The confusion over the use of torture to produce "false confessions" has led the discussion over torture down some terrible by-ways. Hence you have the bizarre debate in the U.S. today between those who believe that the Bush administration used torture solely to produce false confessions (e.g. over WMD in Iraq), and, on the other side, those like Cheney who assure us that torture does work, and that it saved America from another 9/11.
While we have evidence now that Bush and Cheney used torture to wring false confessions from prisoners, it does not follow that torture only produces false confessions. Sometimes (wrongly so, in my opinion) the motivation to torture is to produce real intelligence.
Nor does this exhaust the motivations for torture, which include retribution, terror, sadistic pleasure, propaganda, counter-intelligence misdirection, and execution by torture.
The way the "false confessions" theme has typically arisen–when discussing the recent controversies over U.S. use of torture–is in the context of explaining the origins of SERE interrogation techniques, which are said to originate in Chinese torture of U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. The most egregious example of such false confessions is said to be the accusations by U.S. flyers held by the Chinese that the U.S. dropped biological weapons on the enemy during the Korean conflict.
The allegations of germ warfare during the Korean War raised a huge controversy at the time. An international scientific commission led by British biochemist Joseph Needham concluded that bacteriological weapons had been used. (A more contemporary monograph by Canadian historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman reached the same conclusion.)
The U.S. strongly protested its innocence, and the military initiated studies to better understand how its airmen had been "brainwashed" by the Chinese into making "false confessions." This has led, in modern times, to the belief that these Chinese methods of coercive interrogation were meant to achieve false confessions. One hears that repeated ad infinitum in the press and blogosphere. It is most simply wrong. I have a strong dislike for received knowledge. Too often something is repeated and never questioned.
Let’s look at the evidence. In a New York Times article that got a lot of attention in July 2008, China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo, reporter Scott Shane quoted extensively from a 1957 article by sociologist Albert Biderman, "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Shane, who did note that the Communist techniques were meant to produce confessions, "many of them false," quoted without comment this statement by Senator Carl Levin, which is characteristic of statements about torture:
“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”
But were the Korean War airmen’s confessions false? And were the techniques only intended to produce such false confessions? Not according to Biderman, who in his article stated that the Chinese used "more or less identical methods of gaining compliance for a variety of different ends–for eliciting factual intelligence information, other forms of propaganda collaboration, as well as false confessions" (p. 617).
As noted above, the issue of false confessions elicited under torture had its largest airing when, in 1952-53, captured U.S. airmen told their captors that they had engaged in dropping biological weapons on North Korea and China as part of the U.S. air campaign against those countries. This accusation was vigorously denied by the United States, and a propaganda campaign was begun in the guise of investigating the "brainwashing" of U.S. prisoners. Wild stories of mind control drugs and secret interrogation techniques that could gain unique influence over the personalities of its victims were circulated. It was in this environment that Albert Biderman, Lawrence Hinkle, Harold Wolff, Robert Jay Lifton, Edgar Schein and others were enlisted to study how the Chinese had produced the "false confessions" of U.S. POWs.
Except, were the confessions false?
Publicly, that was the story. But when researchers met behind closed doors, or at professional meetings, a different story emerged. At a 1957 symposium organized by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) on "Methods of Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Interviews", Dr. Louis West noted that "the enemy had a considerable degree of success in obtaining intelligence information and in forcing prisoners to engage in propaganda activities" (emphasis added; the quote is from GAP Symposium No. 4, July 1957, published by GAP Publications Office).
This is convergent evidence for Biderman’s claim cited above, i.e., that the Chinese used techniques aimed at breaking down men for varied reasons, of which only one was "false confessions."
After the airmen were repatriated back to the United States, they all recanted their "confessions," although they had to do so under threat of court martial, a remarkable threat to issue, if the confessions were, on the surface, false.
If it were not for the false history that we have been led to maintain over the reality of torture during the early Cold War, we might not be so confused. The truths are simple and sobering. Torture can work to debilitate an individual. Sometimes it will bring about a true confession. Sometimes it will result in gibberish or "false confessions." Sometimes the torturing power wants a false confession, sometimes it wants the truth (and the spook literature on detecting deception and use of "truth drugs" speaks to the desire to gain actionable intelligence, and not just "false confessions").
Whether or not one should rely on torture because it does or does not produce the requisite amount of actionable intelligence is a question for a government bureaucrat or policeman, not a society.
We must oppose torture on humanitarian and moral grounds, not utilitarian grounds. That’s why the founders of this country opposed it, and we should follow in their footsteps.
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Anyone who supports Obama supports people like Volcker, Rubin, Geitner, Summers and the repeal of Glasss-Steagall which of course puts them to the right of Cheney.
even worse then false confessions
cheney was told by the cia and the fbi, AND his anti terror league including clarke, that there was NO connection between alqaeda and saddam
cheney proceeded to order torture so that he could make believe there was a connection
he knew with no doubt there was none but he ordered torture so he could say there was
a false confession can usually be exposed in trial by the defendant
a false case for your make believe war cannot be exposed at trial, it can only be exposed if those in the agency that performed said torture step forward
we have just such patriots yet cheney goes unprosecuted for his crimes against our country, her constitution, humanity and our posterity
damage that means untold cost for generations unknown
.
Not sure I agree with this point.
Not much needs to be added to your statement. Well said! Thnx.
it is uglier than that. the torture was used to coerce “false confessions” that “detainees/prisoners” were responsible for the events of 11/09/01.
ironically, you can read all about the reasons for torture in the history of the spanish inquisition[THE ORIGINS OF THE INQUISITION in Fifteenth Century Spain, isbn #0679410651]. this is considered a definitive history and was written by benjamin netanyahu’s father.
the “official” conspiracy theories concerning the events of that day are “inventions”, that torture was employed to confirm.
nothing “confessed” by any of those tortured can be believed.
Requiring President Obama to pursue (and not obstruct) legal channels toward prosecutions for the crimes committed by Cheneyco is not asking for sparkle ponies. All should be accountable to the same set of laws. There are few things more difficult to appreciate than the selective enforcement of the law. Why is Cheneyco better than anyone else?
Whether torture is used to elicit false confessions (a time honored tradition) or not, one does not know. Torture is not only morally wrong, but also practically wrong. Since one doesn’t know whether the confession under torture is true or false, torture invariably leads to spending a lot of resources tracing down false leads. The “ticking time bomb” in particular is a bogus scenario, since all the incentives are for the torturee to give bad info lasting long enough to track down until the bomb explodes.
On a practical matter, there are much better methods for getting accurate info, so torture is passe. Here’s a link to a pop culture TV show that got it.
I can see the issue raises a lot of emotion, as it should. For one thing, Cheney pushed to get false (coerced) confessions in order to go to war with Iraq. Now Cheney is using a utilitarian argument for torture to attack his critics, i.e., so if one could find one case where torture produced valuable intelligence, it would be acceptable. But torture is never acceptable. And that is not for utilitarian reasons, but because it is inhumane and morally wrong.
The Korean War case is demonstrative of a totally different side of the whole question. I believe the Chinese used methods of psychological torture to produce true confessions about the use of biological weapons by the U.S. during the Korean War (most of the documents on this remain classified over 50 years after the end of that war). They did not rely solely on those confessions, but combined it with other information produced by spies, and by collecting field evidence. They also used torture to elicit the public renunciation of U.S. policy by airmen, something the latter were forced to do.
The effect of this upon the Pentagon was electric. Not only did it threaten to expose a deeply covert action, which could have led to war crimes charges at the time. It also led them to institute the survival schools, later known as SERE, in order to inoculate pilots, and later other vulnerable military personnel, against such torture. But a CIA psychiatrist, Joost Meerloo, at the time recognized the danger of instituting these schools. He wrote back in 1956:
It seems Meerloo’s prediction became all too true.
You say you’re not sure you agree, but you left off the conclusion leading from my statement:
We truly don’t know the effectiveness of torture, and anyone who tells you otherwise is using second-hand and unscientific “knowledge”. Furthermore, any research on such a question would be totally unethical and wrong. It is the judgment, of course, of many interrogators that the information produced is highly questionable, and that certainly makes sense. But I don’t like the idea of leaving the question open to any possible verification of validity on utilitarian grounds. Does anyone here believe we should torture even if it meant we got valuable information? No. Torture would still be unacceptable, even if it had a 100% success rate.
Slavery, for instance, is one way to organize a society. There have been many slave societies in human history. Some of them lasted for centuries. That does not mean we should believe that slavery is ever an acceptable way to organize a society. It is wrong, period, and so is torture. It is wrong on a level that supercedes any question of its utility. And it is the utilitarian argument against which I am aiming my polemic. Arguing that all torture produces is false confessions is both empirically wrong, and is an embracing of the utilitarian argument, albeit in its negative form. As such, it is vulnerable to the kinds of debate Cheney wants to make. But there’s nothing to debate. They tortured, they should be held accountable, period.
That sums up a very convincing argument. Thanks for your thoughtful analysis, Jeff.
I agree that arguing against torture on utilitarian grounds give torture advocates some legitimacy. However, I think we should not cede the utilitarian debate entirely. The most important utility argument is what torture does to us. It makes us the bad guy. And that is as fruitful as cancer.
I agree with what torture does to us, i.e., making us the “bad guy.” By “utilitarian” argument, I am only referring to the so-called effect or results of torture vis-a-vis its supposed efficacy as an interrogation technique. Since writing this article, it occurred to me that examinations of torture’s “effectiveness” are further burdened by the relative use of the term “effective”. What is “effective” to Cheney, would seem barbaric to me. To even begin to engage, then, in a question of torture’s “effectiveness” is to lose half the battle from the start, as it accepts the premise that torture could ever have any effectiveness.
The 20th century, and now maybe the 21st, may be known as the age of semantics, as the twisting of and misuse of language is a hallmark of our times (cf. Orwell, “Arbeit macht frei,” “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”, etc.)