The Persuasion Filter Looks at Torture. Does it... | Scott Adams' Blog

The Persuasion Filter Looks at Torture. Does it... | Scott Adams' Blog

My point is that common sense, combined with everything you know about human beings, tells you that torture works, at least in some cases. It would work on me. It would work on you. It would certainly work on under-trained ISIS prisoners.

So why do the experts say torture doesn’t work?

The answer can be found in the Persuasion Filter. Torture is persuasion, but so is the way you talk about it. If you promote me to the rank of General, put me on television, and ask me if torture works, do you know what I’ll say?

I’ll say it doesn’t work.

I’ll say I can get more cooperation by being nice. I will look you in the eye and lie my ass off. Because that’s my job.

As a military General, my job is to keep my troops safe. So I will lie about the effectiveness of torture for several reasons:

1) An enemy might someday capture my troops. I don’t want the enemy to think torture is a practical option.

2) I don’t want the enemy to know their captured soldiers will be giving up their secrets to my side in under five seconds.

3) I don’t want to tarnish the brand of the United States or the military by associating it with torture.

4) I don’t want to go to jail. Torture is illegal.

So the ideal approach for an “expert” on torture is to say in public that it never works while finding ways to skirt the law and use it anyway when needed. Waterboarding, for example, was an attempt to stay legal while still “torturing.”

Keep in mind that for every “expert” on television that says torture never works, there are lots of “experts” around the world using the method every day. I doubt they would use if it it NEVER worked. After all, they are the experts.

This brings us to President Trump. He says with surprising candor that he believes torture works but will follow the recommendation of his generals who say it doesn’t.

Interpretation: Torture works. The generals know it. We’ll find a way to do it if necessary to keep the country safe. You don’t want to know the details.

We like to believe that experts are more credible than non-experts. And President Trump is no expert on torture. But keep in mind that President Trump is a Master Persuader who can detect bullshit faster than normal people.

You might even call him an expert at detecting bullshit.

When President Trump presents something as fact, the odds are high that it is hyperbole or just persuasion. You don’t want to assume his facts are literally true, although they are usually emotionally or directionally true.

But if President Trump – The Master Persuader – tells you someone else’s facts are bullshit, you can usually take that to the bank. The man knows bullshit when he sees it. And with his skillset he can also smell it coming from miles away.

Ideas: Torture and Revealed Preference

Ideas: Torture and Revealed Preference

According to news stories, the intent was to capture Abu Sayyaf, believed to play a major role in financing ISIS via black market sales of oil, for the sake of valuable information he could provide about ISIS operations. Killing him, while better than nothing, was not the preferred outcome.

That raises an obvious question. Assuming the raiders had been successful, how did they expect to get at information in Abu Sayyaf's head? The most obvious conjecture is by torture—which the U.S. government claims not to engage in. An alternative possibility is by threatening his wife—also not, so far as I know, a tactic U.S. forces admit to using.

A central principle of economics is revealed preference. What people do provides more reliable information than what they say.

'Torture' Thought Experiment | National Review Online

'Torture' Thought Experiment | National Review Online

Here is a thought experiment I have been using for many years as we’ve debated this topic. It goes to what Obama says about the intolerably brutal nature of waterboarding, the most coercive of the enhanced techniques that were used.

If you were to take everyone in America who is serving a minor jail sentence of, say, 6 to 18 months, and you were to ask them whether they’d rather serve the rest of their time or be waterboarded in the manner practiced by the CIA post 9/11 (i.e., not in the manner practiced by the Japanese in World War II), how many would choose waterboarding? I am guessing, conservatively, that over 95 percent would choose waterboarding.

Now, if you take the same group of inmates and ask them whether they’d prefer to serve the remainder of their time or be subjected to Obama’s drone program (where we kill rather than capture terrorists, therefore get no intelligence from the people in the best position to provide actionable intelligence, and kill bystanders — including some children — in addition to the target), how many would choose the drone program? I am guessing that it would be . . . zero.

I believe President Obama is too smart not to grasp this obvious point.

So ignore the blather about how enhanced interrogation is “not who we are.” The so-called Torture Report is a partisan gift to Obama’s Bush-deranged base, which has been clamoring for it since the enhanced-interrogation program was disclosed. Even before this report was released, the Democrats’ shameful partisan attack on the war effort for the purpose of motivating their political base had seriously compromised U.S. intelligence collection — in a war against a secretive transcontinental terror network against which good intelligence is in many ways our only security.

This report is not just wildly inaccurate (as three former CIA directors attest today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed). It further endangers our country, for no good purpose.

The ‘Torture’ Report’s False Information Canard | National Review Online

The ‘Torture’ Report’s False Information Canard | National Review Online

The press appears to be stressing the finding that much of the intel provided under enhanced interrogation proved to be false or misleading.

The same thing can be said for information provided during the gentle, hyper-lawyered, Miranda-driven interrogations conducted under law-enforcement protocols.

It is simply counterfactual to contend that a person is uniquely apt to lie under enhanced coercion because he has such a powerful motive to tell his interrogator what the interrogator wants to hear – namely, to avoid infliction of more discomfort.

Detainees who provide information to law enforcement are also powerfully motivated to tell interrogators what they think interrogators want to hear, in order to obtain sentencing leniency, win early release, or improve their conditions of confinement. And many of them lie.

Unreliable information is a natural consequence of interrogating outlaws. It has to be dealt with regardless of how the information is obtained.

I have been involved in, probably, thousands of law-enforcement interrogations. In the real world, the detainee often does not know what the interrogator wants to hear — a competent interrogator will use the information he already has to confuse the detainee about the state of his knowledge and the direction of the investigation. He will create an environment in which the detainee concludes that it is in his interest to tell the truth because the consequences of lying are worse for him.

And all interrogation information has to be analyzed and corroborated, factoring in the motives (there are usually several) that the detainee has to lie, to withhold critical facts, and to confess only what he calculates the interrogator already knows.

In civilian due process, the obligation is imposed on the prosecutor to disclose to the defense all the lies the witnesses have told in their interrogations. This rule is imposed, and compliance with it is aggressively examined in almost all criminal trials, precisely because people lie to interrogators all the time – even if they are not waterboarded.

Interview with an Interrogator: Megyn Kelly Gets the Scoop

Interview with an Interrogator: Megyn Kelly Gets the Scoop

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly got a big interview this week following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogations in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001. It was compelling TV, and journalism. Dr. James Mitchell, a former Air Force psychologist, contracted with the CIA to help develop a program to interrogate CIA detainees while America, and those tasked to protect this country, prepared for a second wave of attacks.

Mitchell had spoken with the British newspaper, The Guardian, back in April, after an executive summary of the Senate Intelligence report had been leaked to McClatchy News. At the time, as reported by The Guardian, Mitchell “mounted a full-throated defense of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism policies and attacked ‘partisan Democrats’ for ‘throwing me under the bus’ and ‘rewriting history.’” Now he clearly feels even more free to speak out.

Mitchell was never interviewed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) committee. In fact, none of the CIA people involved in the interrogations, nor the directors or deputy directors, were interviewed. In other words, the purpose of this report was not to actually get to the truth of what happened. It was an attempt, for various political and PR reasons, to accuse and indict the Bush administration and the CIA for allegedly using torture on the detainees.

Mitchell revealed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) didn’t break, or provide information that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, because of waterboarding, but rather because of other EITs (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques). The technique that did work on KSM, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, was sleep deprivation. But Mitchell revealed something that KSM did tell him: “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told me personally, ‘Your country will turn on you, the liberal media will turn on you, the people will grow tired of this, they will turn on you, and when they do, you are going to be abandoned.’”

What comes through in Megyn Kelly’s interview is a thoughtful, patriotic American who was moved by the image of Americans leaping out of World Trade Center buildings, and by the courage of those on Flight 93 who helped bring the plane down, rather than allow it to successfully strike the third of three targets of the “decapitation” that Mitchell said was their goal. The terrorists hit our financial center in New York, they hit the Pentagon—the headquarters of the U.S. military—and the third plane was intended to crash into the Capitol building in Washington, DC.

America is divided over this, but a recent Washington Post – ABC poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly think that “the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists” was justified, by a margin of 59% to 31%. Clearly a significant majority believe the CIA was trying to protect this country at that time, and aren’t too worried about the few cases of excess—even death—that occurred. They don’t see it as a “stain” on our country. In fact, many view the stain as this one-sided report that cherry-picked information and revealed selective portions of emails, contradicted by other portions not revealed in the report—if that’s what they needed to make their case. Many believe that the release of this report has given aid and comfort to America’s enemies, and put American lives at increased risk.

It turns out that KSM was right about the “liberal media,” but it seems that a significant majority of the American people are quite okay with what was done to these terrorists—and other detainees—and don’t believe it damaged us as a country. Many of those in the liberal media—such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker (who actually interviewed Dr. Mitchell back in 2005), and Erin Burnett of CNN—freely call what happened “torture.” To them, it’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.

Kudos to Megyn Kelly for getting the interview, which aired in two parts on Monday and Tuesday nights this week. I urge you to watch for yourself, and to also read this column, “The Feinstein Report is Going to Cost Us,” by Andrew McCarthy. He was the lawyer who successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh, the man responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. McCarthy has a lot of interesting things to say about the report, such as this: “As I have frequently argued here over the years, there is a world of difference between what is couched in political rhetoric as ‘torture,’ a conversation stopper that the Left cavalierly applies to every instance of prisoner abuse, and the federal crime of torture, which has a strict legal definition and is a difficult offense to prove, precisely to ensure that torture is not trivialized.”

The Feinstein Report Is Going to Cost Us

The Feinstein Report Is Going to Cost Us

Still, notwithstanding the revelation of a few new gory details, this is old news and its disclosure serves no useful purpose — it is just a settling of scores.

“Old news” is not used here in the familiar Clinton/Obama sense of acknowledging a few embarrassing scandal details on Friday night to pave the way for dismissing scandal coverage as stale by Monday morning. The CIA’s interrogation program happened over a decade ago. It was investigated by Justice Department prosecutors for years — and not once but twice. The second time, even Eric Holder, the hyper-politicized, hard-Left attorney general who had promised Obama’s base a “reckoning,” could not help but concede that the case against our intelligence agents should be dropped because the evidence was insufficient to warrant torture prosecutions.

As I have frequently argued here over the years, there is a world of difference between what is couched in political rhetoric as “torture,” a conversation stopper that the Left cavalierly applies to every instance of prisoner abuse, and the federal crime of torture, which has a strict legal definition and is a difficult offense to prove, precisely to ensure that torture is not trivialized. Not surprisingly, then, the fact that the interrogations investigation was terminated has never been regarded as a clean bill of health.

‘Torture’ Thought Experiment

‘Torture’ Thought Experiment

Here is a thought experiment I have been using for many years as we’ve debated this topic. It goes to what Obama says about the intolerably brutal nature ofwaterboarding, the most coercive of the enhanced techniques that were used.

If you were to take everyone in America who is serving a minor jail sentence of, say, 6 to 18 months, and you were to ask them whether they’d rather serve the rest of their time or be waterboarded in the manner practiced by the CIA post 9/11 (i.e., not in the manner practiced by the Japanese in World War II), how many would choose waterboarding? I am guessing, conservatively, that over 95 percent would choose waterboarding.

Now, if you take the same group of inmates and ask them whether they’d prefer to serve the remainder of their time or be subjected to Obama’s drone program (where we kill rather than capture terrorists, therefore get no intelligence from the people in the best position to provide actionable intelligence, and kill bystanders – including some children – in addition to the target), how many would choose the drone program? I am guessing that it would be . . . zero.

The Truth About Interrogation | The Weekly Standard

The Truth About Interrogation | The Weekly Standard

The Central Intelligence Agency repeatedly tortured suspected terrorists, regularly lied about it to Congress and the White House, and, for all the pain and trouble this caused the agency and the United States, didn’t end up extracting a single piece of valuable information not readily available by other means.

That, at least, is the conclusion of the forthcoming Feinstein report, a long and, in certain quarters, much-anticipated review of the CIA’s detainee and interrogation programs during the Bush administration. A steady stream of leaks in news stories over several months has provided the public a preview of its contents.

The goal of those leaks, and the report itself, is not hard to discern: to ensure that the coming debate over enhanced interrogation isn’t so much a debate but a public condemnation of those who conceived and participated in the program.

There are certainly parts of the program that deserve criticism. There were major problems with the way it was conceived, approved, and carried out. There were troubling abuses in the early years, and later some misleading briefings about the enhanced interrogation techniques used. There were conflicts of interest and questionable accounting practices. Some of the public claims about the intelligence derived from enhanced techniques were clearly exaggerated, and at least one of those claims was patently false.

Such matters should be subject to tough, dispassionate, fact-based investigation. Actual failings should be condemned by both Republicans and Democrats, by supporters of the program as well as opponents.

That’s not what happened here.

Instead, the report was produced by the Democratic staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Dianne Feinstein. Republicans declined to participate.

Feinstein required former CIA directors and deputy directors to sign nondisclosure agreements in order even to see the accusations made against them. Despite the fact that virtually all of the 500-plus-page report has been declassified for release, the Feinstein committee also imposed, as a condition of access to the report, severe restrictions on what those officials may say in their own defense. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, told The Weekly Standard: “Based on the nondisclosure agreement I signed, I cannot talk to you about the details of the Feinstein report, the Republican rebuttal, or the agency response—all as a condition of my being able to see it.”

In the clearest evidence that the committee was interested in blame rather than truth, the staffers did not seek to interview those involved in the interrogations.

Now, for the first time, one of the lead interrogators is attempting to tell the other side of the story. Writing under the pseudonym Jason Beale, he has produced a provocative 39-page document in an effort to counter the narrative pushed by Democrats and amplified by journalists eager to discredit the program. The document—which Beale says was reviewed, redacted, and cleared by a U.S. government agency—does not reveal Beale’s precise role in the program. A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency would not confirm that the CIA was the agency that reviewed Beale’s document. And in an email interview, Beale refused even to acknowledge that he conducted interrogations in the CIA program. “The opinions I expressed on interrogations in the document I sent you,” he wrote, “are representative of the insight I’ve gained during my career as an interrogator. While I am aware that you and others may draw some inference from the approved portion of the text as to the basis of my arguments regarding enhanced techniques, I am not presently in a position to elaborate on how I formed those opinions.”

Sources familiar with the program independently confirm that Beale served as a senior interrogator beginning in 2004.

Beale’s document covers many aspects of the debate over enhanced interrogation—the morality of enhanced interrogation techniques, the use of EITs on U.S. servicemen and women during their survival training, the hypocrisy of public officials who approved the program and later pretended that they opposed it, the unearned authority of several top critics of the program, and, most important, the effectiveness of the techniques.

News accounts of the forthcoming Feinstein report make clear that a central claim of that narrative will be its most contentious: The techniques didn’t work. Beale challenges that contention on the basis of his experience in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course taken by intelligence and military personnel exposed to a high risk of capture. Tens of thousands of Americans have been subjected to EITs as part of their SERE training. Beale participated in the course first as a student, then as an interrogator.

As a student, I learned that I could resist, and occasionally manipulate, a talented interrogator during my numerous “soft-sell” interrogations—the rapport-building, we-know-all, pride-and-ego up/down, do-the-right-thing approaches. I had my story relatively straight, and I simply stuck to it, regardless of how ridiculous or implausible the interrogator made it sound. He wasn’t doing anything to me—there was no consequence to my lies, no matter how transparent.

I then learned the difference between “soft-sell” and “hard-sell” by way of a large interrogator who applied enhanced techniques promptly upon the uttering of my first lie. I learned that it was infinitely more difficult for me to remember my lies and keep my story straight under pressure. I learned that it became difficult to repeat a lie if I received immediate and uncomfortable consequences for each iteration. It made me have to make snap decisions under intense pressure in real time—and fumble and stumble through rapid-fire follow-up questions designed to poke massive holes in my story.

I learned that I needed to practically live my lie if I were to be questioned under duress, as the unrehearsed details are the wild-cards that bite you in the ass. I learned that I would rather sit across from the most talented interrogator on earth doing a soft-sell than any interrogator on earth doing a hard-sell—the information I had would be safer because the only consequences to my lies come in the form of words. I could handle words. Anyone could.

Ask any SERE Level C graduate which method was more effective on him or her—their answer should tell you something about the effectiveness of enhanced techniques, whether you agree with them or not. In my case, I learned that enhanced techniques made me want to tell the truth to make it stop—not to compound my situation with more lies. The only thing that kept me from telling the truth was the knowledge that at some point it had to end—that there were more students to interrogate and only so many hours in a day. Absent that knowledge, I would have caved.

As a TDY [temporary duty] interrogator in the SERE course, I learned that the toughest, meanest, most professional special operations soldiers on earth had a breaking point. Every one of them. And of all the soldiers I interrogated, all of the “breaks” came during hard-sell interrogations—using as many enhanced techniques as necessary to convince the soldier that continuing to lie would result in immediate consequences. It worked—time and again, it worked.

The techniques were effective, Beale claims, not only with U.S. soldiers being prepared for what they might encounter if captured by an enemy, but also with senior al Qaeda prisoners. Defenders of EITs point to the extraction of important information on al Qaeda’s couriers to make their case. The information on one courier in particular—Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—led to the location of Osama bin Laden’s safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In a heavily redacted section of his document, Beale writes that the EITs were essential to obtaining that information. Others have reported that two high-value detainees subject to enhanced interrogation—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi—went to great lengths to conceal information about the courier. That they did so after providing a steady stream of accurate and valuable information suggested to interrogators and analysts that the information about al-Kuwaiti was important. Beale writes:

That high-level detainee would no more have voluntarily sat down across from a debriefer and provided his list of Al Qaeda couriers without having been conditioned to do so than he would have walked ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ and asked to speak to the CIA debriefer. It simply would not have happened without incentive, and his incentive was to not go back to enhanced techniques. Period. Love it or hate it, that’s the way it worked.

Beale believes that Barack Obama and others briefed on the use of EITs understand that they worked. In support of this view, he notes a subtle but telling change in Obama’s language:

Go back and take a look at the difference between Candidate Obama’s characterization of the efficacy of the interrogation program versus President Obama’s version. Candidate Obama repeatedly stated that enhanced interrogation was not only immoral and un-American, but it didn’t work. People will say anything to make it stop. Every leading interrogator and intelligence professional will tell you that “torture” never works—it produces bad intelligence. That was Candidate Obama.

President Obama told a slightly different story. During his [100th]-day press conference in April 2009, President Obama used an entirely different construct when responding to a question about shutting down the interrogation program: “I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do—not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.”

He went on to say, “But here’s what I can tell you—that the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques—which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques—doesn’t answer the core question, which is: Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques? And it doesn’t answer the broader question: Are we safer as a consequence of having used these techniques?”

Finally, this: “And so I will do whatever is required to keep the American people safe, but I am absolutely convinced that the best way I can do that is to make sure that we are not taking shortcuts that undermine who we are.”

Note the difference—it’s important. After being briefed by serious people using actual intelligence information gained from the EIT interrogation program, President Obama knew that he could not continue with the “it never works” campaign rhetoric as President—to do so would have been insulting and objectionable to the national security team who briefed him, and would be a lie. So .  .  . “we don’t know if we could have collected the same information using standard techniques” became the talking point for every administration official on the subject of EITs.

I know. I know that we couldn’t have collected the same information using standard techniques because I was an expert in using standard techniques—I used them thousands of times over two decades—and the notion that I could have convinced the detainees ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ to provide closely-held information (or any information at all) without the use of EITs is laughable. There is zero chance. Zero.

In an interview, I pointed out that much of the coming debate will be about the effectiveness of the techniques and asked Beale directly: Were they effective? He made a simple point that he hadn’t made in his document. He noted that those subject to enhanced interrogation haven’t boasted about their ability to withstand the techniques and to withhold valuable information.

That is probably a question best asked of the former detainees—did Abu Zubaydah, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsi bin al-Shib, Hambali, Nashiri, or any of their brethren give up protected information during their time in the custody of CIA? If they didn’t they should be proud of their ability to withstand such torturous tactics—I would think they would mock the feeble and misguided efforts of the CIA interrogators to get them to talk, or to make a mistake, rather than claim that such treatment made them say things they later regret. That’s the point of enhanced interrogation—at least from my perspective as a former TDY SERE interrogator—you hope that they say things they will later regret.

Beale wrote his document “to remind the American public that there are two sides to every story” and to make clear “that the upcoming [Senate] report should be read with an understanding that the outcome was predetermined by the political and ideological leanings of the majority, which produced the report.”

He is concerned that the documentation included in the summary report was selected to make the argument that Senate Democrats wanted to make and that information complicating that narrative was deliberately excluded.

“I believe an objective reading of the documents would show that the program was effective,” he wrote, “and I would urge the declassification and release of the entire report and all associated documents so that the American people can make their own decision.”

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
[Ed. Note: You can read the document here.]

Telling the Truth about Torture | National Review Online

Telling the Truth about Torture | National Review Online

Just as a United Nations committee is set to release a post-hearing report on the Holy See and the Convention on Torture, University of Mississippi Law School professor Ronald J. Rychlak has published a helpful paper,Abuse of the Convention Against Torture: A Tortured Reading of the Law. For the sake of law, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of those who have and do give their lives for these values, this is not a news story to misunderstand or overlook. It’s about a new secularism that will use and abuse mechanisms meant for advancing human rights and the common good in dangerous ways. In this particular instance, instead of the U.N. working with the Catholic Church — learning the lessons it has learned and moving toward healing and protection, as U.N. peacekeepers have committed similarly abusive crimes — the horrific shame of scandal is being used as a political weapon. Rychlak​ talks with me about what’s going on and why it matters.

Sarah Palin on Baptism, Waterboarding . . . and 'Torture' | National Review Online

Sarah Palin on Baptism, Waterboarding . . . and 'Torture' | National Review Online

I wonder how much of the reaction to Gov. Palin's remarks are driven by Palin Derangement Syndrome, which seems to be as common among the Country Club Right as it is on the Left.

Sarah Palin’s comparison of waterboarding to baptism, even in jest, was bad judgment. If I were Gov. Palin, I’d lose all the baptism jokes, since they manage to provoke devout Christians and authentic Muslim moderates as much as they do jihadists. But I think it is a mistake so off-handedly to agree with the Left’s political and hypocritical claim that waterboarding, as applied by the CIA to three high-value al Qaeda detainees under careful (albeit controversial) guidelines, amounted to “torture.”
As we discussed ad nauseum during the debate over “enhanced interrogation,” there is no question that waterboarding can amount to torture (and, indeed, can result in death) depending on the technique used. Nevertheless, torture—if we are talking about the crime, as opposed to using loose rhetoric about physical or mental abuse—has a legal definition. It requires the infliction of severe pain and suffering by a government official who deliberately and consciously intends to torture his victim. (Title 18, U.S. Code, Sec. 2340 et seq.) Moreover, to qualify as psychological torture, the infliction needs to be “prolonged mental harm” of the kind caused by the infliction or threatened infliction of severe pain, or “the threat of imminent death.” (It can also include things irrelevant to our consideration, such as use of mind-altering substances or the threat that third parties, like family members, might be tortured or killed.) Waterboarding the way the CIA executed was highly uncomfortable, but it did not cause severe pain, it was of short duration, and it did not cause fear of imminent death (the detainees were told that they were not going to be killed).
As I’ve previously noted, Attorney General Holder conceded in congressional testimony that the use of waterboarding in the training of some U.S. military personnel was not torture because there was no intent to torture. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department adopted the Bush administration’s very narrow legal definition of torture before a U.S. appeals court in a case involving JohnDemjanjuk, the late alleged Nazi concentration camp guard who raised fear of torture in fighting his deportation to Germany. And as Karl Rove has recounted, when bipartisan congressional leaders (including Nancy Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee) were briefed on what the CIA was up to on the interrogation front, their main concern was “whether we were doing enough” to extract information from detainees.
None of this necessarily means the use of physically abusive interrogation methods,waterboarding included, was good policy. People who want a categorical ban on such tactics constantly avoid addressing the ticking-bomb scenario and similar questions that bring the logic of their position into stark relief: forced to choose, they would prefer the occurrence of a preventable atrocity and the loss of perhaps thousands of lives to interrogation that harms a hair on the head of a culpable terrorist. In turn, people who argue against categorical bans (as I have done) often avoid addressing the inevitability that tactics they endorse for dire circumstances will be applied in less dire circumstances—and that our resistance to a ban, even though highly qualified, could encourage rogue regimes in their more routine use of abusive practices.

Justice Department Not Approving Authority for CIA Interrogations

Justice Department Not Approving Authority for CIA Interrogations

via Big Peace by Jim Hanson on 7/20/10

There is quite a lot of hyperventilation going on about some testimony from one of the Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee who co-wrote the so-called "torture memos". Apparently some  of the techniques the CIA used were not included in these memos, and the left is claiming that the Justice Dept. didn't "authorize" these techniques. First of all the term torture is garbage, none of the techniques used, including the dreaded waterboarding, are torture. Secondly the Justice Department is not the "authorizing" authority for what the CIA does when interrogating prisoners. What they did in the memos in question was to offer their legal opinion as to whether or not the techniques were legal under US law and treaties we have signed. Just because particular techniques were not included in these memos does not mean they were unauthorized, it means Justice hadn't weighed in as to whether they would stand up if challenged in court.
The actual authorizing authority would be the CIA itself and the President as its boss. If they decide to use particular methods then those methods are authorized. Going to the Justice Department is only part of the ass-covering process in case (as happened) these tactics become public. Even in his testimony Bybee is not saying that these techniques would have violated our laws and been considered torture, he is saying that they simply weren't covered in the memos in question.

Judge Jay S. Bybee, said the Central Intelligence Agency never sought approval for some practices detainees later said had been used on them, including dousing them with cold water to keep them awake and forcing them to wear diapers or soil themselves.

Since those memos said that waterboarding was OK, and most of these fall well short of that, the CIA simply didn't ask for an opinion on these. They could logically have assumed that since they had "authority" to waterboard that playing loud music was going to be a non-issue. Well not according to our torturologists on the perpetually-outraged left. They keep hoping for that smoking gun where W just said "Torture 'em all". Sorry folks, this ain't it.

Rewriting History on ‘Torture’

"From [sic] some reason, enhanced interrogation critics hate to admit that opposing these techniques for moral reasons and opposing them because they are ineffective are entirely independent arguments. You don't see this reaction with other issues. For example, you can criticize Lance Armstrong's steroid use without needing to claim that doping is ineffective. And people are generally aware that driving over the speed limit is a bad idea, without insisting that it won't get them to their destination faster."

Rewriting History on ‘Torture’

Kathryn Bigelow, the Zero Dark Thirty director who has been attacked by senators and anti-war types for her portrayal of how enhanced interrogation helped intelligence officials track down Osama bin Laden, has published a very sharp response to her critics:

On a practical and political level, it does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in U.S. counter-terrorism policy and practices.
Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue. As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn't mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn't ignore. War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences. …
Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

From some reason, enhanced interrogation critics hate to admit that opposing these techniques for moral reasons and opposing them because they are ineffective are entirely independent arguments. You don't see this reaction with other issues. For example, you can criticize Lance Armstrong's steroid use without needing to claim that doping is ineffective. And people are generally aware that driving over the speed limit is a bad idea, without insisting that it won't get them to their destination faster.
But enhanced interrogation opponents get offended whenever it's pointed out that these tactics contributed to keeping America safe. They're so intent on ignoring reality that they would prefer Hollywood rewrite history rather than acknowledge the benefits of enhanced interrogation. As Bigelow rightly notes, that historical revisionism is a disservice to the men and women of the CIA who put their lives at risk in the Global War on Terror. They deserve to have their stories portrayed accurately, not airbrushed to fit a political agenda.

What real enhanced interrogation was like

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

What real enhanced interrogation was like

via PrairiePundit by Merv Benson on 1/4/13

Jose Rodriguez:

It is an odd experience to enter a darkened room and, for more than 21 / 2 hours, watch someone tell a story that you experienced intimately in your own life. But that is what happened recently as I sat in a movie theater near Times Square and watched "Zero Dark Thirty," the new Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

When I was head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2004 and then director of the National Clandestine Service until late 2007, the campaign against al-Qaeda was my life and obsession.

I must say, I agree with both the film critics who love "Zero Dark Thirty" as entertainment and the administration officials and prominent senators who hate the movie for the message it sends — although my reasons are entirely opposite theirs.

Indeed, as I watched the story unfold on the screen, I found myself alternating between repulsion and delight.

First, my reasons for repulsion. "Zero Dark Thirty," which will open for Washington audiences Friday, inaccurately links torture with intelligence success and mischaracterizes how America's enemies have been treated in the fight against terrorism. Many others object to the film, however, because they think that the depiction of torture by the CIA is accurate but that the movie is wrong to imply that our interrogation techniques worked.

They are wrong on both counts. I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program, and I left the agency in 2007 secure in the knowledge not only that our program worked — but that it was not torture.

...
The film shows CIA officers brutalizing detainees — beating them mercilessly, suspending them from the ceiling with chains, leading them around in dog collars and, on the spur of the moment, throwing them on the floor, grabbing a large bucket and administering a vicious ad hoc waterboarding. The movie implies that such treatment went on for years.

The truth is that no one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program which I supervised from 2002 to 2007. Most detainees received no enhanced interrogation techniques, and the relative few who did faced harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention. To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington. No one was hung from ceilings. The filmmakers stole the dog-collar scenes from the abuses committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. No such thing was ever done at CIA "black sites."

...

Most Americans probably think waterboarding was stopped by President Obama once he took office in 2009. Few know that the technique was last used in 2003, when Obama was still an unknown state senator in Illinois.

Inspired perhaps more by past movies than first-hand accounts, "Zero Dark Thirty" shows detainees being asked a question, tortured a little, asked another question and then tortured some more. That did not happen. Detainees were given the opportunity to cooperate. If they resisted and were believed to hold critical information, they might receive — with Washington's approval — some of the enhanced techniques, such as being grabbed by the collar, deprived of sleep or, in rare cases, waterboarded. (The Justice Department assured us in writing at the time that these techniques did not constitute torture.) When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped — forever.

... 

There is more.

I trust Rodriguez's description of events more than the politicians who have denigrated the efforts of the CIA interrogators.  The enhanced interrogation did save lives and a form of it did provide a lead that led to bin Laden, but it was not through waterboarding, not that it would trouble me if it was used.

While he quibbles with some specifics Rodriguez thinks the movie is worth seeing as a broader representation of the work that went into finding the mass murder Osama bin Laden.

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Ninth Circuit holds for John Yoo in lawsuit by Jose Padilla

Ninth Circuit holds for John Yoo in lawsuit by Jose Padilla

via The Volokh Conspiracy by John Elwood on 5/2/12

(John Elwood)
A unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit (Fisher, Smith, Pallmeyer (dj, NDIll, by designation)) held today that former OLC Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo is entitled to qualified immunity in the lawsuit brought by former detainee Jose Padilla.  If you're just tuning in, the first two paragraphs set forth the nature of the lawsuit and the court's reasoning in some detail:

In this lawsuit, plaintiffs Padilla and his mother, Estela Lebron, seek to hold defendant John Yoo, who was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 2001 to 2003, liable for damages they allege they suffered from these unlawful actions. Under recent Supreme Court law, however, we are compelled to conclude that, regardless of the legality of Padilla's detention and the wisdom of Yoo's judgments, at the time he acted the law was not "sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he [wa]s doing violate[d]" the plaintiffs' rights. Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 131 S. Ct. 2074, 2083 (2011) (internal quotation marks omitted). We therefore hold that Yoo must be granted qualified immunity, and accordingly reverse the decision of the district
court.
As we explain below, we reach this conclusion for two reasons. First, although during Yoo's tenure at OLC the constitutional rights of convicted prisoners and persons subject to ordinary criminal process were, in many respects, clearly established, it was not "beyond debate" at that time that Padilla — who was not a convicted prisoner or criminal defendant, but a suspected terrorist designated an enemy combatant and confined to military detention by order of the President — was entitled to the same constitutional protections as an ordinary convicted prisoner or accused criminal. Id. Second, although it has been clearly established for decades that torture of an American citizen violates the Constitution, and we assume without deciding that Padilla's alleged treatment rose to the level of torture, that such treatment was torture was not clearly established in 2001-03.

Info from enhanced interrogation led to bin Laden

Info from enhanced interrogation led to bin Laden

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 4/30/12

Marc Thiessen:

It's no coincidence that former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez chose the one year anniversary of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden to finally break his silence. In his new memoir, Hard Measures, published today, Rodriguez reveals never before told details about how the questioning of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other CIA detainees made the bin Laden operation possible.

Rodriguez reveals that it was KSM's efforts to cover for bin Laden's courier (who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden) that put the agency on his trail. He writes:

The detainees were always trying to game the system. At one point we discovered that KSM was trying to signal his fellow detainees (using a method I cannot describe). In one message he instructed another detainee to "tell them nothing about the courier." Short of giving us a name, you couldn't ask for a better tipoff.

This altered the agency to focus on uncovering bin Laden's courier network. And when another senior al Qaeda leader was taken into custody, he revealed still more information about the courier:

An al-Qa'ida operative was captured in 2004. He was quickly turned over to the CIA. He had computer discs with him that showed that he was relaying information between al-Qa'ida and Abu Musab Zarqawi… Initially, he played the role of a tough mujahideen and refused to cooperate. We then received permission to use some (but not all) of the EIT procedures on him. Before long he became compliant and started to provide some excellent information…. He told us that bin Ladin conducted business by using a trusted courier with whom he was in contact only sporadically. He said that the Sheikh (as bin Ladin was referred to by his subordinates) stayed completely away from telephones, radios, or the internet in an effort to frustrate American attempts to find him. And frustrated we were.

We pressed him on who this courier was and he said all he knew was a pseudonym: "Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti." This was a critical bit of information about the identity of the man who would eventually lead us to bin Ladin.

Armed with this information, CIA debriefers confronted KSM with what they had learned:

Agency officers went to KSM and asked him, "What can you tell us about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti?" KSM's eyes grew wide and he backed up into his cell. He said no words but spoke volumes with his actions.

Then in May 2005, they captured another senior terrorist named Abu Faraj al-Libi....

... 

Democrats are still in denial about the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation in getting information that led to bin Laden.   It appears they have been misinformed or they are only hearing what they want to hear.  Since Obama was elected there have probably been few opportunities to interrogate al Qaeda detainees.  He mainly kills those we find.

Visigothic law and torture

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Quite a lot of legal systems have used torture to try to force defendants and/or witnesses to tell the truth. Moral problems aside, the obvious problem is that an innocent defendant may confess, or a witness give the testimony he thinks the interrogator wants, to avoid the torture.

Obvious not only to us but to them. The legal literature of Imperial China, where torture of both witnesses and defendants was legal, contains accounts of cases where a clever official figured out that a confession under torture was bogus and successfully identified the real criminal.

Much of what we know about the Athenian legal system comes from orations written by professional orators to be spoken by plaintiffs or defendants. They include two orations, written by the same orator for different cases, one of which argues that testimony under torture (of slaves) is entirely reliable, one of which gives the obvious argument for why it is not—in each case, of course, supporting his client's position.

I recently came across an ingenious, if imperfect, solution to the problem in what is apparently the oldest surviving Germanic law code—the Visigothic Forum Judicum. Alaric accuses Beremud of murder. There is not enough evidence to convict Beremud, so he is tortured to make him confess. Under the code:

 “The judge shall take the precaution to compel the accuser to specifically describe the alleged offence, in writing; and after he has done so, and presented it privately to the judge, the torture shall proceed; and if the confession of him who is subjected to the torture should correspond with the terms of the accusation, his guilt shall be considered to be established. But if the accusation should allege one thing, and the confession of the person tortured the opposite, the accuser must undergo the penalty hereinbefore provided; because persons often accuse themselves of crime while being tortured.

If Beremud is innocent, he won't know the details of the offense—where and when the victim was killed, with what weapon, what wounds were inflicted. However much he wants to stop the pain, he can't confess what he does not know. This assumes, of course, that an innocent defendant will not know the details of the crime. The code dealt with that problem:

But if the accuser, before he has secretly given the written accusation to the judge as aforesaid, should, either in his own proper person, or by anyone else, inform the party of what he is accused, then it shall not be lawful for the judge to subject the latter to torture, because the alleged offence has become publicly known.”

There is at least one  problem with this solution to the problem of false confessions. A guilty defendant, knowing the law, may confess under torture and deliberately get the details wrong. My conjecture is that that problem was dealt with by having the interrogator  keep up the torture until either the defendant confessed with the right details or the interrogator was convinced that he could not. I suspect that most of us, having had the good fortune not to have been subjected to torture, overestimate how easy is to hold out when saying the right words will end the present pain.

It may occur to some readers that a variant of the Visigothic solution survives in modern practice. Police officers are not supposed to torture defendants, but they are allowed to interrogate them, and interrogation sometimes leads to confessions—which may make one suspect that it comes closer to torture than it is supposed to. One way of checking whether the confession is for real is to see whether it contains details that an innocent defendant would not know.

Of course, this depends on the honesty of the officers doing the interrogation—they can, and for all I know sometimes do, subvert the process by feeding the defendant information that they have and he, if innocent, does not.

---

P.S. A talk I just heard on the problem of jailhouse snitches points out a different modern version of the problem—the "confession" by a defendant that may have been invented by the person it was supposedly confessed to, a fellow criminal eager to testify in exchange for lenient treatment in his own case. Here again, one test of truth is whether the confession contains details that the real criminal would know and an innocent defendant, or the fellow criminal who claims to have heard the confession, would not. Here again, the problem is that the snitch may have been fed that information by the police or prosecution, or obtained it himself in some other way.

One further problem, in that case, is that the snitch may be, in some cases turned out to have been, the real criminal, eager to convict someone else for his crime. And well informed about the details.

Michael Hayden: Birthers, Truthers and Interrogation Deniers - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303745304576359820767777538.html?mod=djemITP_h

Let me add a third denomination to this faith-based constellation: interrogation deniers, i.e., individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence. They, of course, cling to this view despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the testimony of four CIA directors, and despite Mr. Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan's statement that there's been "a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists."

The recent dispute over what strains of intelligence led to the killing of Osama bin Laden highlights the phenomenon. It must appear to outside observers like a theological debate over how many angels can reside on the head of a pin. So we see carefully tailored arguments designed to discount the value of enhanced interrogations: the first mention of the courier's name came from a detainee not in CIA custody; CIA detainees gave false and misleading information about the courier; there is no way to confirm that information obtained through enhanced interrogation was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden.
All fair enough as far as they go. But let the record show that when I was first briefed in 2007 about the brightening prospect of pursuing bin Laden through his courier network, a crucial component of the briefing was information provided by three CIA detainees, all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation. One of the most alerting pieces of evidence was that two of the detainees who had routinely been cooperative and truthful (after they had undergone enhanced techniques) were atypically denying apparent factual data—a maneuver taken as a good sign that the CIA was on to something important.
So that there is no ambiguity, let me be doubly clear: It is nearly impossible for me to imagine any operation like the May 2 assault on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that would not have made substantial use of the trove of information derived from CIA detainees, including those on whom enhanced techniques had been used.
It is easy to imagine the concerns at the political level as the CIA built its case that bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound, and it became obvious that detainee data was an important thread of intelligence. To his credit, and obviously reflecting this reality, White House spokesman Jay Carney has not denied that fact but correctly pointed out that there were multiple co-dependent threads that led to this success.

In response to a direct question on the CBS Evening News about enhanced interrogation and the bin Laden success, CIA Director Leon Panetta confirmed on May 3 that, "Obviously there was some valuable information that was derived through those kind of interrogations." He also added that it was an "open question" whether the information could have been elicited through other means, implicitly contradicting those who claim that other means would have produced the same information.

Let me add that this is not a discussion about the merits or the appropriateness of any interrogation technique. Indeed, I personally took more than half of the techniques (including waterboarding) off the table in 2007 because American law had changed, our understanding of the threat had deepened, and we were now blessed with additional sources of information. We can debate what was appropriate then, or now, but this is a discussion about a particular historical fact: Information derived from enhanced interrogation techniques helped lead us to bin Laden.
And so those who are prone to condemn the actions of those who have gone before (while harvesting the fruits of their efforts) might take pause. I've been personally asked about the appropriateness of waterboarding and—recognizing the immense challenge of balancing harsh treatment with saving innocent lives—usually respond: "I thank God that I did not have to make that decision." At the same time, I thank those who preceded me, made such decisions and thereby spared me the worst of the dilemma. Those who deny the usefulness of enhanced interrogation techniques might consider similar caution.

But if they cannot or will not, shouldn't they be true to their faith? If they truly believe that these interrogations did not and could not yield useful intelligence, they should demand that the CIA identify all the information derived directly or indirectly from enhanced interrogation. And then they should insist the agency destroy it. They should also insist that significant portions of the 9/11 Commission Report be rescinded, as it too was based on this data. This would be perfectly consistent with the interrogation deniers' transcendental faith that nothing of use could have come from enhanced interrogations after 9/11.

Strange that we have not heard such calls, even from the most ardent interrogation deniers. Perhaps they are not really like "birthers" and "truthers" after all. Perhaps, when all the public ideological posturing is done, and they are through attacking both their opponents' arguments and their character, they quietly concede to themselves that facts really do matter.

Articles: Alan Dershowitz Says Media Matters Could Cost Obama the Election

Link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/alan_dershowitz_says_media_matters_could_cost_obama_the_election.html (via shareaholic.com)

When asked about Blumenthal's DP article, Dershowitz looked exasperated and listed all the ways in which that article got everything wrong.  For example, Dershowitz is opposed to torture.  Dershowitz has called for something called "torture warrants" to ensure that extreme measures be applied only in extraordinary circumstances and with the most extraordinary of safeguards.  Blumenthal's  distorted analysis?  Dershowitz supports torture. 
Much more newsworthy than the silly spitballs Blumenthal threw with his screaming article was Dershowitz's conviction that Blumenthal and his buddies at Media Matters (a media watchdog organization affiliated with the Democratic party and which has recently been widely accused of engaging in anti-Semitism) were going to cost this president the election.
Asked at the pre-event press conference whether he had seen Blumenthal's article, Dershowitz's immediate and angry response was: "I have, and let me tell you, Max Blumenthal and Media Matters will be singlehandedly responsible for [Obama] losing this election.  They [the Democrats] cannot win the election and keep this affiliation with them [Media Matters]."

A pepper spray series

A pepper spray series

via Bookworm Room by Bookworm on 11/22/11

From Zombie, who comments on the gaggle of giggling girls who gleefully relive their pepper spray experience,
and
From Castra Praetoria, who's been pepper sprayed a few times himself (but all in the line of duty),
and also
From James Taranto, who notes that a lack of actual aggression doesn't mean that the protesters weren't engaging in the type of activity that calls for police crowd control of the physical variety.

The facts about water boarding illegal combatants

The facts about water boarding illegal combatants

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 11/16/11

Marc Thiessen:

It was disappointing to see The Post's editorial on waterboarding this morning replete with so many discredited arguments.  Reasonable people can disagree about whether the United States should resume using enhanced interrogation techniques (as it appears it will if a Republican assumes the presidency in January 2013).  But we should at least debate this proposition based on facts.

For example, The Post writes: "Imagine that a U.S. soldier is captured and subjected to waterboarding. Would Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann consider that torture?  Maybe not, given their disappointing responses to a question about waterboarding posed during Saturday's Republican debate. And if they did object to the soldier's treatment, they've lost the moral authority to argue against it."

Well, no.  It would be illegal for a foreign adversary to waterboard a U.S. soldier, even if the technique did not amount to torture. American troops are lawful combatants.  They wear uniforms or distinctive insignia, follow a clear chain of command, do not hide among innocent civilians, and do not target innocent men, women and children.  Because they follow the laws of war, when captured they receive full privileges as Prisoners of War under the Geneva Conventions — which means it would be illegal for their captors to coerce them in any way, much less waterboard them. 

Terrorists, by contrast, are unlawful combatants.  They do not wear uniforms or distinctive insignia, or follow a clear chain of command.  Not only do they hide among innocent civilians, their primary means of attacking us is to target innocent men, women and children for death.  Because they violate the laws of war, they do not receive the privileges that a lawful combatant receives as a POW under Geneva.  As a result of their own choices, the United States may lawfully coerce them to provide information about imminent terrorist attacks. 

Indeed, it is precisely because they target the innocent that we must coerce them.  When an American soldier is captured and taken off the battlefield, he has been effectively disarmed and rendered unable to cause harm to the enemy.  But when a terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is captured, and he has set in motion a series of terrorist plots, he has not been disarmed.  Even in captivity, he still holds the power to kill thousands simply by withholding information.  We have a moral obligation to stop him.

The Post writes that waterboarding "has been considered torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition."   As I document meticulously in my book "Courting Disaster," waterboarding as practiced by the CIA bears no resemblance whatsoever to the water torture employed during the Spanish Inquisition, or for that matter by Imperial Japan, the Khmer Rouge or Nazi Germany.  I am certain The Post can make an effective case against waterboarding without comparing the men and women of our intelligence community to Medieval torturers.

...

There is more.

Thiessen also makes it clear that we did get valuable information that saved lives despite what critics have argued.  But it is the failure of the critics to comprehend the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants that causes them to be so wrong about the issue.  Those who oppose enhanced interrogation of terrorist continue to be willfully ignorant of the facts.

BTW, when US troops were captured in Iraq, they were brutally dismembered and murdered.