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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Aside from its devastating effects and the wasted time and resources, does torture actually work? Organizations can certainly use torture to intimidate prisoners and to produce confessions (many of which turn out to be false). But the real question is whether organizations can apply torture scientifically and professionally to produce true information. Does this method yield better results than others at an army's disposal? The history of torture demonstrates that it does not -- whether it is stealthy or not.
Advocates of torture believe that more physical pain stimulates more compliance, but this view is not based on science; it is medical nonsense. Pain, as noted clinical psychologist Ron Melzack has shown, is far more complex than that. Injury does not always produce pain. In one study, 37 percent of people who arrived at an emergency ward with injuries such as amputated fingers, major skin lacerations and fractured bones did not feel any pain until many minutes, even hours, after the injury. Similarly, soldiers with massive wounds sometimes do not feel their pain for a long time.
In addition, human beings differ widely in their ability to endure extreme pain. Clinical psychologists and some torturers in colonized nations agree that past experiences and cultural beliefs (for example, "suffering is divine") enable some human beings to endure pain others could not. People also vary in their ability to use psychological states like distraction or anxiety to reduce pain.
Moreover, pain, unlike heat, is not a single sensation but, as Melzack observes, can variously feel like burning, throbbing or cutting. Victims can play these different sensations against each other, using one pain to distract themselves from another, much like a person might bite his hand as someone extracts a thorn.
Last, pain is not constant. As the body is damaged, its ability to sense pain declines. Torturers run out of places where they can apply pain effectively.
Unlike the physics of boiling water, in which one knows how much heat to apply, there is no way to calculate in advance how much torture is needed to obtain compliance from a prisoner. Science and technology can help with the conduct of torture: Modern instruments reduce the hard labor of torture, helping ensure that it is not lethal; and they guarantee that few marks will be left as evidence. But science and technology cannot predict the precise amount or kind of torture that will work with each human being. Opportunistic use of technology does not make torturers scientific any more than wearing a white lab coat makes torturers scientists.
If torture can't be scientific, can it at least be done professionally? To think that professionalism is a guard against causing excessive pain is an illusion. Instead, torture induces a dynamic that breaks down professionalism. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram has shown that professionalism can serve to excuse ever more violent behavior. The myth of the professional torturer is also shattered in "Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities," by Martha K. Huggins, Philip G. Zimbardo and Mika Haritos-Fatouros.
As a victim feels less pain, torturers have to push harder, using more severe methods to overtake the victim's maximal pain threshold. And because victims experience different types of pain, torturers have to use a scattershot approach. No matter how professional torturers may think they are, they have no choice but behaving like sadists. Even though many of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were using techniques approved by their superiors, it is no surprise that they went far beyond these techniques, trying anything that worked.
Competition among torturers also drives brutality. As one torturer put it, each interrogator "thinks he is going to get the information at any minute and takes good care not to let the bird go to the next chap after he's softened him up nicely, when of course the other chap would get the honor and glory of it." Torture, as New York University economist Leonard Wantchekon has said, is a zero-sum game.
What's more, coercive interrogation undermines other professional policing skills: Why do fingerprinting when you've got a bat? Which means investigators rely on even more torture to get information, increasing the degree of brutality.
Finally, competition between intelligence agencies that conduct torture tears bureaucracies apart. Competition between intelligence agencies is a normal phenomenon, and usually a good one, producing multiple sources of information. But when agencies turn to torture, the competition to get first crack at the victim leads to unprofessional behavior and bureaucratic fragmentation. Brazilian police raided each other's prisons. The Nazi intelligence machine fragmented under the intense competition among the Kripo, Sipo, and regional Gestapos.
Is this way of applying pain more effective than other investigative methods? Torture is definitely inferior. The interrogation manual of Japanese fascists put it this way: "Care must be exercised when making use of rebukes, invectives or torture as it will result in his telling falsehoods and making a fool of you." Torture "is only to be used when everything else has failed as it is the most clumsy [method]."
