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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.
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.
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