Torturous Thoughts

The NY Times article "Donald Trump Faces Obstacles to Resuming Waterboarding" causes several ideas to collide in my head.  Isn't it odd that nobody ever questioned the efficacy of torture until the United States thought to use it?

The morality of torture is altogether another question, and not a trivial one, or an obvious one.  But, when other countries were known to use torture, or at least suspected of it---I'm thinking of Saddam Hussein for example, but there were and are plenty of others---the bien pensants would tut-tut about what monsters they were for doing it, but nobody suggested they were idiots for doing it.  Only the United States, George W. Bush especially, are fools for using a tool that does not work.

That the United States is uniquely characterized as idiots for using a tool that "everyone" knows doesn't work, by people who want the United States to fail, should be the first clue that torture works very well, indeed.  In the whole of my intellectual life, from history books to James Bond movies, absolutely positively everyone assumes that torture works.  Every insurrectionist organization, from WW II partisans to the Italian Red Brigades, organized on a cell structure in order to limit damage to the larger organization that is likely to arise from torture.

A revolutionary organization, like the Red Brigades in Italy, or the notorious Baader Meinhoff Gang in West German, will organize in small groups, of maybe five or six individuals, called cells.  All individuals in a cell are completely ignorant of all other cells.  They may know they are a part of the Red Brigades, but that is all.  With one exception.

One member of the cell will be able to contact one person at the next level of organization, but maybe not even that.  He may only be able to recognize when he is being legitimately contacted by a supervisor to receive legitimate instructions.  Even the leader of one cell will have no knowledge of other cells, and will not be able to contact them.  As you might imagine, this is a difficult organization to maintain and to manage.  Why do they bother?

They bother because they know that if an individual is captured, he will break under torture.  Sooner than later, everyone breaks.  Everyone.  Well, if the captured individual knows a lot, the entire organization could be compromised.  If he knows only his own cell, only that cell would be compromised.

In the larger society, from government ministries to operational units of the army, everyone works on a "need-to-know" basis.  In large, heterogenous units, you cannot depend upon everyone's ideological commitment, so there are people who might divulge state secrets for money or sexual favors.  Or, they will break under torture.

Soviet-era army units were famously more fragile than their American counter-parts because of the very high level of paranoia in the USSR.  Surprisingly high levels of officers were kept ignorant of essential operational intelligence for fear of losing that sensitive information to the enemy.  Enlisted men, even sargeants, were not even given maps.  This meant that if a lieutenant or captain were killed in action, that unit was effectively decapitated, and therefore lost to operations, until new officers could find them and assume command.

All this because everyone in the real world knows that torture works.

In another line of attack, people have asserted that torture is worthless because a tortured person will say anything.  He is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.  Torture is a tool like any tool.  It has its strengths and weaknesses and it takes years of training and experience, and some amount of talent, to use it well.

The purpose of torture is to inflict intense pain without killing the subject.  Clearly, death is a catastrophic failure since dead men don't talk.  Furthermore, it may be perfectly true that you might not get what you want if you have only minutes or a few hours to work.  This is a limitation of the tool.  But, if you have the time, you will certainly learn what the subject knows.  Exactly how much time depends upon how gentle you need to be with your subject, and probably other factors of which I know nothing, but I feel sure we are talking days or at most some weeks.  Certainly not months or years.

Finally, there are, of course, some maniacs out there, like a Saddam Hussein, who will inflict pain for the sheer joy of it.  Lumping them in, with the scientific use of torture for extracting valuable information, is the same category error as forbidding guns to criminals and policemen alike, because guns kill.

I am far too removed from the details of such operations to say whether the U.S. should or should not use torture.  But the arguments against torture are idiotic, and that makes me suspicious.