Friday October 26 2007

Is water boarding torture?

methods of Gathering Intelligence

• mass information gathering - deforest
• mass toture - elkins
• Ausureases

intelligence is essential to COIN

• allows you to identify insurgents
• to win you need to identify and isolate them
• Intelligence is also essential to insurgency

non-coercive interrogation

• no actual or perceived threat of pain of discomfort
• no penalty to the individual who refuses to cooperate

coercive Interrogation:

• involves fear of punishment

Torture

• using pain and terror to ascertain information
• lasting psychological or physical pain or damage

attitudes toward torture

• you are 1/3 more likely to support torture if a terrorist attack had occurred and vice versa

ethics of responsibility

• duty
• public duty trumps individual morality
• you can use extraordinary means to protect the public when time is of the essence
• the ticking time bomb is rare
• Max Weber

Kidnapping

• 5 year old boy is abducted in germany
• police set up a sting at the ransom drop
• the boy was apparently trapped in an oxygen depleting environment
• the only sure way to find the child was to convince the kidnapper to tell the police where the kid was located
• torture ensued - the kidnapper cracked
• it turned out the kid was already dead
• what was that kids life worth - it was worth the human rights of the kidnapper
• the chief was fired and then rehired by a neighboring province

Trinquier

• up to 20 people are involved in a bombing
• remember the hierarchical structures of insurgents
• if a courier is caught - then within 24 hours the insurgent structure is changed
• this reduces the value of the prisoner to the COIN units
• the insurgent has information he doesn't even know is valuable
• this is the ticking bomb in COIN
• beat the clock

Under these circumstances you resort to torture

Why is torture ineffective?

unreliable information

• people will say anything to get you to stop

corroboration

• the solution to unreliable information
• everyone lies all the time
• torture is no more or less likely to produce a lie than a non coercive measures

moral reasons

• in an ideological contest - both sides want to be the champion of a higher cause
• for example social justice, democracy,
• a political agenda presupposes a moral agenda
• trinquier said that torture destroys the morale of soldiers - specialists and veterans do it to prevent corrupting the youth

Torture is not about pain

• it does inflict pain
• fear makes for a successful interrogation
• all interrogations are coercive
• pain is secondary
• the victim is scared of punishment and weighs the costs of giving information vs. punishment

Elkins

• Kenya
• black, grey white, streaming of people in the pipeline
• torture is never the first
• Ausereasses - most of the people obviously coerced into participating were let go

• colleague of professor
• has a simplified manual of distinguishing between arabic names for people who do not read and write arabic
• by understanding flags and information about their name you can conduct a verification
• When in doubt bring out the flexcuffs
• error on the side of caution
• another egyptian colleague says that this would mean a number of her family members would be in flexcuffs
• suspicion is not the same as guilt - should they still be punished?

Habius Corpus

• the body of a prisoner must be produced
• very difficult to revoke
• lincoln tried to suspend it and it triggered a constitutional crisis

Quote of the Day
"How many of you have ever been arrested"
"Just one?"
"None of you little flowers would last 5 minutes in Saskatchewan."
Akash: "Do you think this the norm, isn't this a good thing?"

COIN is still war and it is a festival of brutality

• there is no incentive for the system to let you go unless you can prove you are not a threat