Torture!

I'd missed January's Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk, How to rig an election -- and get away with it - with Dr Brian Klaas, because I was suffering my third bout of gout and it was taking me about four times as long to get anywhere as normal. Gout is painful, that's for sure. But it's not anywhere near as painful as waterboarding, having your head slammed repeatedly into a wall, or being put on a rack. Neither is it as disorientating as being deprived of sleep, being forced to listen to white noise, or being told one's family is about to be raped or murdered.

So, it could have been worse. February's talk, Why torture doesn't work and what does - with Jo Kenrick, touched on all of these 'techniques' but instead of just giving us a graphic list of violent, grisly, or plain nasty 'enhanced interrogation' methods (which, judging by the Greenwich Skeptics audience would have gone down pretty well) Jo came at the subject from a far more forensic, and in her own words evangelical, angle. Her aim was not to give us a cheap thrill or turn our stomachs (I'd had some very tasty pie'n'mash in Goddards beforehand and fancied keeping it down) but to show us what torture is, why we do it, why it doesn't work, and what we could do instead to get information, often vital and potentially life saving, out of people.

Jo is, among many other accolades - host Chris French recited a fairly impressive CV out in The Star and Garter - a PhD researcher in the Forensic Psychology Unit at Goldsmiths and a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London. So it's only correct she should take that approach. Clearly an academically minded lady, her talk did not, however, lack passion.

Nor did it lack audience participation. Which, when not mandatory, is always fun. Especially, it seems, when that involves shouting out what torture is. Some went for a dictionary style definition but most just shouted out types of torture. The aforementioned waterboarding, rack, sleep deprivation, and white noise cropped up but so did starvation, enforced confinement, and sexual assault.

Noticeably none of them were particularly reliant on modern technologies or were, in fact, modern at all. That's because most torture/enhanced interrogation techniques were drawn up many centuries ago. But they were only codified fairly recently. Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment is the internationally agreed legal definition of torture and was drafted as late as 1984, becoming effective in 1987. It states:-


"Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."

Ignoring the lack of gender nuance in the statement (can only men be tortured?) this seems reasonably clear. Until, that is, you ask the question 'what isn't torture'? Giving someone a nice ice cream (as suggested by Chris French) is, quite clearly, not defined as torture and neither is legal confinement, consensual BDSM, or appearing on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and eating a kangaroo's anus. That's your choice.

More seriously hooding, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, white noise, and being forced to adopt a stress position (the five techniques that, coincidentally - who can say, don't leave a mark) are not defined as torture. The British used these methods against IRA suspects and the Americans used them against those they thought were involved with, or members of, al-Qaeda. The Landau Commission, set up by the Israeli government in 1987 to investigate the suspicious deaths of two Palestinian prisoners, ruled that violence against suspects did not equate with torture.

American actions in Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) have also been accepted as not being torture but our speaker made it very clear that she considered all these things listed to be torture and when she spoke about torture these actions and techniques were very much within her remit. Certainly testimonies of people who have undergone these euphemistically titled enhanced interrogation techniques, like Abu Zubaydah - a Saudi citizen currently detained in Guantanamo, make them sound very much like torture. 

He was placed in small boxes, waterboarded, and had a towel tightly wrapped round his head as it was continuously bashed in to a wall. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck it's usually a duck.

At which point you may reasonably be thinking that if this stopped further deaths from al-Qaeda activity then so what, it's worth it. Jo gave us a ticking bomb scenario in which we had someone in custody and we knew, almost for certain, that they were the mastermind of an imminent terrorist attack and the only way we could get them to tell us the details of it, so we can stop it, is by torture.

Surely we'd agree that, in those circumstances, many of us would concede enhanced interrogation is necessary. For the greater good. The trouble is, Jo said, this never happens. She later, in a very interesting Q&A, conceded there may be a few outlying cases where it has happened but, certainly, the case of Zubaydah proves how this reasoning appears to be, often, applied retrospectively to justify actions.

It was believed that Zubaydah had knowledge of an imminent nuclear threat but he was detained for forty-five days before the torture began. Clearly there was no nuclear attack by al-Qaeda so it seems Zubaydah had no information to give them on that, under torture or otherwise. Zubaydah is still detained and, after eighteen years, has not been charged with a single offence.

In other cases, not only have the CIA caught, interrogated, and tortured the wrong people. They've even caught some of their own people. CIA informers have been arrested in misunderstandings. The level of calamity involved in some of these exercises makes Chris Morris' recent The Day Shall Come start to look like a documentary.

Innocent people, when being tortured, quite understandably want the torture to stop. So often they'll concoct false stories so that that happens. Give their interrogators what they want so that the pain ends. The trouble is when you make up a story, especially under extremely stressful conditions, it's very difficult to keep that story consistent. Oddly enough concussion, dizziness, fatigue, sleep deprivation, and stress don't actually aid memory recall very well at all.

Jo asked us to picture another scenario. To imagine one's teenage daughter at a music festival with her friends. When one of them dies of a drugs overdose and your distraught daughter returns home how do you find out what happened? Do you punch her in the face? Smash her head into the wall continuously? Obviously not. Because that doesn't get you any closer to the answers you're looking for - and because it's cruel (but, hopefully, that bit hardly needs stating).

Army rangers have volunteered to undergo, and have undergone, physical and psychological stress and have been put through exercises such as trying to evade capture, imprisonment, and, pretty much, torture (by their own employers - the armed forces). Tests on these volunteers show a huge deterioration in cognitive function which results in an inability to recall details clearly. Results were three times worse than those taken from people who were over the legal alcohol limit to drive. Torture, basically, makes people "less reliable and more stupid"!

It works if you're James Bond or Jack Bauer but it doesn't tend to work in real life. It didn't in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries in France and Spain and it doesn't now. Six million pages of CIA records of enhanced interrogation procedures find not one example of it working and, in some cases, it has proved to be a hindrance in collecting information. Detainees who had previously been cooperating and providing gen stopped, following torture, for ideological reasons.

Threats against family and insults to detainee's religions have been show to increase resistance and reduce cooperation. Those who have managed to successfully get information from captives have used reciprocity, likeability, and authority.

Reciprocity is giving something to get something, likeability works because we're always more eager to help out someone we like than someone we don't, and authority has to be earned. It can not simply be asserted. Kicking a Koran away from a Muslim won't make the investigator look authoritative (and certainly not likeable) as much as it will make them look disrespectful and ignorant.

I'm not sure if the example of a successful, and respectful, investigator I'd have gone with would have been a Nazi but if, and it's a big if, you can put that to the side for a bit it's worth considering the case of one Hanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff, a Luftwaffe interrogator of WWII who took the prisoners assigned to him for walks in the woods, gave them tea, biscuits, and beer, and even took them to local swimming pools.

On one occasion he even let one pilot his B52 bomber as a special treat! This seemingly unorthodox approach not only allowed him to build a rapport with his subjects before casually extracting whatever he needed from them but they often provided him with so much data that by the time the next captured bomber pilot was handed to him he even knew about them!

Jo gave other examples including a Shin Bet investigator who would flatter Palestinian bombers by complimenting their "amazing wiring" skills and asking how on Earth they managed to create such an effective and deadly bomb! When Anders Breivik was arrested by Norwegian police following a shooting on Utoya island and a van bomb in Oslo that between them killed seventy-seven people, it was not known if he had planted other bombs. 

It was largely believed that he most likely had done so. The woman who interrogated him (and he wasn't pleased that it was a woman) employed solely non-coercive techniques and managed to build a rapport with him before establishing that there were, thankfully, no further bombs. 

Returning to Abu Zubaydah, he did provide the CIA with useful information but that was before they began torturing him. After they started doing so, he provided nothing useful whatsoever. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is another person whose treatment, and the results of that treatment even more so, make a very weak case for the usefulness of torture.

al-Libi, who had led an Islamist training camp in Afghanistan (nobody is saying these people are angels or even innocent), was flown in a coffin (an actual coffin) from Afghanistan to Egypt by the Americans who were, to all intents and purposes, outsourcing his torture. In Egypt, under torture, he claimed, untruthfully, there were links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

This forced confession was one of the main reasons used by Tony Blair and then US Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq which would, eventually, tally up nearly half a million deaths. al-Libi was later passed on to the Libyan authorities, he was from Libya, where he died in jail following a mysterious accident.

Jo had made her point loudly, clearly, and, for the most part, I had agreed with her. Is it really worth waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times (sixteen according to the CIA who count waterboarding sessions rather than individual waterboardings) just to get him to lie about poison gas operations on US soil and make up that al-Qaeda have recruited several African-Americans in Montana?

I don't think so. Even in cases where the information may be useful what does this say about us? We wouldn't accept people on our side being tortured. Taking the gloves off and fighting dirty means there's little or no difference between the terrorists and ourselves. If we've resorted to their level then what are we actually fighting for. If we've resorted to their level it could be claimed, and I would claim, they've already won.

A Q&A brought up an interesting chat about what torture does work for. It plays well to crowds, allows politicians to appear strong, and it's good for, the example of the Algerian War was given, terrorising a people and keeping them down - thus further underlining that torture isn't counter-terrorism. It is terrorism. Not that Priti Patel, our current Home Secretary, knows the difference between the two.

It also touched on 'learned helplessness', how Trump and Obama both used torture quite freely, how little is known of Russian torture (those who have undergone it aren't generally around any more to talk about it), and a question on the use of torture in China was left unanswered from which you can draw your inclusions.

Equally interesting, and a question I'd not have thought of asking, was what torture does to the torturers themselves. Jo said that many suffer PTSD, many become alcoholics, often their marriages break up, and there is a high suicide rate. That's fairly standard. There are less cases like Charles Graner who was convicted of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. He didn't keep his abuse inside secure facilities. He carried it out at home too. When he was investigated for domestic abuse and his guns were taken away he remarked he wouldn't need guns for what he had planned for his wife anyway. He seems like a guy who just liked hurting people so where better for such a man to get a job than for an employer that allows you, and pays you, to do it.

He went too far even for the US military and eventually served six and a half years of his ten year sentence but he's out now and remarried to another former Abu Ghraib guard. His use of torture helped nobody but himself and, in most instances, that seems to be the case. If there's something you want to do you just need to find a justification for it. It seems surprisingly easy to do so. Far too easy.

Thanks to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, and Jo Kenrick, for another fascinating, if slightly disturbing talk. Ariane Sherine is there next month with the wonderful 'Talk Yourself Better:A Confused Person's Guide to Therapy, Counselling and Self-Help'. I saw her deliver the speech at London Skeptics in Camden last March and it was so good I had to wipe tears away. I'd heartily recommend you attend.