of the USMC and a former CINCCENTCOM, surely not Code Pink types, have confirmed it.

Damn! The moment I saw 'Krulak' I sat up straight. Talk about a chip off the old block. And as you say, not likely to be mistaken for a flaming liberal.

Originally Posted by Shek

So you've tortured people? How many were special ops? How many were high-ranking? What nationality were they? What kind of counter-interrogation techniques were they trained in?

Some people are way out of their league and don't get it. Dude, if you do real torture you're probably in the wrong place. If you haven't, you are talking out of your rear end.

Originally Posted by Old World Order

This thread seems to assume that one tactic will always be the most effective. Are we discarding the idea that what is effective 90% of the time maybe ineffective 10% of the time? And that what isn't effective for 95% of situations may be effective in 5% of situations? And what works on most people may not work on others?

And all permutations therein?

No, the thread doesn't assume one tactic will always be the most effective. However, there's a clear theme that there's a class of techniques that are far less effective than others if not completely ineffective.

Originally Posted by Old World Order

Uhhh...when a thread is entitled "Most Effective Interrogation Technique" there is obviously the implication that one technique will be most effective. Don't insult people's intelligence, please.

It's not obvious at all. In fact, it's just as likely that the implication is that it's situationally dependent. When you read the thread, the tone isn't in support of a single one size fits all solution. So your obvious implication is even less obvious. You'd do well to minimize reading too much into things. Swinging at strawman isn't very effective

Originally Posted by Old World Order

????



Shit's situational. Was that what you were looking for? I guess we cut the fat off this thread. Teamwork!

So I take it that you have nothing to add and are just wasting bandwidth?