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posted by
martyb
on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:28PM
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
From Wikileaks (via Vinay Gupta):
Judge rules two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who made millions as consultants for the CIA's torture program can face trial.
How do you get into the business of being a torture consultant? Good question because when they started:
Neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had language skills or expertise on al Qaeda - the chief enemy in the war on terror - when the CIA handpicked Mitchell and Jessen to spearhead its supposed intelligence gathering program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their psychology backgrounds were in family therapy; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure.
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Millionaire CIA Torture Psychologists to Face Trial
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday July 31 2017, @02:37AM (12 children)
The really nutty thing is that the US military didn't really need the "help" of these psychologists: The techniques employed are well-documented, in the transcript of the International Tribunal for the Far East, the other post-WWII trials for war crimes.
Also, one of the things everyone knows about torture is that it is useless for getting the truth out of people. The way people respond to torture is that they tell their interrogator whatever they think will stop the torture, regardless of whether it's remotely true.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @02:51AM (4 children)
So it seems like it should be obvious that these are patsies.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 31 2017, @04:41AM (2 children)
Definitely patsies. With military justice tending to be harsh and abrupt, the military boys are very interested in CYA. They'll happily use anyone with a degree or reputation to justify their actions. Dangle big carrots in front of them to tempt them into endorsing whatever idiotic notions they want to act upon. They can also exert a great deal of unfair pressure on uncooperative civilians. You don't want to sign your name on the memo endorsing torture? Say goodbye to your career! But if you just sign here, we can keep you on in a real cushy job, a sinecure.
Seems to me the people who actually did the torturing are the ones most deserving of punishment. This latest event could be another twist in the plot. Now that their asses aren't covered, they will throw the doctors under the bus in a heartbeat, turn them into fall guys.
Look at the history of America's foreign interventions. So many of them were directly contradictory to American values, and caused a great deal of blowback. One such is the Contras of Iran-Contra scandal infamy. Seems many of the military boys think the end justifies the means, and keep digging themselves and all of America in deeper with their reckless shortcuts. F*** diplomacy, just identify the bad guys and shoot them! Or heck, who cares who's bad, shoot them all!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday July 31 2017, @09:39AM (1 child)
It depends. These guys have sworn an oath [ucpress.edu] not to do what they were doing. The Oath of Enlistment [army.mil] doesn't prohibit that, and if it weren't for the Nuremberg Trials sort of making that look bad could be seen as condoning the use of torture if so ordered (disclaimer: I'm not a military lawyer so I don't know if there isn't some subclause of a subclause in the Uniform Code of Military Justice somewhere that prohibits it, but on the fact if it it just says obey orders and follow the UCMJ).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday July 31 2017, @02:30PM
The UCMJ is actually quite clear on this point: Anyone subject to the UCMJ must obey lawful orders, and must disobey unlawful orders. So, if, say, somebody ordered National Guardsmen to gun down unarmed protesters (to use a completely hypothetical example [wikipedia.org]), the Guardsmen are supposed to disobey that order and could be prosecuted for their actions.
Torture, being illegal under both US and international law, should never be carried out by US military personnel, even if they are ordered to do so. Of course, the odds are approximately zero that any of them will be court-martialed for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @08:59AM
That's a given. Deciding to engage in organized war crimes is generally a top down thing.
At the same time, I think this is a good thing. That same top down hierarchy tends to result in a sense of protection. 'Wow, I can earn millions of dollars just helping carry out some orders from a military commander who's one step away from the white house?' That implies safety, then the cognitive dissonance kicks in. 'I mean this is awful stuff, and I'd never normally do this. But if I don't do it - somebody else will. I'll at least try to carry things out in the most efficient and safe fashion. It's dirty business, but I'll try to make it as clean as possible.' I think killing off the notion of safety is important. Make people understand that nobody who orders, tells, or asks you to do something - you can (and ideally will) still be held responsible for those actions yourself.
Ideally we'd get the guys at the top as well, but this is not so easy. But undermining their assurances, implied or otherwise, of safety goes a long way towards removing the disconnect between personal actions and personal accountability that I think is what the Milgram experiment fundamentally showed.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @03:33AM (1 child)
There are two ways to use torture.
a. You have a way to test the information, and good reason to believe that they have it. For example, they yanked the power to a computer with an encrypted hard drive as you raided their place. Every time they "tell their interrogator whatever they think will stop the torture", which is of course the password, you go test the password on a copy of the seized computer.
b. You have a way to test similar information, and good reason to believe that they have what you want. Here, you might know the answers to 90 out of 100 interesting questions. You ask all 100 questions. If you are getting mostly wrong answers for the 90 questions you know about, then you can't trust the answers for the other 10. Keep torturing until you are getting good answers.
So those things "things everyone knows about torture" are just wrong. Use it right, and it works great.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Whoever on Monday July 31 2017, @05:52AM
Above comment is complete BS.
What really happens when used with confirmation is that the torturers merely attempt to confirm their own biases. Objective truth doesn't enter the process.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday July 31 2017, @05:49AM (2 children)
one of the things everyone knows about torture is that it is useless for getting the truth out of people
This. In fact, getting a "confession" out of someone tend to prove their innocence. Because someone with real colleagues and information to protect is likely to hold out longer.
I've read articles claiming that torture can be useful, when used to acquire specific facts that can be checked. For example: "where is the ticking bomb?" However, that is a very unusual scenario, and there is little evidence that the CIA got any useful intelligence out of this.
Really, one of the most embarrassing episode in American history. Instead of taking the moral high ground, American sought to prove that it could act even more depraved than the terrorists. Plus Abu Ghraib. Plus Guantanamo. Plus whatever secret events that never came to light.
Shameful, and yet: no one from the government is in jail.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @04:59PM
Most of us were quite angry about this, but seeing as we don't actually live in a free country there is nothing we could do. There were a lot of reasons to put this prison in another country, one big part of that is they didn't want protesters to line up outside and draw lots of attention to their activities.
The fact that no one went to prison, except probably for these two patsies, is a clear indicator that the US is not a democracy in any but the most superficial ways. The people have power, but it is so distributed and scattered into political pockets that it is near impossible to get unified action.
Blergh, I hope humanity steps back from the edge soon, this dystopia crap is becoming depressing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @06:44PM
From the Malleus Maleficarum:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/mm/mm03_14a.htm [sacred-texts.com]
"We found a
TerroristWitch! May we burn her?"(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 31 2017, @07:09AM
The research from WWII using violation of human rights were barred from use. However with parallel reconstruction and a alibi.. it becomes easy!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @10:25AM
It's not a binary option "It works/it's useless".
Note: We are talking about getting information, not torture to get a confession, to send a message or as retaliation. Jus to get valid information.
It's documented that there is what they call the breaking point. Before the breaking point, the tortured guy will resists, won't tell any thing or lie, the information is not reliable. After the breaking point the tortured will tell anything he thinks you want to hear to stop torture and information is not reliable. There is a small window of time when the tortured may say valid information. So, recognising when the victim is in the small window is the most important to get valid information.
Getting information by torture is many times useless and not as easy as many supporters of torture think. The interrogator must be skilled to notice the breaking point, unfortunately, many times he is not an skilled interrogator but just a sadist (to overcome the natural empathy towards another human screaming, they must be sadists or have become sadists). The information may have become irrelevant when you get it (i.e accomplices may have flown) . That is why captured try to resist and get time, and interrogators try to sell that resistance is futile, they already know everything.
The justification behind torture is a neat division between "we" and "they". They can be tortured, we will never be tortured.
If you torture someone that hasn't any relevant information, the window time of breaking point is zero, he will pass from telling "I know nothing" to tell anything. Nothing wrong, it's one of them, not one of us. The only regret is the waste of time. It is like picking oysters, some have pearls, some don't, no regrets about the poor oysters.
If you accept torture of enemies as fair play. They torture as well to us. Of course USA citizens may think "Well, they are in the other side of the world, so I will never be tortured. And the battle is so asymmetric that my soldiers will seldom be captured and tortured." And probably they are right.
If you accept torture as a legal activity in your own country, you are playing with fire. i.e. your son, a college student, is friend of someone whose family suspect of terrorism, they may pick your son, and give him back to you with physical and psychological damage, or dead. And everything would be legal. By the way once you accept legal torture in certain cases, won't remain too long restricted to certain cases. The cases when will only expand.
In short: Torture works a little to get information. But if you accept torture as a common practice, you are going to live live in a much tougher world, and in a very little safer world. is it worth?
Note: The information about torture is from a manual of the School of the Americas [wikipedia.org] a read long time ago.