This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.
As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.
I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.
To be honest I am extremely skeptical of this conclusion for two reasons. First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought. For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun. Second, the conclusion that torture does not work is suspiciously close to support moral intuition of modern western researchers, I would hardly expect some research in the vein of "torture is moderately effective, but historical evidence such as study of notes by Gestapo and Khmer Rouge investigators shows that torturing prisoner's children in front them increases investigative efficiency by 346%. Further study in Guantanamo is needed". I do not think this would gather much praise for any Psychology journal.
And here is the rub. The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes." It is "Statements made under torture are unusually unreliable, and therefore interrogation under torture does not produce actionable intelligence." The premise has been a principle of English evidence law since time immemorial (the first explicit documentation that torture evidence is never admissible in English courts is as late as the 1460's, but Fortescue implies that the rule was old in his day), and the conclusion follows from it as night follows day.
The famous medieval civil and ecclesiastical torturers did not use torture to extract intelligence - they used it to extract confessions (usually true ones, as is the case with all corrupt policing, but frequently false ones) - because this worked in Roman-law inspired systems including Canon Law everywhere and Civil Law in most of Continental Europe.
In wartime, we don't have as much visibility because military law isn't a thing until modern bureaucratic states. We do know that medieval knights liked to "get medieval" on defeated peasants and townsfolk, but this doesn't look like torture for intelligence gathering - based on my knowledge it is a combination of sadistic revenge and torture as a terror-weapon to deter future rebellions. "Getting medieval" on knightly POWs was prohibited by the rules of Chivalry (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, of course, but it does mean that it was not seen as a usual incident of warfare).
When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.
The reason for this is obvious. Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know. In theory you could develop a technique of interrogation under torture where you "calibrated" the victim's response by asking questions you did know the answer to and punishing incorrect answers before switching to the information you actually wanted. In practice, nobody has done this, and the people who have the expertise required to do it are unanimous that you would be better off offering a hot meal and a cigarette in exchange for sincere co-operation.
The most famous example of systematic use of torture for intelligence gathering in a counterinsurgency was the French in Algeria. They lost that one. The most recent example was the waterboarding of KSM and a small number of other high-value Al-Quaeda captives at CIA black sites. Eventually KSM realised that what he needed to say to stop the torture was that Saddam Hussein was helping him. Obviously, that was believed stat by the Bush administration. They lost that one too.
You're confusing torture used to extract a confession with torture used to extract military intelligence. It is possible to have those things entangled in reality, like, the tortured person lies about the location of the bomb because he doesn't know the real location and wants the torture to stop. But if you just want the data and don't have preferences regarding its content other than you get it, and you have a relatively short feedback loop, I don't see any reason for why it won't work.
Torturing someone with an aim to learn that Saddam Hussein gave them money is pointless. Torturing someone to betray their contacts or sabotage targets or whatever useful non-loaded intelligence can work.
I am not confusing them. I am explicitly making the claim that this is a distinction without a difference, because torture to extract confessions works so well that even when you think you are trying to extract actionable intelligence the person you are torturing is actually thinking "what does he want me to confess to?" I make this argument purely from authority because I have no experience torturing people, and I sincerely hope that nobody else on the thread does either. But an argument from authority beats a hunch. Note that the required condition for torture to be a good idea is not "You occasionally get true intel you would not have got by being nice" - it is "In expectation, torture for intel produces a net benefit compared to not doing it"
The authors of the medieval law books, the 1863 Lieber Code, the 1907 Hague Conventions, and the US Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations do. And they have a lot more experience than you.
There have been a number of cases where evil regimes set up permanent corps of professional torturers with doctrine, field manuals, line and staff hierarchies etc. (The CIA torture programme post 9-11 was not one of them - one of the surprises in the Senate report that shocked even the pro-torture Republicans on the committee is just how unprofessional it was) The most famous are the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet GPU/NKVD/KGB. In all these cases, the aim was to extract confessions. The nearest thing to a corps of professional torturers focussed on intelligence gathering was French military intelligence during the Algerian war of independence. The torturers destroyed their records so we don't know how well it worked, but we do know that the French lost the war.
Yeah, but he knows that if he confesses to the wrong thing, he will be tortured more. So there is a failure mode where he really doesn't know the information that you're interested in and so makes something up, but if you're aware of this failure mode and the subject does in fact have the information you're interested in, you probably can extract it reliably.
Consider for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Reinhard_Heydrich#Investigation_and_manhunt. When Nazis did it, it worked.
Are you saying that an office dedicated to extracting intelligence tends to transform to extracting confessions? I'm not following, what's the evidence for is this supposed to be?
As far as I understand from reading Wikipedia, the French military won the war against the Algerians decisively, then lost the war against the French journalists, in a very similar fashion to how the US military utterly destroyed the Viet Cong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive), then lost the Vietnam war to the US journalists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is the exact argument I reliably hear from them. Bringing up that some torture gets useful intelligence generates a lot of hostility and denial.
(EDIT I got called a "torture apologist" for saying that some torture gets useful intelligence by this very person, so, yep, this conversation went exactly the way I thought it would.)
The anti-torture movement has been colonized nearly completely by people opposed to Bush's GWOT and they want him to be both stupid and evil.
I'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid - it was a logical plan to achieve his goals. He wanted to start a (second) land war in Asia, and in order to sell it to the normally-isolationist Republican base he needed false intelligence that Iraq was helping Al-Quaeda. Torturing KSM was a good way of getting it. (The bad info on WMD had a different target audience, including people like me, and was in any case probably an honest mistake). Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one.
I am saying that the intelligence gained by torturing KSM was net-negative for the US, because the most consequential thing we got out of him was false.
I am also saying that John Fortescue writing in the 1460's, Abraham Lincoln issuing executive orders in 1863, and the negotiators of the 1907 Hague Conventions were not motivated by their attitude to the foreign policy of George W Bush.
I am not saying it was, either. But I am saying the anti-torture movement did not want to have an uncomfortable discussion that we were leaving a useful tool on the table by declining to torture, because "it does not work anyway."
But life is not a morality play. Sometimes making the morally right decision leaves you worse off. That is why it is called the moral decision. If you pay nothing for your principles they are not principles.
See, now, this is even worse. Torture can absolutely get confirmable information out of a person. That is extremely useful in a conflict. Pretending it is just useful for false confessions to manufacture a war is refusing to face reality.
An anti-torture movement that is built the idea that torture does not work is built on a foundation of lies and will crumble to dust in the first strong wind.
An anti-torture movement that says "yes torture works, but we refuse to do it, because those are our principles" is healthy in the long term.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is it controversial that Bush was both stupid and evil?
President George W. Bush didn't even know of the existence of the Sunni and Shia sects in Iraq until 3 months before the invasion, after the decision had been made to attack and they were well into the war-justification phase. Only when they brought in an Iraqi dissident did he tell Bush about it. This is from Galbraith's book "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End". What kind of idiot doesn't read a brief summary of the country he's planning to invade? The whole war was conducted in an incredibly reckless and ill-planned way, with predictably catastrophic consequences for the region. Bush didn't know about the Shia majority in Iraq, how this would obviously give the Iranians a way to influence the country if he demolished the state apparatus.
Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech where he threatened pre-emptive strikes against Iran and North Korea. Iran hated Saddam and the Taliban, Bush lumped them all together in the anti-US camp. He effectively told Iran 'make our Iraq experience as disastrous as possible or you're the next target'. North Korea nuclearized and went on to cause more headaches for Washington.
I remember bien-pensants comparing the Axis of Evil speech to Reagan's Evil Empire speech at the time, and thinking they were even stupider than Bush. The point about the Evil Empire speech was that the Soviet Union was both evil and an empire, but there was a legitimate argument about whether the leader of the free world shouting this from the rooftops was a good idea with nukes involved. The point about the Axis of Evil speech was that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were not an axis, and thinking they were should disqualify you from national security policymaking roles. But to treat both speeches primarily as examples of provocative American jingoism is to indicate that you don't care about the truth values of statements.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
North Vietnamese, during the Vietnam war, also famously tortured American PoWs, yet they won their civil war.
You provide a link to an example of an American PoW who was tortured into doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese (John McCain was another). This is a minor variation on torturing someone to give a false confession. You do not provide examples of American PoWs tortured into giving up actionable intelligence, because there is no evidence that it happened. This is unsurprising - NATO doctrine on intelligence investigations is that a sufficiently large percentage of PoWs will give up the goods for a hot meal and a cigarette that you have to assume anything a PoW knows is compromised and plan accordingly, so we would not expect to see evidence either way.
You attacked US torture programme, merely by the result of the war, without proving that the programme was ineffective. It thus seems fair to defend the North Vietnamese torture by only showing that they won, not proving that it helped.
In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.
Fine, a CIA operative was kidnapped, soon after undercover agents that he knew were killed.
Thanks. Someone who has been tortured to the point where
is obviously limited in the value of the intel they can provide, but getting them to name names worked for Hezbollah. I genuinely don't know how Hezbollah avoided the problem of continuing to get useless names after the victim has run out of useful ones - this was a major problem for the US in Afghanistan, to the point where the CIA torturing Al Qaeda captives to name names appears to have ended up being a net negative.
Unusually, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified a summary of their report into the CIA torture programme, coming to the conclusion that
and providing an unclassified overview of the detailed evidence present in the full, classified report. The CIA's internal report into the torture programme (the "Panetta Review") apparently comes to the same conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link