Does torture really work?

I loved Saturday mornings when I was a kid. I usually watched cowboy shows— you know, the ones where they fired dozens of rounds each and never had to reload their 6-shot revolver, where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black. 

Life was simple: If a white hat put the feet of a black hat to the proverbial fire demanding the truth “or else,” the bad guy would always roll over and spill his guts and the information obtained was always correct. The day was always saved. 

But what about real-life torture? Does it really help us gain information from our enemies? 

Interrogation— from Vietnam to Guantanamo Bay
My experience suggests it largely doesn’t. I was a Military Intelligence (MI) agent in Vietnam in 1966. I watched as we worked to dehumanize the enemy, some calling them “gooks,” “slopes,” and other terms designed to differentiate between them and us, the good guys and the bad guys. 

The U.S. Army and other military services taught and practiced “IPW” or interrogation of prisoners of war techniques.  A designation in your military service record verified that you had been taught to conduct “interviews” of enemy combatants.  MI agents and other battlefield interrogators did what they believed they had to do to get information from a detainee, information that could save the lives of other GIs.  After all, how could you compare the life of a Vietcong or a member of the North Vietnamese Army with that of an American, especially when our troops were being killed at such an alarming rate?  And so it went, just as it had probably gone since combatants first squared off against each other with rocks and spears on the fields of battle around the world.  We had to defeat “the enemy,” and if we needed to “take the gloves off,” we justified it in the name of war in order to bring our troops home alive.

Now fast forward with me to 2003-2005 and the detainee holding facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. We know that General Ricardo Sanchez, former U.S. military commander in Iraq, signed a memo in September 2003 that authorized interrogation techniques against Iraqi and other detainees that may have been in violation of both the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Army’s own standards for the conduct of such interrogations. Gen. Sanchez’s memo allowed for tactics such as the use of dogs (the Iraqi detainees were said to be terrified of attack dogs); subjecting prisoners to body positions that would induce physical and mental stress; the implementation of isolation techniques; manipulation of the prisoner’s environment, including disruption of his sleep cycle to confuse his body’s circadian rhythm; drastically changing the temperature in the prisoner’s cell, and even injecting “unpleasant smells” into the prisoner’s environment.

It now appears that the military chain of command broke down and the significant and substantial difference between interrogation and torture was somehow lost. Trained and untrained military and government interrogators conducted these interviews, including National Guard and military reserve personnel, and U.S. Government intelligence agents (read: CIA) and other government contract employees. We have all seen the pictures of prisoners stripped naked and made to lie on top of each other, detainees wearing a dog collar and leash being led around by a laughing female guard, and attack dogs allowed to approach and possible abuse prisoners. We have heard of other alleged abuses, including lit cigarettes put in the ears of prisoners and physical beatings that have contributed to or caused the death of dozens of the detainees— despite the fact that information linking the prisoners to known terrorist groups was said, at least in some cases, to be shaky at best.

Doing whatever it takes
If you’ve watched the TV series “24” this season, you’ve already witnessed a terrorist shot in the leg during an interrogation, another person shocked with an electrical cord, and yet another shot with a stun gun. All of those acts by or around Jack Bauer, the tough government secret agent and rebel you love to fear. Jack’s actions against others are justified, in part, by the ticking clock scenario, something that Jack’s show, by definition, seems to be up against every week. 

“Do what you got to do Jack,” we yell, “to save us from destruction.” We have learned from Jack and others that we must do whatever it takes to preserve truth, justice and the American way of life.  But if we follow Jack’s example and do “whatever it takes and to whom ever we must,” do we eventually lose the distinction between them and us, and, perhaps, reach the point one day, as Pogo once said, where “We have met the enemy and he is us?”

“Stress and duress” is the name for the practice of using coercive techniques to induce psychological regression in a prisoner by the systematic weakening of his will to resist.  We do this to exhaust an individual’s ability to oppose our demands while providing him with the rationalization— perhaps the cessation of pain— to cooperate. But what about less brutal methods, say Sodium Pentothal?  Unlike in the movies, there is no real “truth serum” that will cause a person to lose his psychological self-control and deprive him of the ability to lie or otherwise resist providing the information demanded from him. Drugs used in this manner are mainly intended to create a state of relaxation and make the person more susceptible to suggestion, but their use does not guarantee results that include the absolute truth. 

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