Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Andrew Sullivan makes a powerful argument against torture from our current presidential campaign. How do we know that torture leads to false intelligence information and false confessions? Because John McCain, treated with the same torture techniques we've been using, made a false confession.
Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession ... are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks.How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true?
Well said. And well thought out.
Here is a video of Phillippe Sands, director of the Center on International Courts and Tribunals, testifying before a House committee on torture. He talks about the British experience with the IRA and their rejection of torture. He also talks at the end about McCain's experiences.
Politics
Comments
Shhhhh, not so loud! You might be next.
Posted by: Abby Normal | July 8, 2008 10:08 AM
It is very interesting to see this discussion ... this admission of the 'creation of a breeding ground' for recruits.
Right. Don't call it a war on terror.
Posted by: Greg Laden | July 8, 2008 10:09 AM
If I were just a little more cynical I'd think the current administration is intentionally creating "terrorist breeding grounds" in order to ensure a perpetual enemy for their perpetual war, or more to the point, perpetual war-time power. But I don't think they're quite that Machiavellian. (In some ways I'd be comforted to think they were.) Rather, I see the Bush policies as the result of a desire for revenge, a means of intimidation, and a healthy dose of incompetence.
Posted by: Abby Normal | July 8, 2008 10:27 AM
Here's another tidbit in this little circle:
NYT reports that the Gitmo techniques came verbatim from a memo written by an expert on Chinese torture techniques used against US AF pilots captured in Korea. An American analyst summarized the techniques and explicitly established that the purpose of the interrogations was to generate false confessions. His name, Biderman, is still used to describe them; he's become eponymous for a torture process. Nice.
Assumption--the Vietnamese (despite their hatred of the Chinese) would be working from the same set of techniques. Lots of evidence for that, with exhibit A John McCain.
The SERE training (established after McCain and the Vietnam experience, I believe) includes training to give the interrogators what they want, I think.
Most interesting, the Chinese (and therefore their American students) were less interested in real intelligence than false confessions for propaganda purposes. But the handbook on torture described in the NYT article has the parts about false confessions stripped out, with the rest--waterboarding, etc.--in there verbatim. So not only are the US interrogators using a communist template for interrogation, they don't know it, and they don't know that its main value is to generate propaganda and not real intel.
That's a charming trick to play on your own people; it means that the intel from Gitmo is certified by the grunts on the ground, and becomes golden propaganda, yet the politicians who benefit from it have deniability when it proves out false. Rumsfeld and Rove fingerprints, with the vacant complicity of George Bush.
ice
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON -- The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215000694-vrVKeu08Xu6lPbBRT6iPDg&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Posted by: ice9 | July 8, 2008 10:42 AM
Time to invoke 1984:
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
Posted by: Paul | July 8, 2008 12:32 PM
Meanwhile, a nutter here:
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2008/07/bush_we_dont_torture_the_facts.php
Seems to think that morality goes out the window when the USA is under attack, and that torture is fine and dandy.
Posted by: guthrie | July 8, 2008 1:46 PM
I would add to guthrie's note that he is talking about the troll there who is the real nutter, not the author of the article. The troll overwhelms with volume, but is more than somewhat distanced below Reality.
Posted by: GrayGaffer | July 8, 2008 2:19 PM
guthrie's link should instead go directly to one of Randy's comments. He's a regular fixture on that blog. Oddly charming - clearly unbalanced - and a character with ruthless, dangerous, and immoral opinions, in that he often justifies torture, wire-tapping, use of nuclear weapons, and so forth. (I would call Randy pragmatic, except that I believe torture's principal effect on government policy is to increase the severity of the leaders' pre-existing delusions.)
Posted by: llewelly | July 9, 2008 12:24 AM
IMO, this false confession aspect of torture is the best angle for torture opponents because it blows away the pragmatic arguments for torture.
Even in the ludicrous "ticking bomb" scenario, a method of obtaining information that generates more noise than signal is of no use. Because of the unreliable information it generates, the use of torture is a threat to national security.
Posted by: James K | July 9, 2008 1:15 AM
A bit of snark cross-posted from Greg's blog:
Smith! 6079 Smith W! We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia. Or was it Eastasia? No, wait, that was last week.
:-PPPPPPPPPPP
(/snark)
I'm struck by Sands's final comment. I immediately thought of the end of the movie WarGames, in which the supercomputer controlling the US nuclear arsenal plays out all the possible scenarios and says:
Posted by: themadlolscientist | July 9, 2008 4:04 PM