Warning: This article goes in-depth about the topic of torture, and may be difficult for some readers. Please be aware of this before reading it. While it is gruesome in nature, it is also important to shed light on it with caution and care.
1.0 Introduction
Torture is as old as human history. The notion that the detained is ‘hiding something’ has justified sadistic inhumanity since the dawn of time. Gradually, modern liberal societies have however come to reject torture as excessively cruel and barbaric. Since the Second World War, all four Geneva Conventions have explicitly outlawed torture.
Throughout the Cold War, states engaged in torture earned open condemnation and those fearing it were offered refuge or asylum. The West perceived itself as a liberal bastion of civil liberties and human rights. Then came September 11 and suddenly societal attitudes towards torture took a dark and vindictive turn. On 17 September 2001, the Bush Administration signed a directive authorising the secret imprisonment and ‘enhanced integration’ of terror suspects. [source]
The effectiveness of torture has not been well documented throughout human history. Typically, torture techniques were not standardised and each torturer relied on an array of informally learnt techniques. Moreover, torture incidents have usually been kept off the record.
However, since 2001, the grizzly details of US torture at CIA Black Sites have been gradually exposed. US government enquiries into CIA torture during the War on Terror are now among the most well documented accounts of torture and it’s supposed effectiveness. The documents also provide an insight into US society in 2001 and how the “Leader’s of the Free World” came to morally justify torture in the name of national security.
2.0 How the United States Found a Moral Justification for Torture
2.1 Ticking Time Bomb Theory
How did the US, a nation whose constitution outlaws cruel and unusual punishment, come to justify torture morally and legally? How is it that by mid-November 2001, two-thirds of Americans surveyed by the Christian Science Monitor favoured torturing terrorist suspects? [source] One rational explanation is known as the ticking time bomb scenario.
The ticking time bomb scenario is a thought experiment used in ethics debates to measure the morality of torture during interogation. In the scenario:
Suppose that a person with knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack that will kill many people is in the hands of the authorities, and he will disclose the information needed to prevent the attack only if he is tortured.
Should he be tortured?
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In the context of the ticking time bomb, a liberal could justify torture by stating that torturing the guilty individual is justified by saving countless innocent lives. By ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number of people, a left-leaning progressive-minded person, previously opposed to torture can quickly find themselves justifying its use. And as David Luban points out, once a torture prohibitionist concedes their moral opposition, they are “down in the mud” and “all that is left is haggling”. [source] Once torture has been justified, the question becomes a slippery slope of how far to go with extraction techniques.
2.2 The Torture Memos
In 2009, the Justice Department was forced to release a series of legal memoranda that outlined the US government’s legal justification of “enhanced integration techniques”. The series of memos were drafted by White House Lawyers between 2002 and 2005 during the Bush administration. [source] What the memos demonstrate is the ticking time bomb’s slippery legal slope as the President, CIA and Department of Defence sought to test if torture could be legally permissible.
In January 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department (OLC) produced two memorandum stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to terrorist suspects as they are non-state actors. Bush agreed with the OLC’s memo and stated that the Geneva convention applied “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity”. [source] In essence, if the US deemed it militarily necessary, the Geneva Convention would not apply.
Jay. S Bybee, United States Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Image [source]
In August 2002, the head of OLC, Jay S. Bybee, signed off on arguably the most controversial of the torture memos. Known as the ‘Bybee Memo’, the document justified torture through legal ambiguity and proved to be hugely influential on US integration policy during the War on Terror. The Bybee Memo suggested that pain inflicted on a detainee only amounted to torture if the pain was severe enough to cause: “death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions”. [source] In terms of psychological torture, Bybee concluded that intergators would only be tortruing detainees if their techniques sought to inflict “lasting … damage” such as PTSD. Overall, the Bybee Memo constitutionally justified torture as means of self-defence with in President Bush’s broader War on Terror. [source]
3.0 Is Torture an Effective Means of Gathering Intelligence?
3.1 Government Investigations into the Effectiveness of Enhanced Techniques
In 2014, the US Select Committee on Intelligence released a 712 page study assessing the effectiveness of CIA enhanced interrogation techniques between 2001 and 2009. The Select Committee report concluded that enhanced interrogation was “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence”. For example, the CIA subjected 39 suspected terrorists to enhanced interrogation of which 7 produced no intelligence while in custody. [source] Moreover, during enhanced interrogation, many suspects fabricated information to fit the integrator’s intelligence priorities.
The 2014 Select Committee report more importantly reveals that throughout the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, CIA personnel regularly called into question the effectiveness of enhanced techniques. CIA personnel often believed that the techniques failed to encourage cooperation or produce reliable intelligence.
Throughout the War on Terror, the CIA justified the use of enhanced interrogation techniques by pointing at terrorist plots halted as a result of the techniques. The 2014 report examined 20 such ticking time bomb-esque cases. The Select Committee subsequently found a minimal or exaggerated relationship between enhanced techniques and counterterrorism successes. The intelligence provided in 20 case studies were broadly categorised as either 1) Intelligence already available to the US intelligence community 2) Intelligence obtained from the detainee prior to interrogation. [source]
3.2 The Ticking Time Bomb Scenario is Flawed
The ticking time bomb scenario is based on a series of assumptions which poorly translate into real world examples. The scenario reduces the decision to authorise torture to a simple cost-benifit analysis without taking into account the uncertainty of information in the real world. In 2007, the Association for the Prevention of Torture produced a report called “Defusing the Ticking Time Bomb” in it they outline the following assumptions [source]:
- A specific planned attack is known to exist.
- 2.The attack will happen within a very short time (it is “imminent”).
- The attack will kill a large number of people.
- The person in custody is a perpetrator of the attack.
- The person has information that will prevent the attack.
- Torturing the person will obtain the information in time to prevent the attack.
- No other means exist that might get the information in time.
- No other action could be taken to avoid the harm.
- The motive of the torturer is to get information, with the genuine intention of saving lives, and nothing more.
- It is an isolated situation, not often to be repeated.
Beyond the relative implausibility of the ticking time bomb scenario occurring, the analogy paints a narrow picture of the intelligence and counterterrorism process. Information, the backbone of intelligence, in the real world is often unreliable or incomplete. The scenario assumes firstly that the suspect is in fact the suspect and secondly that information provided by the suspect is wholly truthful.
4.0 How the United States Tortures Detainees
4.1 US Black Sites: The Torture Chamber Archipelago
Since 2001, the CIA has operated a network of clandestine detention centres known as Black Sites. As secret locations in foreign countries, Black Sites are outside the reach of the Red Cross or organisations monitoring the treatment of prisoners of war. The sites were the end product of the Bush Administrations 17 September 2001 directive authorising the secret imprisonment and detention of terror suspects. [source]
The following section will detail the torture techniques the CIA inflicted on Abu Zubaydah who was detained at a Black Site between 2002 and 2006. In March 2002, Zubaydah was falsely accused of plotting September 11 and was subsequently captured in a joint US-Pakistani raid. [source] Zubaydah was immediately transferred to a CIA Black Site where he was held for six months.
During the final 47 days of detention leading up to “enhanced interrogation”, Zubaydah endured the deprivation of all human contact without being questioned. It was at this point the interrogators determined Zubaydah was being uncooperative and “enhanced techniques” were necessary. [source]
Over the next 17 days, James Mitchell and Bruce Jenssen from the US Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) systematically tortured Zubaydah with a “constantly-rotating barrage of techniques” designed to break his resistance. Prior to 2001, SERE was primarily a US military training program designed to expose new recruits to “conditions that they could expect to encounter from a harsh regime not limited by the Geneva Conventions”. In 2002, Mitchell and Jenssen reverse engineered SERE’s manual to design an American torture program. [source]
Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches. [source]
4.2 Persistent Conditioning Techniques
Nudity – Military personnel typically stripped detainees upon arrival at Black Sites. Then, they keep the detainees nude to induce “capture shock” and encourage cooperative behaviour. When combined with cold temperatures or cold water, nudity has the potential to be fatal.
Dietary Manipulation – CIA integrators reduced the calorific intake to induce dependency. The 2003 Interrogation guidelines do not however provide a minimum calorific intake. For example, they restricted Zubaydah to a liquid diet during periods of waterboarding leading to near starvation.
Sleep Deprivation – CIA sleep deprivation ranged from 7 days continued wakefulness to three months of severely disrupted sleep. Integrators kept detainees awake by chaining them in stress positions, shining bright lights, dousing them in water and keeping them hungry. By design, sleep deprivation breaks the detainees ability to think and through discomfort encourage cooperation with integrators.
Loud Music – Integrators play loud, often repetitive music, to drive detainees towards madness and prevent sleep.
[source]
“[o]nce they even played the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack all night long. ‘Hardly,’ I thought,’ ‘enough to break anyone I knew.’. . . ‘We’ll talk. We’ll all talk,’ I said in half jest when they played it, ‘just turn that crap off please!’” But as the torture began to stretch on, it became unbearable”
Mozzam Begg, detainee at Guantanamo Bay (2003-2005). [source]
4.3 Physical Contact Techniques
Insult Slap – The method is described as “slapping the detainee directly between the tip of the chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe”. It achieves shock rather than pain.
Abdominal Slap – A slap anywhere between the navel and sternum. The slap instils fear or punish unwanted behaviour. Integrators are forbidden from clenching their fist during the slap. The abdominal slap is used in conjunction with stress positions and walling to maximise helplessness and humiliation.
Facial Hold – The integrator places their hand either side of the detainees head to firmly hold it in place. There are no restrictions on the facial hold and the integrators can apply significant pressure to induce pain.
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4.4 Coercive Techniques
Walling – Walling involves slamming the detainees head against a flexible wall. Their shoulders are intended to hit the wall first during the technique. Whilst being simultaneously hooded, the detainee is expected to experience physical and psychological stress.
Water Dousing: The detainee is laid on a plastic sheet and doused with water for 10-15 minutes whilst the room is maintained at between 15-21C. Water is poured onto the face and chest and detainees are threatened with water boarding to induce anxiety.
Stress Positions: The integrator fixes the detainee in a position which induces mild physical discomfort from prolonged muscle use.
Wall Standing: A method where detainees are forced to stand one to two metres from a wall. Then, spread their legs and lean forward, placing only their fingertips against the wall.
Cramped Confinement: A technique where detainees are forced into a small confined area such as a box for extended periods and in a small or large box. Detainees are typically held in large boxes for 18 hours and smaller boxes for no longer than 2 hours.
Waterboarding: This technique simulates the sensation of drowning. The detainee is strapped to a board and tilted so the head is closer to the ground than the rest of the body. A towel is then placed over the mouth of the detainee and water is poured through. The water soaked towel restricts the air flow into the detainees mouth and angle ensures that water cannot descend the airways. It is usually carried out in 20-40 second intervals.
5.0 Conclusions on Torture
As can be discerned, torture is a grim business – one with no value to the intelligence discipline. Historically, as shown by the Global War on Terror and further US actions with captive ‘enemy’ combatants, the so-called ‘intelligence’ collected from these savage methods is faulty and unreliable. In a general sense, extreme duress produces fear based responses. And, forever taints the benefactor nation or organisation behind the action.
One may hope that lessons learned from recent history will prevent the use of torture in future conflicts and operations. Of course, the secret world keeps its secrets, but government accountability and the knowledge of the use of torture in modern conflict in the public sphere are two landmarks the US and its allies should continue to set a course towards.
In the end, torture has no place in modern conflict. Especially in the civilized world, where words like ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are often mere figures of speech.
