Last week, teacherken had a terrific
diary up about the torture issue. One of the
comments from the thread led me to this great article by
Jane Smiley at the Huffington Post. But after the umpteenth time of reading the comments to the article from one of HuffPo's local trolls that torture is an effective and reliable way to gather intelligence, and all the responses that just seemed to goad the troll into wilder flights of unreality, I found I just couldn't stand and take it anymore and had to find a definitive response to this meme.
I believe there is still hope to reverse the downward spiral of immorality that the Bush Administration has set our country on. Whatever that hope is, be it the midterm elections, or the inevitable court challenges, the debate will continue. With great anticipation of the day that the spark of debate rises again, and the flames need fanning, I would like to suggest a new frame for the debate: Say "Uncle"
Odds are that at some time in your life you have been the victim of or witness to (or possibly perpetrator of) bullying. I'm not just talking about the acts of the schoolyard bully, I'm talking about that annoying uncle/family friend, sibling, or even co-worker. Whoever it was, I'm reasonably certain that we all understand the connotation of the phrase "Say: Uncle".
Whatever the technique: armbar, Full Nelson, or sitting on the victim and grinding the persons face into the ground until every pore is filled with dirt and/or fine gravel; the goal is the same: to get the victim to say what the perpetrator wants. And it isn't limited to "Uncle" either, often the goal of this brutal coercion is to elicit some particularly embarrassing confession from the victim. But the victim will do and/or say anything to make the punishment, the pain...
the torture...stop.
"But torture is an effective interrogation technique."
I swear those words will haunt me until the war crime trials.
OK, take two. Assuming that we allow the "one percent doctrine" standard that torture could result in valuable intelligence that will save American lives (yada, yada), then why are we limiting its effectiveness? Shouldn't we expand this out to our police forces, so that they can get more criminal scum off the streets and make our cities and towns that much more safe....
But we don't.
Why?
Because decades of law enforcement practice have shown that forced confessions are, at best, unreliable. At worst they are false, and just add another victim to the crime. And there is another, better way.
I was a great fan of the show "Homicide: Life on the Streets". My favorite character in the show was Detective Frank Pembleton (played by Andre Braugher). It was a great to watch the show where almost every week fans would be treated to one of Pembleton's interrogations. As portrayed, the character was a psychological genius, a maestro of the human condition. Through various methods of fast talk, deception, and intellectual intimidation he was usually able to suss out the chink in his targets psychological armor, resulting in something revelatory if not totally confessional. (For a real treat, see the episode with Steve Buscemi.)
While we may not have real supercops like Frank Pendleton, or even super interrogators, that which has been shown in our neatly-packaged one-hour-a-week Police shows are dramatizations of REAL and EFFECTIVE techniques used by actual interrogators to acquire reliable information.
Anything else is just sadism.