One interesting fact about the "Attention Grab" (I've seen this linked a couple of palces, and am relying on those references -- if someone wants to tell me it's not true, I'm convincible) is that the Israelis stopped using it as a technique after they killed a couple of people with it. We killed a prisoner with the cold cell technique.
Wouldn't you think that anything you can do to someone where death is a not overwhelmingly unlikely possibility should count as torture?
Yes, think of the "attention grab" as "like those incidents where babies get shaken to death." Physicians for Human Rights on it--I don't know that they're trustworthy, but they don't seem to be a far left group or anything.
While there definitely exists a grey area where it is hard to say whether a particular technique is or is not torture, I'm afraid that some are using that grey area as a red herring (to mix color metaphors), e.g., "Because it's hard to say what is and is not torture, you can't really say for sure that any technique is really torture. Therefore, we do not torture." The argument is never stated so succinctly as that, but that seems to be the what torture extreme interrogation apologists are getting at whenever they bring up that whole "torture is so hard to define" line of reasoning.
3-- That reminds me of that "Sorities Paradox" thing (I think) that Yglesias referenced when he was on that panel wearing the crazy green tie. Something to the effect of, we can't say at what specific point someone starts to be bald, but we still find it useful to have a bald/not bald distinction. Even though it's hard to very specifically define exactly what torture is, that doesn't mean nothing is torture.
Yes to what eb said--some of these, I think all but the face and belly slaps, are intrinsically torture for the reasons LB and eb give. The face and belly slaps could just be ordinary prison-beating in some contexts (which is still wrong, you know). That's when you need to bring in the situation. (and you know, sticking someone in a hole without company for months on end and no due process rights is pretty bad in itself)
I have no idea how to win people over to our side on this. I don't even know how to talk to someone who brings up frat hazing in these contexts.
I had quite a bit of training in the military on this. Ogged is right, even in weeks of training, it was something we knew would end relatively soon. Sometimes painful, often bruising, but we all knew, temporary.
Did I get turtured? Never.
Did I get a taste of what turture might sometimes feel like?
Maybe a little, certainly enough to know that the techniques listed in the post, in the context of the the US prisoners in the war on terror and their unlimited detentions, some without right to council or even Red Cross/Cresent visitation, are clearly torture as defined by Geneva, and by me.
The very least the torture apologists could do is a hiuge retrospective apology and damages to the KGB: I mean, how could we have called them tortureres, when it turns out they were just frat-hazing Mandelstam, and Babel and Bukharin all along. And to think that there were people calling for Walter Duranty's pulitzer prize to by withdrawn posthumously! If the CIA has accurate information now, then all the confessions in theMoscow show trials must have been accurate too.
Mr. B has a good point -- maybe we should actually use the existing laws that define torture, rather than trying to solve the problem on a vague conceptual level. But as for the vague concept, I think the line is between where you say, "Maybe he's getting a little rough" and where you say, "Wow, that interrogator guy is one sick fuck." I would say that even a stomach slap is more toward the sick fuck side, though a slap in the face might be permissible. But then, I hate America, so what do I know?
I suppose that a bunch of people who think that movies and video games make you qualified to know what war is like, would naturally believe that frat hazing and interrogation training makes you qualified to know what torture is like.
Also, the elephant in the room of these torture discussions seems to be that torture is way more common than we are willing to admit. I came away from that Volokh thread, as I have from some other similar discussions, convinced that an awful lot of torture goes on in American prisons, performed partly by the other inmates, partly by the guards. American schools? I'm not willing to rule it out. American history? I'm afraid to even go there.
It would be nice if our current administration's torture fetish got us to examine this more closely, but I doubt it.
maybe we should actually use the existing laws that define torture, rather than trying to solve the problem on a vague conceptual level
But who's going to report it, and who's going to want to prosecute it? This seems to me an issue where the side the public supports will carry the day, regardless of the laws. Without some sense of shame, or an understanding of just what's wrong about what's going on, then people will stand around and say, "I'm sure it hurt, but I wouldn't call it torture." And anyway, the administration's legal position is that Geneva doesn't always apply.
Evil people like John Yoo use the vagueness of the concepts to try to excuse things that are clearly torture, and we need to to respond with clarity that isn't simply rigid and stupid in its own way (e.g., saying that an "attention slap" is always torture).
But this is really the problem. If things are vague (and they are), then it's important to have worry over the people who are in charge of the refinement of the definition. If those guys seem to make the wrong call in the same direction every time (and they do), throw the fuckers out. If those guys come up with an explanation or definition that seems wildly inappropriate (and they have), throw the fuckers out.
But pretending that there is an undiscovered heuristic out there that will make people who feel comfortable with the John Yoos of the world see the error of their ways is more than unhelpful; it's a commitment to seeing more of the same occur.
I think explaining that context matters can go a long way. But I'd like some formulation that would at least help people wrestle with the vagueness, because the frame right now is, "Does this look like what I've seen in the movies? Does this cause permanent bodily harm?"
Isn't the administration's position that Geneva doesn't always apply incidental to their position that only what they say counts?
In which case we - well, someone with actual power, as opposed to, say, blog commenters - do need to deal with things conceptually in order to form a code that does apply to the detainee cases rather then leaving everything so vague as to slide into abuses.
What's disturbing is that there does seem to have been a kind of a code for interrogation procedures. I can imagine that some officials involved in drafting and applying the torture memos looked at the Abu Ghraib pictures and thought: "Hey, those aren't the techniques we ordered!"
Yeah. The rule I like on torture is that hurting people to make them talk? Is torture. (That is, there's probably some level of hurting people that I wouldn't consider torture -- I doubt that that level of hurting people would have much effect on making them talk.) So don't use hurting people as a technique for making them talk. If you want to get tricky about what 'hurting people' means (does standing in one position for 40 hours 'hurt'?), the question to ask is: Do you expect someone to talk because if they talk it will stop, or unless they talk you'll do it again? If so, at that point, I think we're talking about torture.
I agree that the basic lack of public shame regarding the cases of bona fide, unmistakable torture that are well-documented (e.g., Abu Ghraib) is huge obstacle to overcome. It makes it all the more difficult to try to hold our government to some internationally agreed upon standard of conduct when the attitude of so many people is to minimize what happened ("fraternity-style antics"), to make excuses ("a few bad apples"), or even to justify it ("they were terrorists, so they deserved it"). Where is the sense that, as the good guys, we should not be engaging in this sort of stuff, even if we feel that these bastards somehow deserve it, because when we torture we cease to be the good guys?
also, very importantly: information obtained under torture tends to be extremely unreliable. People say something just to make it stop -- especially in situations like Iraq where information is often unverifiable.
This is the biggest reason why countries like the UK and even pre-G.W.Bush America had mostly phased it out: besides being morally disgusting, torture often JUST DOESN'T WORK as a way of gaining information.
##16, 17: Read the Bybee memo, specifically fn. 7. There was a framework for some of this stuff, and they just read that framework defanged. The interpreter matters as much as the language; I'd think you two would be particular proponents of this belief.
What's disturbing is that there does seem to have been a kind of a code for interrogation procedures.
A manual, you mean? Da. Of course there is. I saw the first picture of the sort of things they do way back in December 2001. ("Terrorist" tied up in the back of a plane with a bag over his head while a bunch of swinging dicks stood around and looked tough. At the time I didn't connect it with torture, since he was just immobilized, but I couldn't figure out why they were so goddamned afraid of one terrorist.)
Anyways, I mailed A. Sullivan an email to exactly that effect about a year ago. They use the same tactics (breathing restrictions/hooding, harsh beatings, 'blaspheme' & sodomy!) pretty much everywhere, with local innovations, regardless of effectiveness. In fact, from what I can, they don't care about effectiveness. They just want to beat on people.
It's almost like a repressed homosexual sadist/S&M freak with a fetish for darker men got the opportunity to scrawl his sexual fantasies across the Near East. (I doubt that part of my email went over well with Andrew.)
Also, the elephant in the room of these torture discussions seems to be that torture is way more common than we are willing to admit.
Yes. Been there and done that! Being tortured is not fun!
That said, I must say being slapped is hardly the worst form of torture; the standing for forty hours shit? That's way way worse. (Well, unless they slapped you repeatedly for 40 hours. Hello, wet brain.)
I agree with Yglesias that torturers tend to be sadists, and thus not very good at extracting information. I'll disagree and say that you can extract some information from terror, intimidation, & pain, it's just not very good information. IF you have someone that knows what the hell they're doing.
Which we don't.
ash
['So, that invading Iraq thing was a really GREAT fucking idea, wasn't it? A cakewalk, even.']
I found Atrios's post "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" to be really enlightening on why the administration might not be paying as much attention to the "torture results in false confessions" argument as I think they should. The short version:
A recent Times article pointed out that the methods for torture we used were taken adapted from tolitarian communist techniques valued not for their success in obtaining the truth but in their ability to obtain false confessions.
Apparently that wasn't really a bug, but a feature. The Times also recently pointed that even though the Bush administration was warned that one of the information sources, al Libi, was full of shit they kept on using his information to justify the war...
The Bush administration needs evidence to support their war. They use torture techniqes designed to extract false confessions to obtain that "evidence," which they then use to sell the war despite knowing full well of the lack of reliability of the information.
If you want to get tricky about what 'hurting people' means the question to ask is: Do you expect someone to talk because if they talk it will stop, or unless they talk you'll do it again? If so, at that point, I think we're talking about torture.
How does putting Judy Miller in jail get categorized? Being in jail sucks, and is certainly emotionally painful, if not physically. It stopped when she talked, and presumably if she gets hauled before Fitzgerald's new grand jury it'll be in her mind when she's deciding whether or not to talk again. Does that mean that she was tortured?
I don't think she was, but I think that saying "Must not torture. It's self-evident what this means." leaves one open to charges that of fuzzy-headed thinking that we can ill afford in these difficult times blah blah blah.
What's a more effective argument? I don't know. Old Israeli generals saying "I've tortured more people than even your CIA, and I realized that frankly, not only does it come back to screw you, but it doesn't work anyway?" US Vietnam vets saying "I told them whatever the hell they wanted to hear just so they'd stop beating me?" Iraqis saying "I told them what they wanted to hear, a) so they'd stop beating me, b) because Ahmed was making eyes at my sister and I wanted him punished, but I didn't realize that they'd bomb his house while my sister was there and kill them both, the bastards!" Getting a steady stream of leaks out of the CIA to keep the military sort of in line until the 2006 elections and hopefully getting control of some of the government back then? Damned if I know.
One interesting fact about the "Attention Grab" (I've seen this linked a couple of palces, and am relying on those references -- if someone wants to tell me it's not true, I'm convincible) is that the Israelis stopped using it as a technique after they killed a couple of people with it. We killed a prisoner with the cold cell technique.
Wouldn't you think that anything you can do to someone where death is a not overwhelmingly unlikely possibility should count as torture?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 11:42 AM
Yes, think of the "attention grab" as "like those incidents where babies get shaken to death." Physicians for Human Rights on it--I don't know that they're trustworthy, but they don't seem to be a far left group or anything.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 11:59 AM
While there definitely exists a grey area where it is hard to say whether a particular technique is or is not torture, I'm afraid that some are using that grey area as a red herring (to mix color metaphors), e.g., "Because it's hard to say what is and is not torture, you can't really say for sure that any technique is really torture. Therefore, we do not torture." The argument is never stated so succinctly as that, but that seems to be the what
tortureextreme interrogation apologists are getting at whenever they bring up that whole "torture is so hard to define" line of reasoning.Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 12:02 PM
"Long Time Standing" seems like a situation all by itself. Or is 40 hours standing, shackled and handcuffed, done in relatively benign situations?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 12:07 PM
3-- That reminds me of that "Sorities Paradox" thing (I think) that Yglesias referenced when he was on that panel wearing the crazy green tie. Something to the effect of, we can't say at what specific point someone starts to be bald, but we still find it useful to have a bald/not bald distinction. Even though it's hard to very specifically define exactly what torture is, that doesn't mean nothing is torture.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 12:12 PM
Yes to what eb said--some of these, I think all but the face and belly slaps, are intrinsically torture for the reasons LB and eb give. The face and belly slaps could just be ordinary prison-beating in some contexts (which is still wrong, you know). That's when you need to bring in the situation. (and you know, sticking someone in a hole without company for months on end and no due process rights is pretty bad in itself)
I have no idea how to win people over to our side on this. I don't even know how to talk to someone who brings up frat hazing in these contexts.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 12:12 PM
I had quite a bit of training in the military on this. Ogged is right, even in weeks of training, it was something we knew would end relatively soon. Sometimes painful, often bruising, but we all knew, temporary.
Did I get turtured? Never.
Did I get a taste of what turture might sometimes feel like?
Maybe a little, certainly enough to know that the techniques listed in the post, in the context of the the US prisoners in the war on terror and their unlimited detentions, some without right to council or even Red Cross/Cresent visitation, are clearly torture as defined by Geneva, and by me.
Posted by Mr. B | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 12:15 PM
The very least the torture apologists could do is a hiuge retrospective apology and damages to the KGB: I mean, how could we have called them tortureres, when it turns out they were just frat-hazing Mandelstam, and Babel and Bukharin all along. And to think that there were people calling for Walter Duranty's pulitzer prize to by withdrawn posthumously! If the CIA has accurate information now, then all the confessions in theMoscow show trials must have been accurate too.
Posted by Andrew Brown | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 12:58 PM
Mr. B has a good point -- maybe we should actually use the existing laws that define torture, rather than trying to solve the problem on a vague conceptual level. But as for the vague concept, I think the line is between where you say, "Maybe he's getting a little rough" and where you say, "Wow, that interrogator guy is one sick fuck." I would say that even a stomach slap is more toward the sick fuck side, though a slap in the face might be permissible. But then, I hate America, so what do I know?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 1:00 PM
I suppose that a bunch of people who think that movies and video games make you qualified to know what war is like, would naturally believe that frat hazing and interrogation training makes you qualified to know what torture is like.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 1:01 PM
Also, the elephant in the room of these torture discussions seems to be that torture is way more common than we are willing to admit. I came away from that Volokh thread, as I have from some other similar discussions, convinced that an awful lot of torture goes on in American prisons, performed partly by the other inmates, partly by the guards. American schools? I'm not willing to rule it out. American history? I'm afraid to even go there.
It would be nice if our current administration's torture fetish got us to examine this more closely, but I doubt it.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 1:07 PM
How come the Church gets so vocal about abortion and politicians but hasn't, as far as I know, come out vocally about torture?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 1:16 PM
Conflict of interest.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 1:17 PM
maybe we should actually use the existing laws that define torture, rather than trying to solve the problem on a vague conceptual level
But who's going to report it, and who's going to want to prosecute it? This seems to me an issue where the side the public supports will carry the day, regardless of the laws. Without some sense of shame, or an understanding of just what's wrong about what's going on, then people will stand around and say, "I'm sure it hurt, but I wouldn't call it torture." And anyway, the administration's legal position is that Geneva doesn't always apply.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 1:59 PM
Evil people like John Yoo use the vagueness of the concepts to try to excuse things that are clearly torture, and we need to to respond with clarity that isn't simply rigid and stupid in its own way (e.g., saying that an "attention slap" is always torture).
But this is really the problem. If things are vague (and they are), then it's important to have worry over the people who are in charge of the refinement of the definition. If those guys seem to make the wrong call in the same direction every time (and they do), throw the fuckers out. If those guys come up with an explanation or definition that seems wildly inappropriate (and they have), throw the fuckers out.
But pretending that there is an undiscovered heuristic out there that will make people who feel comfortable with the John Yoos of the world see the error of their ways is more than unhelpful; it's a commitment to seeing more of the same occur.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:07 PM
I think explaining that context matters can go a long way. But I'd like some formulation that would at least help people wrestle with the vagueness, because the frame right now is, "Does this look like what I've seen in the movies? Does this cause permanent bodily harm?"
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:12 PM
Isn't the administration's position that Geneva doesn't always apply incidental to their position that only what they say counts?
In which case we - well, someone with actual power, as opposed to, say, blog commenters - do need to deal with things conceptually in order to form a code that does apply to the detainee cases rather then leaving everything so vague as to slide into abuses.
What's disturbing is that there does seem to have been a kind of a code for interrogation procedures. I can imagine that some officials involved in drafting and applying the torture memos looked at the Abu Ghraib pictures and thought: "Hey, those aren't the techniques we ordered!"
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:13 PM
13. Seriously, though, I wouldn't mind seeing a christian movement on this. The pertinent line should be "love your enemy," no?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:13 PM
Yeah. The rule I like on torture is that hurting people to make them talk? Is torture. (That is, there's probably some level of hurting people that I wouldn't consider torture -- I doubt that that level of hurting people would have much effect on making them talk.) So don't use hurting people as a technique for making them talk. If you want to get tricky about what 'hurting people' means (does standing in one position for 40 hours 'hurt'?), the question to ask is: Do you expect someone to talk because if they talk it will stop, or unless they talk you'll do it again? If so, at that point, I think we're talking about torture.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:16 PM
18 - I'm pretty sure Jim Wallis/Sojourners have been speaking out about this.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:17 PM
20 - Yep: "Who Would Jesus Torture?"
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:18 PM
Re 14:
I agree that the basic lack of public shame regarding the cases of bona fide, unmistakable torture that are well-documented (e.g., Abu Ghraib) is huge obstacle to overcome. It makes it all the more difficult to try to hold our government to some internationally agreed upon standard of conduct when the attitude of so many people is to minimize what happened ("fraternity-style antics"), to make excuses ("a few bad apples"), or even to justify it ("they were terrorists, so they deserved it"). Where is the sense that, as the good guys, we should not be engaging in this sort of stuff, even if we feel that these bastards somehow deserve it, because when we torture we cease to be the good guys?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 2:22 PM
also, very importantly: information obtained under torture tends to be extremely unreliable. People say something just to make it stop -- especially in situations like Iraq where information is often unverifiable.
This is the biggest reason why countries like the UK and even pre-G.W.Bush America had mostly phased it out: besides being morally disgusting, torture often JUST DOESN'T WORK as a way of gaining information.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 3:47 PM
##16, 17: Read the Bybee memo, specifically fn. 7. There was a framework for some of this stuff, and they just read that framework defanged. The interpreter matters as much as the language; I'd think you two would be particular proponents of this belief.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 3:58 PM
What's disturbing is that there does seem to have been a kind of a code for interrogation procedures.
A manual, you mean? Da. Of course there is. I saw the first picture of the sort of things they do way back in December 2001. ("Terrorist" tied up in the back of a plane with a bag over his head while a bunch of swinging dicks stood around and looked tough. At the time I didn't connect it with torture, since he was just immobilized, but I couldn't figure out why they were so goddamned afraid of one terrorist.)
Anyways, I mailed A. Sullivan an email to exactly that effect about a year ago. They use the same tactics (breathing restrictions/hooding, harsh beatings, 'blaspheme' & sodomy!) pretty much everywhere, with local innovations, regardless of effectiveness. In fact, from what I can, they don't care about effectiveness. They just want to beat on people.
It's almost like a repressed homosexual sadist/S&M freak with a fetish for darker men got the opportunity to scrawl his sexual fantasies across the Near East. (I doubt that part of my email went over well with Andrew.)
Also, the elephant in the room of these torture discussions seems to be that torture is way more common than we are willing to admit.
Yes. Been there and done that! Being tortured is not fun!
That said, I must say being slapped is hardly the worst form of torture; the standing for forty hours shit? That's way way worse. (Well, unless they slapped you repeatedly for 40 hours. Hello, wet brain.)
I agree with Yglesias that torturers tend to be sadists, and thus not very good at extracting information. I'll disagree and say that you can extract some information from terror, intimidation, & pain, it's just not very good information. IF you have someone that knows what the hell they're doing.
Which we don't.
ash
['So, that invading Iraq thing was a really GREAT fucking idea, wasn't it? A cakewalk, even.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 3:58 PM
I found Atrios's post "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" to be really enlightening on why the administration might not be paying as much attention to the "torture results in false confessions" argument as I think they should. The short version:
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 11-21-05 4:16 PM
If you want to get tricky about what 'hurting people' means the question to ask is: Do you expect someone to talk because if they talk it will stop, or unless they talk you'll do it again? If so, at that point, I think we're talking about torture.
How does putting Judy Miller in jail get categorized? Being in jail sucks, and is certainly emotionally painful, if not physically. It stopped when she talked, and presumably if she gets hauled before Fitzgerald's new grand jury it'll be in her mind when she's deciding whether or not to talk again. Does that mean that she was tortured?
I don't think she was, but I think that saying "Must not torture. It's self-evident what this means." leaves one open to charges that of fuzzy-headed thinking that we can ill afford in these difficult times blah blah blah.
What's a more effective argument? I don't know. Old Israeli generals saying "I've tortured more people than even your CIA, and I realized that frankly, not only does it come back to screw you, but it doesn't work anyway?" US Vietnam vets saying "I told them whatever the hell they wanted to hear just so they'd stop beating me?" Iraqis saying "I told them what they wanted to hear, a) so they'd stop beating me, b) because Ahmed was making eyes at my sister and I wanted him punished, but I didn't realize that they'd bomb his house while my sister was there and kill them both, the bastards!" Getting a steady stream of leaks out of the CIA to keep the military sort of in line until the 2006 elections and hopefully getting control of some of the government back then? Damned if I know.
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 12:08 AM