Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Is Torture Effective? How Can We Tell?

The Justice Department's release of a secret report on the interrogation techniques used by the CIA in its overseas prisons has renewed the public debate over torture.

The argument for harsh techniques is that the information obtained can prevent future terrorist acts. And this argument makes sense in principle: if imposing pain, suffering, and even the risk of death on one person can avoid pain, suffering and the risk of death for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands, it would seem hard to object.

Yet the case for torture is not convincing. The crucial issue is that the public has zero evidence that torture has in fact reduced terrorism. Those who defend torture have claimed it helps foil terrorist plots, but they have not provided hard data.

Now, one possibility is that revealing information about foiled plots would compromise ongoing national security efforts.

A different possiblity is that the information obtained from torture has had minimal value in preventing terrorism.

My hunch is with the latter explanation. If the CIA had convincingly foiled terrorists acts based on information from harsh interrogations, the temptation to shout it from the highest rooftops would have been overwhelming.

Thus the logical inference is that harsh interrogations have rarely, if ever, produced information of value.

In that case, the cost-benefit evaluation of torture is trivial: it has certain costs, such as inflaming antipathy to the U.S., and no benefits.

48 comments:

John Thacker said...

From the article you posted:

"In what appeared to be a response to the Justice Department’s release, the C.I.A. later on Monday released previously secret agency reports from 2004 and 2005 that detailed intelligence scoops produced by the interrogation program. "

I'm sorry, isn't that what you asked for? I'm a bit confused.

Anonymous said...

1) Harsh interrogation is not the same as torture, morally or legally.

2) The CIA would not necessarily blurt out from the rooftops foiled plots, unless they were isolated aberrations, such as, say, something like Oklahoma City. The bulk of the intel is sensitive. When dealing with al-Qaeda intelligence is almost the only decisive weapon we have, and they are a nebulous ideological organization built around the practice of terrorism. They are always plotting, and waiting until the timebomb starts ticking is perhaps not the most prudent policy. By then it is likely to be too late.

Most foiled plots will thus not be in the very latest stages of development, and so will not be "convincingly" foiled to a lot of people. Disrupting the organization by unearthing and capturing the plotting leaders is a necessity nonetheless. Oftentimes we don't know who these people are, or if we do, where they are, who they're coordinating with, and what they intend to do. High value detainees often do know these things.

We simply do not know a priori how convincing the plots being plotted are, but we know with reasonable certainty that plots there are. After 9/11, it would have been lunacy to assume otherwise.

3) There is not "zero evidence" of effectiveness, rather there is positive evidence that we have to take the CIA's word for. You may not trust the CIA, but that does not settle the matter. You may think that the plots that were foiled were not serious, but the CIA clearly disagreed. There are a lot of shades to what is "convincing," and it looks different to differently situated people.

4) If it was your responsibility, would you stick to your notion of a "convincing" plot? At what point does it become convincing? Is it cost-justified to be risk averse about that?

5) Nor have you provided "hard data" that serious plots haven't been foiled from information obtained via harsh interrogation. It's in the nature of these matters to be murky. To demand the level of precision you seem to demand and then conclude negatively from its absence is, as it were, all benefit and no cost.

Sun Tzu said...

3) The CIA's own internal studies themselves, such as were released thus far, suggest there is zero positive evidence that torture/harsh interrogation acts produced actionable intelligence that could not have been produced in any other way. That's the problem with the theory that it "works" and hence saves lives. They do not say that no actionable intelligence resulted from torturing prisoners and I'm not sure anyone would make that claim in it's entirety. But they do say that it's not clear what we did that produced information. Asking them questions or simulating drowning? We don't know. In the absence of that sort of hard evidence itself, it's probably safer in the long run to presume that cruder methods of interrogation were less than effective at generating useful information and at best provided no benefits relative to their substantial costs to our legal system and international moral standing.

By contrast, there's also a wide variety of evidence provided by people who didn't use such harsh techniques and still got useful information, in fact far more of it, going back at least as far to a famous Luftwaffe interrogator (Hanns Scharff).

Anonymous said...

Re: Suntzusays

3) "could not have..." They do say that we don't know, but the fact is, as the documents do state, that they did provide very useful actionable intelligence where there was none before.

By the same token, if we went nice on the relevant terrorist detainees and we got some actionable intel, I could just say that "We don't know that we could not have gotten more and better intel by being somewhat harsher." My point was that the epistemological claim cuts both ways, and it's a little too easy to assume that harsh interrogations are useless because they don't satisfy the demands of speculative arguments.

I find it interesting how willing some people are to put faith in a counterfactual in order to argue against the CIA's use of counterfactuals (which they must do). First, the objectors say that we "could have" got the same intel via nicer methods; but, like professor Miron, many also deny that that intel is worth having (since no convincing plots were foiled).

Say you're responsible for American security and 9/11 just happened; are you really going to rest your response on those considerations? Maybe you would, but I think at least you would consider the matter from other perspectives. I'm just saying that a bit more humility is called for.

As for the historical evidence, you're right that there's lots of evidence where torture or even harsh interrogation yielded bad or zero intelligence. There's lots of evidence that it has been useful too, e.g., in Bagaric and Clarke's book "Torture."

As far as I know, the most comprehensive study of the question came in Rumney's 2006 paper, and all of his examples involve gratuitous punishment and are anecdotal. Many cases of ineffective coercive interrogation are explained by the fact that the subject simply did not have the information desired.

Nothing wrong with any of that--it's a difficult subject to be exact about--but we do, if we are honest, have to admit that there's lots of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. Israeli authorities claim to have foiled 90 terrorist attacks by using coercive interrogation (Posner and Vermeule 2005). French General Paul Aussaresses wrote of a "string of instances" where he broke up terrorist plots in Algiers "as a result of torture" (Adam Shatz, 2002). Alasdair Palmer (2005) reports that in 1995 the Philippines' intelligence service provided information, obtained through torture, that helped foil a plot to crash eleven planes into the ocean and fly an explosives-filled Cessna into Langley. Marcy Straus (2004) reported that Abu Nidal was "broken" by being tortured by Jordanian officials. And so on.

The numbers game can be played all day. The overall picture is just that torture is clandestine, and so hard data on it is not available and never will be. All we know is that humans dislike pain and will try to avoid it, and that sometimes torture or harsh interrogation has yielded information that saved other people, and sometimes it hasn't. Just consider the practice of subpoenaing witnesses in the common law. This is coercive; people go to jail if they do not comply. Why would we expect information given under subpoena to be truthful, but not under coercive interrogation?

Lastly, I appreciate your civil tone. And you do raise serious questions (as does professor Miron).

Anonymous said...

To what do you attribute the absence of serious terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 2001?

Steve M. said...

This is a tough one... as a previous poster said "Harsh interrogation is not the same as torture, morally or legally. "

By labeling it all as "torture" we are ignoring the intracacies of the process. What if the prisoner wasn't fed for 12 hours? Is this torture?

Sun Tzu said...

"Coercive" interrogation methods need not be cruel or unusual punishments. I think the point that is raised is valid. We still don't have a means to objectively verify that torture is any more effective than normative and legally sanctioned interrogation (legally sanctioned by which I mean our international agreements and previous denouncement of such methods as were used).

The problem with that point is that since it does not provide any proof that torturing prisoners is of necessity to safety or national security, and since it does either increase hostility, justify repressive tactics used by hostile regimes internally, or at best, decrease international support for our quest against terrorism generally, it does not demonstrate that we've outweighed our costs. It can be demonstrated that an interrogation method in particular produced information X. And perhaps information X helps us prevent plot Y, which saves some number of lives. That's great. That's not the actual story so far as we can tell. We don't know which interrogation method produced information X, according to the CIA. We don't know which information or which plots were foiled with certainty by which forms of interrogation. And we do know with some level of certainty that our invalidation of a position of being strongly against torture decreases our ability to rally support among our allies, decreased our ability to strongly oppose Iranian protest suppression and subsequent torturing of arrested demonstrators, and quite possibly increases the ability of terrorist cells to recruit new followers by having a clear and obvious point of propaganda.

If our society cannot be clearly shown to convey even such obvious benefits as the right not to be tortured or even tossed in detention indefinitely without due process of law then I would argue we are placing our national security in much greater risk over the long run. And to do so without any evidence that the precise actions that cost us that risk are in fact helping us in the short run is unjustified, and probably illegal or unconstitutional to begin with.

@Steve M. Depends. Which is worse, not feeding a prisoner for 12 hours (a modest time period that I very often do not eat over by choice or out of inattentiveness to my bodily needs and for which I would not suffer any sense of serious privation and pain) or force feeding a prisoner on a hunger strike using a feeding tube? Care to guess which one of those we've done?

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