Martin Robbins writes about how the US got suckered into playing torturer to the world. One reason is that we live in a culture that seems to celebrate torture: there sure are a lot of people wearing representations of an ancient torture device, where audiences will happily sit for hours watching torture porn in the guise of a religious movie, and where TV pretends that torture works every time as a way of getting results.
But here’s the thing: torture doesn’t work. Reason and evidence together ought to tell you that.
Luckily there’s another good argument, as I set out in these pages back in 2010 – torture simply doesn’t work. No compelling evidence has ever been put forward to show that torture can produce reliable intelligence. Worse still, the techniques used – typically causing stress, pain, sleep deprivation, or confusion – are textbook examples of ways to screw up a person’s recollection.
The intelligence and military communities have long accepted this to be true. The Intelligence Science Board provided scientific guidance to the US intelligence community on this matter, which I quoted at the top of this article. It was evidently ignored. In my 2010 article I quoted the US Army’s Training Manual [http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/policy/army/fm/fm34-52/chapter1.htm], which states:
The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor. condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.
If only certain atheist scientists could comprehend this … and that people would kick to the curb anyone who brings up the ludicrous “ticking time-bomb” scenario.
So, if the science says it doesn’t work, and military manuals clearly state you shouldn’t ever do it, why were Americans torturing people? Here’s the interesting reason: they had hired a couple of psychologists to cobble together studies showing the effectiveness of torture — somebody basically didn’t like the answer given above, so they paid a few people to tell them what they wanted to hear. They commissioned studies to the tune of $180 million. Yeah, you can buy a couple of Ph.D.s for that.
The British Psychological Society put out an interesting but little-noticed response to the Senate report, stating: “we note with deep regret that some members of the profession and discipline of psychology were involved in developing some of these techniques.” That involvement took the form of contracts worth a staggering $180m, awarded to a company run by two psychologists who appear to have been little more than quacks. The report notes that neither, “had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qaida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”
In spite of these shortcomings, the intrepid doctors were able to develop presumably unpublished “theories of interrogation based on ‘learned helplessness’” (a kind of passive state associated with depression and loss of control) along with “the list of enhanced interrogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees.”
It’s not clear from the report who exactly was involved, but Salon published an article in 2009 exploring some of the early stages of this work. ‘Learned helplessness’ was a concept developed by the famed psychologist Marty Seligman, who himself has earned tens of millions in defence contracts since 9/11. Vaughan Bell published a good article on the CIA’s use of the concept a few years ago, but suffice it to say that there’s no great reason to believe inducing the state aids interrogations.
These guys weren’t just back-room theorists though. “The psychologists personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA’s most significant detainees using these techniques.” On page 487 of the report, we learn that a psychologist told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “if anything happens in the United States, we’re going to kill your children,” bringing a whole new meaning to ‘daddy issues’.
Here, by the way, is Seligman’s claim to fame.
Seligman is most famous for his work in the 1960s in which he was able to psychologically destroy caged dogs by subjecting them to repeated electric shocks with no hope of escape. The dogs broke down completely and ultimately would not attempt to escape through an open cage door when given the opportunity to avoid more pain. Seligman called the phenomenon “learned helplessness.”
He has spent about 60 years torturing small animals, and the CIA paid him huge piles of money to graduate to advising them on how to torture human beings.
You know, I really don’t think that anyone needed to do Seligman’s experiment to know that you can break minds with sustained torment. I wonder how much information he got out of those miserable, despairing dogs?
It’s also horrifying that the CIA thought that ‘learned helplessness’ was something they wanted to induce in people.
FFS, people confessed to being witches and doing witchcraft. This should tell everybody that torture doesn’t give you any reliable, but highly convenient data.
Torture as a way to seek information doesn’t work. But torture as an instrument of terror is quite effective. A policy of terror has been demonstrated to often succeed in repressing opposition.
The US government seeks a world empire, but it is so decadent that unlike the Romans of two thousand years ago, it cannot even create an empire that at least brings the benefit of an end to war. As an empire, torture is a necessity, not an option. This is a regime that cannot be reformed but must be replaced.
Gods that don’t exist, were none of these people ever on a playground? A persistent or sufficiently violent bully can get a victim to say anything they want, and none of it true.
The part I hate the most is the faeces-cannons who insist that releasing the report will lead to backlash – no, you fucking anencephalic orangs, the fucking torture did that.
How can anyone think that the report would cause backlash not caused already by the stuff in the damned report? I know the lying apologist scum don’t believe it, but they really want us to believe it.
Why did Americans torture despite mountains of evidence stating it was a bad idea? Same reason they did just about everything they did post 9/11: REVENGE. They got hurt, and they wanted to hurt someone back, because too many people think revenge is a synonym for justice. And it didn’t even have to be someone who was responsible for the terrorist attacks.
As if the flimsy justifications for torture weren’t bad enough before, now I find out they involved torturing dogs. I’d like to lock Seligman in a small room with Fluttershy.
It’s now confirmed–Al-Queda won. That’s the point that needs to be hammered home, here. We lost the war after we surrendered our principles, our founding values, all of it, starting shortly after 9/11. Killing Osama meant nothing–he still won.
Learned helplessness is a thing, BTW, and not just for sadistic animal torturers (although most psychological experimentation has a sadistic aspect to it). Specifically, it was part of my own diagnosis.
Part of it you captured above: if experience teaches you that X suckage is going to happen to you, and nothing you do can do a damn thing about it, then you give up. But it has some delightful side-effects, as well. For example, rats who were repeatedly plunged into ice water, despite anything they could do about it, gave up trying anything–but they did develop weird rituals, like knocking three times on the cage wall when they got dry again, or something.
In a human, with a mixture of depression, PTSD, and learned helplessness, it means things like: accepting responsibility for a doomed project; obeying orders without question that you know will only make things worse; not bothering to protest your orders or alert management (or the customer) that they are actively making things worse; not bothering to look for another job because, “Why bother? It will suck just like this one, but changing jobs is hard work”; but adopting almost religious rituals, possibly as silly as reading a certain blog every day at 10:00 AM without fail, even if it means missing a meeting to do it. (The rituals seem to be both a procrastination, and an effort to carve out a meaningless sphere in which you actually do have some sort of control.)
I can testify about that state firsthand, but I can’t tell you whether it would have made me a good subject for interrogation. I might have answered your questions, because who gives a fuck? But I probably couldn’t be arsed to go into detail, or think very hard. And I might lie for the hell of it because who gives a fuck? You’re going to torture me anyway, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it, so I might as well exercise the minuscule control I do have, to feed you bullshit.
The ticking time bomb scenario is, in my opinion, a perfectly valid argument in favour of making torture illegal. If the pay-off from torturing someone to find the time bomb is worthwhile, then surely the person who commits the torture is willing to explain their actions *after the fact* to a jury? If they genuinely saved all those lives with torture then no jury would convict them anyway. Plus they won’t have to try and convince the jury of a hypothetical – they can hold up the defused bomb and a chart of blast radius vs population, and they’ll be applauded out of the dock.
“audiences will happily sit for hours watching torture porn in the guise of a
religioushorror movie”FTFY. Seriously, I am thoroughly disgusted with Hollywood’s rebranding of Torture movies as Horror. I know the defn is pretty slippery, but “horror” is more than just seeing someone ripped to shreds. That is not “scary”, it’s the monster you DON’T see, lurking in the dark, that is scary. – – – –
regardless, I’m not here to be an armchair film critic, but to note how the quantity of “torture porn” is distorting everyone’s attitudes about real-life torture.
And then there’s the Revenge aspect. That’s all I can see as the motivation for “enhanced interrogation”.
I like how Stewart (on The Daily Show) caught Shrub explicitly saying, “We Do Not Torture”, gave him a pass, that “maybe he wasn’t told yet”, and then showing the dates. He was told in April 2006, and his denial was Oct. 2007.
And last night, Stewart swooned over McCain scolding the CIA, et al, that torture was definitely the wrong way to approach the problem. It was refreshing to see WarDaddy scolding the Senate, CIA, etc.
I really don’t get this. It’s really simple, we tortured people because they set off a bomb in our village. It’s like a patrol of soldiers gets hit by sniper fire killing a popular member of the squad. So, they go into the nearest village and kill or beat the crap out of everyone and then burn it down.
The torture and destruction that has taken place in the war on terror is the exact same thing, just writ large. The notion that “Torture works” is only the veneer over the absolute barbarism that we perpetrated on innocent people.
You’re done with In God we trust. Can I suggest a new national motto for the US? Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate, so long as they fear. Torture works for that.
Here’s the thing. I don’t give a shit whether torture works or not. It’s illegal and it’s immoral.
Can I wake up now? This dream is upsetting me…
Not so much: it breeds a lot more anger than fear, until it reaches a point where it override the conflict aversion hardwired in our ape brains. Make no mistake: there is a lot more people who wish to see the american people ending on the receiving end of a genocide today than there was 15 years ago.
***
I’m afraid you’re wrong: not many people confuse revenge and justice: many people know the difference but prefer revenge over justice.
Ignoring the fact that torture is evil, stupid and exists to make the torturer get a rush of sadistic glee and no other reason (“The purpose of torture is torture”), I just got one thing to say about the “ticking time bomb” setup:
Why on Earth wouldn’t this cartoonishly evil mastermind who won’t give up the information without torture not just lie about the hypothetical bomb’s location anyway?
“TELL ME WHERE THE BOMB IS NOW THAT I’VE RIPPED OUT YOUR FINGERNAILS”
“Okay, it’s at [location]!”
Everyone, believing this to be accurate, rushes off to [location]. The bomb in question is at [other location]. Bomb blows, cartoon bad guy wins, presumably screams “COOOOOBRAAAAAAAAAA!” and is tortured some more or put into the proper legal system or whatever’s supposed to happen on the other side of the “ticking time bomb” bullcrap.
There’s not a shred of any part of the torture-for-information argument that withstands any part of the Evil Overlord list. Particularly not the part where you ask a five year-old child if your plan has any hope of working.
This is interesting. We’ve made quite a change in our opinion of waterboarding since 1968 when an American soldier in Vietnam was courtmartialed for performing it.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a012168usconvicted
It’s apparently never occurred to “certain atheist scientists” that the actual evidence supporting the efficacy of torture is pretty much the same as that supporting, say, astrology. Even if the ludicrous “ticking time bomb” hypothetical ever actually happened it would make just as much sense to say “Break out the Tarot cards!”
We all knew this stuff was happening, so the release of the report had no huge surprises. What is most scary to me at this point is that there are so many who still defend this shit. Not just small-minded idiots in comment sections all over the internet, but former and present high-level representatives of the US government. They openly defend both the efficacy and even the legality of this far less than useless, and clearly immoral practice. And they face no consequences. The fact that they don’t hide their ideas and beliefs shows that they know they face no consequences. The thing is, all of their consequence-free defense of this shit, right now, is perpetuating the distrust and hate that people have for the USA. Even the people who say this report shows we are ‘big enough to admit our mistakes’ are not saying, ‘and those who made them should be accountable for it’.
Torture not only does not work. It rightly makes things worse around the world for the governments that use it.
freemage at #5 is right, and I’ve thought so for years. Al-Queda did win.
There’s a fair portion of the public that supports torture that would believe those confessions.
Holy hard-boiled goose eggs, get the hell out of my head! This is my current job in a nutshell: all of management in my chain is techno-illiterate and textbook Dunning-Kruger.
So, they know more than me about stuff they hired me to do (and that I’ve been doing since forever). Doesn’t matter what I demonstrate or try to suggest, they already “know” what they’re doing and my opinions are summarily dismissed. The only thing they understand is massive failure (caused by their incompetence), but are incapable of learning any lessons from it. As you observed, it is far easier to keep my mouth shut, do exactly what they ask and set the care-o-meter to zero.
In my case, I’m staying put because I am working on a plan that, once completed, will ensure future financial stability. At that point, I will start looking for another job and jump as soon as possible (as in, the week after I accept an offer).
Exactly why the “if anything happens in the United States, we’re going to kill your children,” threat is meaningless. I’d have to assume my kids are dead already and do what I could to waste my captors’ time and money by feeding them goosechase scenarios.
Oh, and the timebombs are ALL TICKING, chief! Better evacuate and lock down the Holland Tunnel before rush hour! And the McKinley is going to go off at the same time!
Did I mention that St. Ronnie airport will suffer a massive attack of Ebola on December 20th?
Alright, so, let me see if I can summarize this whole thing as I understand it:
We knew it wouldn’t work.
We said we wouldn’t do it.
We did it.
It didn’t work.
We admitted it was evil.
We admitted that it didn’t work.
We kept doing it.
We know it doesn’t work.
We know it isn’t evil.
We will keep doing it.
No one will be punished for doing it.
…’bout right?
Of course when you are fighting someone who expects you to torture the shit out of them if they get captured, they are a) much less likely to surrender, even if you offer them terms and b) much more likely to fight to the death, preferring a quick-ish death that helps their cause over prolonged pointless agony. Hence the time-honoured tradition of telling your troops horror stories about what The Enemy does to prisoners.
Since the US are pretty much exclusively fighting asymmetrical wars against fighters recruited from the general population, this seems very counter-productive — you can’t realistically kill everyone in a country, so you’re relying on them eventually giving up and laying down their weapons.
Errr, “We know it’s evil,” instead of “we know it isn’t evil” there at the end.
THe USA wasn’t suckered into torture. The most compelling cases against torture are moral, not scientific, and even if torture worked it’d still be wrong. We used bogus studies to try and justify something we already wanted to do. The torture regime of the US was a moral outrage, not a scientific faux pas.
The “ticking time bomb” scenario was ignored by the torturers themselves. In some cases they held even high-value prisoners for more than 40 days and 40 nights before asking them a single question.
The other myth being bandied about is that this torture thing was done in the past, we knew all about it and it’s over. No, not true. Watch Maddow’s segment, “US torture a current matter, not yet history.”
@16: Yeah, well: as I keep reminding people, said atheist scientist also takes Rupert Fucking Shel-fucking-drake seriously. And Buddhist meditation tells you all sorts of Marvelous Things about the universe, instead of about how your head is wired up inside. Apparently, they give out Ph.D’s in neuroscience to people who miss the most obvious lessons of neuroscience — that our mind is a meat computer doing its best to construct a model of the external world that doesn’t get the body carrying it killed too often. But hey, they give degrees in geology and paleontology to YECs who can turn the crank on the dissertation system, so why not? And said atheist scientist should be taken about as seriously as we take that bunch.
I found it telling when it was reported years ago that at least some of the torture techniques were based on an Air Force study called “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?pagewanted=all including charts copied verbatim from the document.
One example that destroys the “ticking time bomb” excuse for torture:
NY Times link.
Some detainees were cooperative before they were tortured, not after:
Another fact that destroys the “ticking time bomb” excuse: some prisoners in the “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan were ignored for long periods of time (weeks).
Learned helplessness is the worst possible interrogation model one could concoct.
Part of what makes one unwilling to move is the subjective certainty that one can’t make anything better…but part of what that means is that the times **between** torture are just as bad as the torture. Why bother not being electrocuted when you’ll just have horrible anxiety about when the next bit of electrocution will start?
At that point there is no motivation to say anything, no motivation to tell the truth if you do talk.
If torture HAD, in fact, ever been effective with a subject, torturing to learned helplessness would be deliberately torturing until, by definition, torture no longer has any effect.
WTF?
Hell, even if the bomb is at the location, obviously any decent terrorist will have a back-up bomb in place. He knows that he might get caught and that he’ll be tortured. He knows that he might reach a breaking point. So, he deliberately places two bombs, knowing that if he reaches his limit, he can give up the first bomb and still achieve his goal.
Of course, the torturers know this, so even after finding the first bomb, they have to continue the torture. You can’t risk there being a second bomb, so you have to assume there is one and apply torture to get the location.
The terrorist knows this as well, so he’ll have a third bomb ready. But you know that, so you’ll keep torturing until he reveals it. So he’ll plan for a fourth bomb, which you’ll have to torture him to find, so he places a fifth… etc ad infitinum.
Once you start torturing, you can’t ever stop. Any stopping point is a weakness that terrorists can exploit to sneak a bomb past you. For the same reason, a torture regime can never entertain the notion that a person might be innocent. It’s literally unthinkable. If you think it, you open the door for a terrorist to trick you and you lose.
As a result, you keep torturing until the victim dies. You can never stop and you can never let them go. Of course, the terrorists know this, eliminating any incentive to talk at all. They know that no matter what they say, the torture will never stop.
For these reasons, torture doesn’t work. It can’t work. The very nature of the interaction makes it impossible that it could ever result in any practical end. Even if you’re banking on the terrorists being unprepared, naive or lacking in conviction, these are also characteristics you’ll find in the innocent. So, if your subject tells you a location and there’s no bomb there is it because he’s a terrorist trying to trick you or is it because he’s innocent and just said something to get a moment’s peace? You can’t tell, so you keep torturing.
It’s very true: The purpose of torture is torture. People torture because they want to. Anything else is a rationalization.
Next you’ll be telling me that 24 isn’t a documentary, and Jack Bauer is a fictional character.
Very true.
Going along with my stance that torture’s purpose in the context of an investigation is deception, I’ve imagined a resistance technique that kinda makes learned helplessness cut the other way: If I give the torturer what he wants, it’s only going to encourage him to torture me further and more intensively to get more positive results. Whenever he suggests he’ll stop torturing me if I give him what he wants, I can assume that it is a lie, since torturers are inherently deceitful assholes. I rank them below compulsive liars and the delusion in terms of truthfulness because they compel other people to tell their lies for them, as well as use that compelled testimony for allegedly external validation of the lies the tell themselves. The best thing I can do is endure and wait for an opportunity of accident because I can assume any deal offered by the torturer is a ruse.
If he’s threatening someone I care about, well, I know (at least rationally, if not viscerally) that I can’t really be held responsible for what happens if I don’t meet the torturer’s demands. I don’t have any actual control over the torturer’s actions, therefore I have no means of ensuring compliance will help my friend. And much like torture on myself, compliance would only encourage them to make further threats against the people I care about.
If I give him nothing to work with, I might at least buy some less-painful time by frustrating him into confusion or by making him stand out to his superiors through his repeated failure to get results.
The UN and human rights groups are calling for US officials involved in the CIA torture program to be prosecuted, but the Justice Dept. does not intend to investigate further.
Chris Hayes covered this issue. Link. This segment includes an interview with Kenneth Roth, the Executive Director for Human Rights Watch. Roth makes the point that the CIA knew from the start that the enhanced interrogation techniques were torture. Some law firms told the CIA they could not guarantee that interrogators would not be prosecuted … so the CIA shopped around for a law firm that would tell them something different.
At about 7:40 in the Chris Hayes segment (link in comment #34) the two psychologists who set up the “really bad cop” scenario of the torture done at CIA black sites. An interview with an investigative reporter for Vice News, Jason Leopold, brings up new details.
Moral issues (which should be the main driver) aside, here’s another data point:
NOBODY MAKES TICKING BOMBS.
Seriously. If anyone with half a brain had a remote-controlled nuke in a big city, in some hotel room, there would be a webcam and a remote relay on it that would supercede the timer. So you could have a screenshot of the last seconds of the bomb squad guys who discovered it. There might even be an orc or two who were willing to guard the thing. If someone caught a person who was part of the plot, they’d say where the device was because they’d know that Jack Bauer was also going to ride the bomb to eternity. Score!
The whole “ticking bomb” scenario is unutterably stupid because it completely flies in the face of the way terror organizations are cell-structured. They’ve been structured that way for a very long time because terrorist organizations have experience with how police states try to break them. They have evolved defenses against torture, or, more precisely, the way they structure their operations protects the operations from torture even though it may not protect the individuals. In the scenario above, if a key person got captured, then you set the bomb off right now and it’s all done. The Vietcong figured that out, hello?
When you see someone talking about “ticking bomb” scenarios they are hoisting the clueless roger and are saying:
1) they don’t know much about terrorism
2) they don’t know much about bombs
3) they don’t brain very hard
It’s one thing if a hack atheist writer speculates ignorantly about ticking bomb scenarios, but it’s another whole epic level of ignorance when intelligence professionals (who ought to know better) make such speculations.
Ugh, how I hated the teasers for 24…the constant shouting of:
WHERE’S THE BOMB!!!!!
To which, any terrorist worth his salt would answer, “UP YOUR ASS.”
Excellent point.
Something I forgot to bring up in my previous post is a parallel with torturing the wrongly suspected: Once they’ve tortured you for a confession, they aren’t just going to move on, they’re going to ask you about your alleged accomplices. Salem witch trials. McCarthyism. That’s how witch hunts sustain themselves. They continue until you “confirm” whatever names they keep asking you to give them, along with a few more off the top of your head.
They do lie, but not as part of some master plan. They probably have no idea about the bomb and even if they did, any group worth its salt modified that plan the second the supposed mastermind was caught so any info they might have had is already obsolete. No, it’s that they tell you whatever the heck it is they think you want to hear so that you’ll stop ripping their fingernails out. I strongly suspect that interrogators know this.
I think the unspoken truth is that they don’t actually hope to extract any useful intelligence but hope that it will scare the hell out of anybody who will come up against us. It’s the allied equivalent of those beheading videos: “If you challenge us, we will take you and feed you rectally, break your limbs and chain you in a standing position for days on end, so you might as well just lay down your arms and run while you have the chance.” Hell, some may even have been happy about the report, sort of like a hip hop star enjoying the buzz created by a single supposedly leaked without authorization.
It’s not like anything of consequence will happen anyway. If you can’t get a cop indicted for blowing some unarmed kid’s head off on a street in Missouri, you damn well ain’t prosecuting some CIA interrogator for “aggressively interrogating” some dastardly terrorist in a war zone.
On NPR this morning someone remarked how pathetic it is that we aren’t even having the *moral* conversation about this, regardless of science.
It seems questionable to me still if Seligman was directly involved in developing the torture program. He received a no-bid contract to do resilience training and his prior work was used by the two directly involved, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. However he denies involvement. CBS states,
Thus I do not see evidence yet that the “CIA paid him huge piles of money to graduate to advising them on how to torture human beings.” I’m willing to believe they found sick quacks acceptable since the real goal over all is sadism over science. Forgive me if I am misinterpreting your sentence, PZ.
Cheney threw Bush under the bus:
Talking Points Memo link.
It looks like some Senators or their staff are trying to rewrite history on Wikipedia.
Link.
Somewhat OT question, but an honest one: is it necessary to graphically describe torture practices in this thread?
I ask because I can absolutely see why it could be: shying away has not served us, I totally get that.
But during a time in an army jail before I was chucked out for queerness (1986 was not 2014), I had occasion to experience a few of these things at the hands of my desperately terrified jailers. I’m not going to say what; suffice it to say I am ON FUCKING SIDE OMG about the evil of torture, but I need to not read this thread.
But may I ask that you do consider that in your ethical calculus about whether or not to use that imagery? I don’t want to derail, but thought I might introduce the question so that the idea that “posting graphic imagery should involve an ethical calculus” could be another takeaway from this thread. I’m really not prescribing the outcome of the calculus, just positing its existence – else I’d just have quietly left. :)
I can’t read anymore here either way, but no blame to anyone for whatever you might post on this thread.
Stephen Colbert produced on the willful ignorance of Bush and others:
Salon link. Scroll down to view two video segments.
@OptimalCynic (#7):
Malcolm Nance, a former SERE instructor, was one of the first people to stand up and say waterboarding is torture. IIRC, he said much the same thing as you did: If someone feels torture is justified in a specific circumstance, they should apply the illegal torture, produce the intelligence that prevents the tragedy, and then take the consequences.
via BoingBoing, Dr Atul Gawande on Twitter denouncing members of the medical profession who gave assistance, advice, and refinements to torture. (Methods detailed in tweets with page references to the CIA report) Collected at kottke.org:
If you torture someone, they’ll say what you want them to say.
If you give someone $180 million, they’ll say what you want them to say.
Win-win.
And then blowback happens.
When one of our (U.S.’s) guys are captured, there will be no humane treatment. There may not even be any detention, as that requires materiel and personnel. The sole thing guaranteeing humane treatment of both sides was the Geneva Convention, which the US no longer supports. We’re in clear violation of Article 32, and have been since 2003 (fun fact: by failing to bring Dubya and Cheney to trial, Obama is in violation of the GC as well).
Every side is now are better off never surrendering, even in the face of hopeless odds.
But he is a torturer himself: he tortured dogs, and wrote papers on the results. Now he may say this is completely different, but I don’t buy it. What kind of person could bring themselves to carry out the experiments he did? And we know that “self-employed” torturers and serial killers usually start by torturing and killing non-human animals.
It’s rather disgusting how much this is tolerated. I recall in the 90’s we had TV that demonstrated torture was the ultimate act of villians, always showing it from the victim’s point of view (such as that one episode of Four Lights where Captain Pican got purple nurpled by the Cardigans). Suddenly, we get 24 showing just how much the poor torturer suffers. Pitty the Tickler, for his MORAL TORMENT! All that guilt, how can one person take it?! Pah!
If I can say one thing though, the whole crucifiction thing with Christians isn’t celebrating torture. I can’t think of any Christians I knew who thought that Pilate was totally right to torture the Jesus. Generally, they frown on that decision. If anything, I would think that their beliefs regarding what the J-man went through would make them totally opposed to torture, at least that’s how it was, again, back in the 90’s when I was still one of them.
On the other hand, Jon Stewart made a rather impressive decision to continue focusing on a real issue when he COULD have taken the easy road and reported on the royal mannequins over in England doing…. like…. what are they doing exactly? Anyway props to Jon Stewart for that. He always was my favorite Green Lantern.
iain @47:
Too true. And the two psychologists evaluated their own torture program. Bias.
CaitieCat@43:
As I included some of what you are talking about in my earlier comment, my apologies for not at least tacking on the good, ol’ trigger warning at the beginning.
[I see what you did there, wink, wink]
[re: nonbolded stuff] Exactly [smirk]. Crucifixion was the Roman method of public execution, in order to instill Fear in all the proles. Yes, it was a torturous to hang on that cross till the body yielded the lifeforce, but the intent was not to torture the crucified, to yield information. First rule of torture is: Do Not Kill. (make him so tortured he wishes to be dead, but that can be part of the torture itself). The whole purpose of crucifixion was to kill, so cannot be torture per se, by definition.
Still, that the xians worship that cross device, with the dying J guy still hanging on it, is horror porn of the worst sort.
look I am completely personally absofuckinlutly sick and tired of this weak excuse of a fear of blow back if this kind of stuff is released. The real blow back that is feared has always been from the public in whose name this crap was and is supposedly done. The bad guys have always known about it, the only detail they might not have known was the location which was hidden not from them of course but again it was hidden from the public .
If anything it is helping to convince me that everything we do as a government should be completely open and in the public light no more behind close doors for anything how could it be worse?
I seem to remember from some where all this screaming about the evil secret government coming from the conservative side of the political spectrum did I dream that?
uncle frogy
This is an excerpt from a report filed by the Red Cross after interviewing detainees:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/apr/09/us-torture-voices-from-the-black-sites/
Seligman only revolutionized the study of depression. =P
And he stopped studying learned helplessness a long time ago, because he hated it. He’s been studying resilience and “learned hopefulness” for years – ways to increase optimism and internalize locus of control. So, basically the exact opposite of torture.
“Torturing small animals”? Some people call that “animal experimentation”. So now it’s wrong?
FWIW here is the APA policy on torture:
http://www.apa.org/ethics/programs/position/
Position on Ethics and Interrogations
The American Psychological Association’s (APA) position on torture is clear and unequivocal:
Any direct or indirect participation in any act of torture or other forms of cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment by psychologists is strictly prohibited. There are no exceptions.
Clear violations of APA’s no torture/no abuse policy include acts such as:
Waterboarding.
Sexual humiliation.
Stress positions.
Exploitation of phobias.
——————————————
It would appear that Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen violated these rules. I’m surprised they still legally can call themselves psychologists. And that they have not been charged with severe ethics violations. They violated the ethics guidelines of every major psychological association on both the state and national levels – such as the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. Both of these and their affiliated organizations specifically prohibit torture and any participation in it with no exceptions.
The torturing dogs story should be spread wider. I bet Americans will be more concerned about that than they will about torturing human beings (even if all of them were guilty/murderers, which quite obviously a lot of them werent).
Torture does work.
The Bush Cheney administration needed a pretext to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. So they tortured someone into telling them that Iraq had something to do with 9/11.
Thus they got their pretext.
So torture does work. It just depends on how you define worked.
@larrylyons
The APA has been complicit in the torture program for many years. All they saw was the oodles of mony they could snag as consultants for the the dark side of the empire. Only recently have they started to backpeddle.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/11/the-complicity-of-psychologists-in-cia-torture/
It hasn’t been mentioned yet, so I might as well mention it: Bruce Jesson was called as a mormon bishop in Spokeane, WA in 2012. One of his duties was to hear confessions from members of his congregation. Life imitating art, I guess.
Jeebus, I’m going to have nightmares tonight after just reading about Seligman’s poor dogs. Ugg. How could anyone even think that would be a worthy experiment to conduct?
I am completely personally absofuckinlutly sick and tired of this weak excuse of a fear of blow back if this kind of stuff is released
Right on. The blowback is a response to a deed; don’t want the blowback, don’t do the deed.
There is a more practical reason not to torture. When our troops surround a fighting enemy unit they can often avoid a bloody battle to the finish by getting them to surrender. Many American lives will be lost in future battles because our enemies now believe that if they surrender they will be tortured. What Cheney did was kill Americans in current and future wars for no reason.
@David C Brayton
Jeebus, I’m going to have nightmares tonight after just reading about Seligman’s poor dogs. Ugg. How could anyone even think that would be a worthy experiment to conduct?
But you have no objections to PZ Meyers experiments on fish? Seligman’s work revolutionized the research and treatment of depression by working out a viable animal model of it. Frankly the choice between helping literally hundreds of thousands or sparing a few animals, the ethical choice is clear.
Go catch tuberculosis.
So there’s this meme going ’round the ‘Merikkka parts.
Seriously, world, you need to sanction us. The assholes are showing how horrible they are in their propaganda that being scrupulous is a character flaw.
I knew a guy who saw torture being done in Central America. Said it was 1) horrible and 2) didn’t work. Later, he defended our using it. Yeah, he was in favor of the Iraq war, too.
greg hilliard, I bet your acquaintance rationalised it to himself by assuming those Central American torturers he saw were doing it for the wrong reason in the wrong ways, while American torturers did it for the right reason in the right ways.
How the hell did the dogs experiment get past ethics committee???
On top of all the given reasons torture won’t work, there’s the issue of Muslim history itself. Of their early heros was an assassin who murdered a king and was caught. Under torture he named 13 of the kings loyal followers as conspirators, all of whom were promptly put to death. Thus with a single knife thrust he killed 14 of the enemy.
@68 Azkyroth,
PZ has defended animal experimentation numerous times. I agree with some of his points, and disagree with others. Why they fuck is it suddenly poor defenseless puppies being tortured by the mean psychologist? Learned helplessness is a solid concept that has significantly improved our understanding of depression. Is it worth it? I can’t say. How about PZ’s zebrafish?
@73 Weatherwax,
That’s a really good story. I’m going to use that.
We’re “lucky” torture doesn’t work. If it did, it would be so much harder to fight it.
Please give citations showing (a) That hundreds of thousands of people have been helped due to Seligman torturing dogs and (b) That the insights gained from torturing dogs could not have been gained without torturing dogs.
That’s because they are ignorant of the fact that most animal experimentation involves inflicting little or no suffering. It is quite consistent to oppose some but not all animal experimentation.
No need to go that far back: just look at decolonization: french authorities tried to crush the algerian independentist uprising with heavy use of torture: it worked as well as you’d expect.
@72, It got past the ethics boards because 1) it was done in the 70s when ethics boards were easier and our ideas of animal cognition were different, and 2) it had scientific value that was judged worth the suffering it induced. Don’t imagine the shocks as stronger than they were (not to say that shocking dogs is great, but don’t imagine electric chairs when you should be imagining someone pinching you), and don’t imagine that we don’t run experiments now that are equal or worse in terms of animal suffering.
Having met some of the people involved directly in those studies I can share that they were not monsters and that they cared about the dogs. I don’t know everything that went on in those experiments, but I know that at least the tests weren’t bad enough or were valuable enough that men of decent character felt that they could do them.
Animal experimentation is always a difficult thing to balance and I am a huge supporter of strict ethical oversight. That being said I find some of the language being used here a bit extreme and over-shocked. Also, of all the psychologists who could be demonized it’s weird seeing it be Marty Seligman.
throwaway, never proofreads, every post a gamble wrote:
Not going to happen except in token gestures. The U.S. spends more than anyone else on their military (more than the next ten spenders, combined, unless that’s changed recently). The U.S. also controls way too much of the world economy to piss them off for no reason. Most countries have much to lose by opposing the U.S. that directly, so the U.S. is largely untouchable except for these token gestures.
@77, I don’t think that’s true, actually.
Or are you not thinking about the probably larger fraction of animal experimentation being done by medical researchers? “I’m going to make this mouse swim for 30 seconds” does tend to seem more benign than “I’m going to inject this mouse with this drug for a few days and see what the side effects are. I’ll put it down if the tumour grows to 10% of its bodyweight.”
In retrospect, “for no reason” should not have been part of my post. There are, of course, very good reasons to oppose what the U.S. has been doing.
Many of us remember the U.S.’s use of “extraordinary rendition” of citizens to countries that do employ torture, so the revelation that the U.S. is also directly torturing isn’t as surprising as some might assume. It still doesn’t mean we can do anything about it.
Torture doesn’t produce results in the sense that it gets people to tell the truth, it clearly doesn’t. What it does do is intimidate people both through the threat of torture and its practice.
The reason why cops, criminals, judges, dictators and nice first world governments like the US and it’s allies condone it, turn a blind eye to it or flat out practice it is because it makes people fear them.
In other words torture isn’t a means of extracting information, it’s a propaganda device for political and personal terror.
It doesn’t work well to produce accurate intelligence, no. And it creates dangerous blowback. And it alters the torturer, corrupting them and making them more sadistic. All that is true.
But it’s not true that torture doesn’t work. It works to terrorize and punish enemies of the state, whether these are insurgents or dissidents. It creates a sharp hierarchy between the torturer and the tortured. For a bureaucracy that needs to generate propaganda for some purpose, it’s the perfect thing. Torture worked to help the Iraq War of 2003 happen.
So it just isn’t true that torture doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for its declared purposes, no. But it works well for other things. Like warfare, it’s politics by other means. One has to engage the arguments put forward in favor of torture, and so thank you for doing that here Mr Myers. But the arguments put forward in favor of torture aren’t the real reasons it is used, and I suspect that on some level most folks realize that.
To be fair, the only alleged creationist I know of who has a doctorate in paleontology is Marcus Ross – and, having read his paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2008 (IIRC), I’m convinced he’s lying: if he came out as being an evillusionist, his family would disinherit and shun him, and he’d lose his job at which has made him unemployable in institutions that are Of This World.
Myers uses anesthesia. And only one e, not two.
@Nick Gotts
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=learned+helplessness+depression&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C47&as_sdtp=
The first page along gives details on therapies and outcome results going back to the 1970’s.
Are about 138,000 results enough citations for you?
larrylyons:
I don’t see why that would support the idea that torturing the dogs was necessary. A vague gesture in the direction of thousands of google scholar results with the terms shouldn’t be enough to settle that kind of a question.
The hypothesis was presumably formed before the guy started torturing dogs, because it’s a phenomenon which is apparent in the depressive behavior some people exhibit. So that’s clearly not a barrier. What’s supposed to have prevented him (or someone less sadistic) from testing it other ways? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing.
Fish embryos also aren’t like (juvenile or adult) dogs either. If you’re not going to make any distinctions like that, as you imply in #67, I can’t even imagine where you’re coming from.
larrylyons,
No: clearly, just producing a lot of citations that include the words “learned”, “helplessness” and “depression” is no evidence of anything. What I asked for was:
Can you provide either?
Well, it’s complicated but as a general rule I don’t consider knowledge, even knowledge there is literally no other way to EVER obtain, thus making it forever off-limits, enough of a justification for torturing animals. Now, my understand of PZ’s work is that they are embryos, more or less, without developed brains, so that gets a pass, but as a general rule saying “an ethics board approved it” comes across as hand waving, because why the heck should I trust an ethics board’s ethics?
Not all animal experimentation should be banned, but vivisection, for example, well Mark Twain had a few things to say about that, and I agree with it. My opposition has nothing to do with how well it works in gaining information. It’s probably amazing at that, but that, well, for the sake of morality maybe we just don’t ever get to HAVE that data? Is that the worst thing in the world?
“but as a general rule saying “an ethics board approved it” comes across as hand waving, because why the heck should I trust an ethics board’s ethics?”
Generally the Institutional Review Board, or Ethics Board have to make their standards and procedures public. For instance here are the rules used for many student based research: https://student.societyforscience.org/vertebrate-animals?pid=318 Its pretty straight forward and details what is and is not acceptable, and what can be allowed. But the thing is you have to justfiy it.
Moreover many scientific societies follow what the Dept of Agriculture or NIH have set down as ethical guidelines for animal research. Alternatively they may set up their own more stringent guidelines for instance with the American Psychological Association their guidelines subsume the DOA and NIH rules. http://www.apa.org/science/leadership/care/guidelines.aspx Violations of these guidelines mean that the federal funding is cut off. No University or Institute wants to go through that.
“but as a general rule saying “an ethics board approved it” comes across as hand waving, because why the heck should I trust an ethics board’s ethics?”
I’m all for transparency.
You perhaps shouldn’t trust them. It depends on how far your views diverge from the average. I don’t know how things work down in the states, but in my direct experience (in Canada) the idea seemed to be that if you have enough caring people involved in creating the standards, those standards will come to reflect a sort of average of current societal ethical sensibilities. The board I sat on included representatives from every department involved in animal research, school veterinarians, graduate students, and community members. We had a lawyer too, but I can’t remember whether there was a particular lawyer position or whether that was one of the community members. Some of the board members were involved in charity animal welfare groups external to the school. Granted, the majority of the board members did care about science as well as animals. The board reviewed all experiments and checked in on how all the labs were being run. As well as creating their own standards they made sure that the school was up to the standards of the Canadian Council on Animal Care, which in turn was another batch of people discussing things and trying to balance ethics with research. As mentioned above, research also needs to conform to certain standards in order to be published or to be supported by granting agencies, which adds another layer of people making decisions. So it’s not like there’s one guy somewhere just signing off on all research. But you’re right, if your views on animal research are much more strict than is average, the decisions of the ethics boards probably wouldn’t satisfy you.
“Not all animal experimentation should be banned, but vivisection…”
I’m never sure what animal rights activists mean when they say vivisection. If they think that live, unsedated, unanaesthetized animals are being cut into. . . well, I have never seen that done.