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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes."

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'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid

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.

Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one

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.