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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Since the 1970s, a large body of research has shown that unless the public specifically identifies suspects to the police, the chances that a crime will be solved falls to about 10 percent. Only a small percentage of crimes are discovered or solved through surveillance, fingerprinting, DNA sampling and offender profiling.
Police in long-term dictatorships like China and the Soviet Union also know the importance of public cooperation for solving crimes. Where they can't get public cooperation for certain crimes (such as against state property), they create an alternative human intelligence system -- informants. Although such police states use torture for intimidation and false confessions, they also know that good intelligence requires humans willing to trust government enough to work with it.
Even guerrillas know this truth. An internal report from Iraq, quoted by Seymour Hersh in the May 24 New Yorker, states that the insurgents have depended mainly on "painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance" by the Iraqi police force, "which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents" and "pro-insurgent individuals working within the [Coalition Provisional Authority's] so-called Green Zone." Not surprisingly, the insurgents' "strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good."
Torture is a sign that a government either does not enjoy the trust of the people it governs or cannot recruit informers for a surveillance system. In both cases, torture to obtain information is a sign of institutional decay and desperation -- as Saddam Hussein's Iraq clearly demonstrates. And torture accelerates this process, destroying the bonds of loyalty, respect and trust that keep information flowing. As any remaining sources of intelligence dry up, governments have to torture even more.
But perhaps torture for something, anything, is better than sitting on one's hands. Maybe, somehow, one can retrieve a nugget of true information.
The problem is that "anything" needs to be verified, and as the Vietnam-era CIA Kubark manual explains, "a time-consuming delay results." In the meantime, the prisoner can think of new, more complex falsehoods. Intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to this. In police work, the crime is already known; all one wants is the confession. But in intelligence, one must gather information about things that one does not know.
What's more, even prisoners who tell the truth under torture normally provide less detailed information than that obtainable through noncoercive interrogation. Damaged, sleep-deprived bodies remember information inaccurately, unable to make fine distinctions. Consider the case of a prisoner who wanted to tell the Chilean police an address: "Although I knew the street name, I had no idea of the number. Still furious, they realized that in truth I could not tell them where to go and once more they untied me."
Sometimes when prisoners provide true information, interrogators refuse to recognize it, since they assume most victims lie. So they continue torturing until they are satisfied. The notion that one will stop when one hears the right information presupposes that one has gathered circumstantial information that allows one to know the truth when one hears it. But that is precisely what does not happen with torture. Torturers spend so much time on torture that they have no time to gather supplementary evidence.
Finally, even when torturers think they know what they are looking for, they sometimes can't believe true information. One prisoner in Chile broke down several days into torture and revealed the names of the nuns and priests who had sheltered her. But the conservative and devout interrogators could not believe they were involved and continued torturing her.
What if time is short, as with a "ticking bomb"? Does torture offer a shortcut? Real torture -- not the stuff of television -- takes days, if not weeks. Even torturers know this. There are three things that limit torture's value in this context.
First, there is the medical limit. Physical methods, like psychological methods, take time. In the face of extreme pain, human beings faint and, as one French resistance fighter said, this "gives you a reprieve between blows" and delays interrogation. As the interrogation proceeds, victims become less sensitive to pain. After undergoing four torture sessions, a Norwegian resistance fighter concluded that "pain had reached its limit -- when it could hurt no more, what did it matter how it was inflicted?" In addition, as torturers push harder, they sometimes cause inadvertent death. And dead men, like unconscious men, don't talk.
