Why Torture?

[Fred the Red Shirt]

A year ago, maybe more I was listening to an interview on
NPR with a person who was familiar with the use of torture
in Central America. Perhaps he was an author promoting a
new book. Anyways, he went on to explain why torture is
worse than useless for obtaining evidence or actionable
intelligence. To paraphrase him, by the time the subject
is broken down to the point where they will cooperate, they
are no longer rational, they are broken down to the point
that what they say not longer depends on what facts they
may know.

So then, the person was asked, why did these regimes
torture people? His answer was that torture was used,
not to obtain information, but to obtain compliance. The
prisoners were tortured primarily to obtain their confessions,
or to obtain incriminating testimony against opponents of
the regimes who of course did not care if it was true or
not.

Naive person that I am, this came as an epiphany. More
on that later.

These subjects, in general, were ordinary people not military,
paramilitary or spies. So what of people who are trained
to resist torture. Nonsense. No one is trained to resist
torture. It is not possible to resist torture. Spies, and one
presumes high ranking operatives in al Queda also, are
trained to give up both truthful information, and plausible
false information, mixing and matching them so that the
interrogators are overloaded with conflicting information.
The strategy turns the interrogation into a tool the prisoner
can use to confound his enemies.

Did the Bush administration officials who advocated torture
not realize this? Well, the methods used are exactly those
used by the Chinese and North Koreans to extract false
confessions from American POWs during the Korean War.
So it is pretty hard to believe that they thought they would
actually obtain good intelligence or valid evidence.

Al Queda has three principle goals. I shouldn't be giving a
rat's ass about their goals because now, nearly eight years
after attacking New York and DC, everyone of any importance
in al Queda should be dead or in prison. That's the way
the previous administration dealt with the 1993 bombing
of the WTC. Instead al Queda is firmly entrenched in West
Pakistan while their Taliban allies have regained control
over much of Afghanistan.

How did that happen?

After the initial success in Afghanistan, and instead of pressing
that advantage to the fullest, the bulk of the US military has
been bogged down in Iraq, with even Armed Predators diverted
there from South Asia. Why, with 3000 dead on our shores
and the same perpetrators regrouping in Pakistan, why did
the Bush administration put the fight against our most dangerous
enemies on a back burner?

We know that several persons in the Bush administration
came to DC already intent on invading Iraq. On the evening
of September 11, insensibly, some of them, notably Dick
Cheney, Paul Wolfowiitz, and Donald Rumsfeld actually
had the gall to suggest that the administration ignore the
attackers entirely, and simply use the attack as an excuse
to invade Iraq. Colin Powell and George Tenet were able
go dissuade Bush, hence the highly successful liberation
of Afghanistan.

But Cheney et al hadn't given up. They faced a difficult
problem. There was no rational reason to commit American
blood and treasure to the invasion of Iraq in peacetime,
and the unfinished war with al Queda in South Asia made
it much harder to justify starting an unrelated war in another
part of the world. Saddam Husein didn't have the military
capacity to even control the northern third of Iraq, let alone
threaten any neighboring country and certainly didn't dare
to antagonize the US. Saddam Hussein was clearly a
waning threat.

The only intelligence the administration had implying that
Iraq had returned to manufacturing chemical and biological
weapons came from "Curveball" a man referred to by
German Intelligence as a 'crazy drunk' or other discredited
sources. There was no credible evidence that the secular
government of Iraq, the government of Saddam Hussein,
a man bin Laden himself called an apostate, supported
al Queda.

I suddenly realized why al Queda prisoners were tortured.
There was no evidence to make a case that Saddam Hussein
supported al Queda. So these prisoners were tortured
to obtain statements linking Saddam Hussein. Does
this mean that their torturers directly ordered them to make
such statements? We may never know since the video tapes
of those interrogations were destroyed.

Clearly they were not destroyed to protect the torturers
themselves. It is a trivial matter to obscure a person's
face in a videotape. If anything, destroying those tapes
endangers the torturers because now, any investigating
body has no recourse other than to call the torturers
themselves as witnesses. And while on this subject
let's be clear that the claim that there was no potential
legal use for the tapes was an outright lie. Here are
three: The tapes could used by defense attorneys to
argue that incriminating statements had been coerced.
OTOH, if the prosecution wanted to argue that they have
not been coerced, then the tapes could be used as evidence
that they had not been. Finally, the tapes could be used
to prosecute the torturers and those who authorized,
ordered, approved, or tolerated the torture, which is
surely the reason they were destroyed. But for now,
that is a digression.

So, suppose I am correct, that the al Queda prisoners
were tortured to obtain statements implicating Saddam
Hussein in support of al Queda. It would hardly be necessary
for the torturers to put those words into their subject mouths.

Remember those three goalsI mentions above? The first
is the destruction of Israel. The second is the elimination
of non-Muslim influence in the Muslim world. The third is the re-
establishment of the Caliphate in Baghdad.

al Queda is going to have considerable difficulty with all
three. But the third of those is just a little bit easier now
that Saddam Hussein and his sons have been removed
from power.

Preposterous?

Well, several hundred years ago, a few hundred miles
north of where al Queda was organized and sheltered in
its early years another group, that in modern parlance
would be called 'terrorists' was formed and thrived for
decades. These men called themselves Assassins.
And there is story, apocryphal perhaps, that one of them
was captured after infiltrating and killing an important
official in the court of one of their enemies. Tortured
over several days, one by one, he revealed the names
of ten others in the court who had conspired with him.
All were put to death. And thus the assassin killed
11 of his enemies, though only one by his own hand.