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Why torture?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

07:51 / 23.05.04

Inspired by this thread and this one, putting to one side for a moment the ethical arguments against torture and maybe we'll bring in the conveyor belt system of state sanctioned torture of countries inhabitants later, why would countries like the US and UK torture Iraqis? In the middle ages people wouldn't have known better, but intelligence services these days acknowledge that torture is a really crap way of getting information because the victim will tell you what you want to hear. So is it now a meaningless propogation of misery, we torture now though we know nothing of value comes of it, purely because we've always tortured those people of an enemy force that we've got our hands on?

These people weren't important, most dissidents aren't that important, if you're okay with torturing them, why not just shoot them and stick them in a mass grave? Gaah, I'm confused...

08:40 / 23.05.04

Our Shortened Lady: It's the same mysterious force that makes Israel plow down Palestinian houses in an attempt to stop terrorism, that is itself encouraged by such acts of 'collective punishment'. I.E. totally fucking ridiculous, but the people doing it are a) shortsighted, b) putting their instantaneous reaction to something before a logical appraisal of the situation and c) probably *don't* accept what everyone else knows about the inefficiency of what they're doing.

From the comments of England, etc, it is clear that the soldiers on the ground were obviously under the impression they were getting usable intelligence from the torture. So maybe when intelligence services say publically they don't condone the use of torture to extract information, this is only really for public consumption, and in private they hold it to be an effective method.

10:13 / 23.05.04

Ooh, ooh, Flowers, read Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain, which totally explains why torture - starting, like you, from the premise that it's not a great method for getting information out of people. She writes:

Torture permits one person's body to be translated into another person's voice, allows real human pain to be converted into a regime's fiction of power.
World, self and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotations of betrayal. The prisoner's confession merely objectifies the fact of their being almost lost, makes their invisible absence, or nearly absence, visible to the torturers... even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another.

This becomes even more important in a war like The War On Terrorism, when what's at stake is biopolitics/ideology - power over individual bodies' affiliations, rather than over a specific geographic area. In such a war, resistance to America/ constituted state power/imperialism takes place in the medium of the individual terrorist body (hence the focus on "suicide bombers" etc), not in the medium of a regular army or another constituted State power. So getting those bodies to speak the words of the torturer is destroying the basis of the power to resist - not just on an individual scale, one person at a time, but striking directly at the heart of the locus of resistance. Through pain, torture turns the capacity of resistive bodies to carry voices, to imagine and produce a world, into a machine to generate more power for the torturers' regime.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:15 / 23.05.04

That's true, but it's also important maybe to consider the broader context of the act. That is, torture is not, in practical terms, a set of events leading up to a single speech act - it is a set of events in which the speech act is contained. That is, the process is not torture, torture, torture, speech act, end of torture, but torture, torture, torture, speech act the utterance of which is subsequently reabsorbed as torture. The aim of the speech act in which the individual says anything just to get the torture to end is logically only a waystation - one where it is demonstrated that the subject of the torture will indeed tell the torturer anything he or she wants to here in order to stop the physical torture. However, this preparedness to tell the torturer anything the torturer wants to hear is merely a state in the process towards the victim of torture telling the torturer what he or she wants to *know*, because the fear of further torture if the information proves false is greater than the fear of immediate discomfort.

So, the speech act is vital but not final. The problem here being working out when the torturee has reached that particular point. Which of course is why actually and honestly knowing nothing is a terribly bad idea for the torturee.

So, why torture people, especially when you have undertaken not to, if it doesn't work? And if it does work, what are the disincentives? The most obvious one is that it often brings the mechanisms of the state into the role of physical agressor against people whose culpability has not been ratified by those same states...

(A possible comparison might be the information about WMDs provided by Ahmed Chalabi and others of his party, which were compelled only by the offer of money, and so led to the US being told exactly what it wanted to hear, and also what would bring about the desired result by both parties - the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.)

01:31 / 24.05.04

Perhaps some people are merely extrovert sadists who want to break other people merely for the sake of breaking them without anything else to be considered.

Maybe think 1984 or Brazil. Control desires control merely for the sake of control, and those not under its control, or who defy control, are objects to be broken on the rack of control. Maybe something like Deva has said about "power over individual bodies' affiliations." It then seems not to be about torturing someone, but about torturing something that is not an organ in the body of control.

06:52 / 24.05.04

this preparedness to tell the torturer anything the torturer wants to hear is merely a state in the process towards the victim of torture telling the torturer what he or she wants to *know*,

Well, not according to Elaine Scarry: she argues that information-gathering is just the legitimizing myth which enables the torturing side to carry out the unworlding/unpersoning of the torturees (the real, if not avowed, purpose of torture - in the sense that it is the 'unworlding' function which achieves a result for the torturers, not the gathering of information, which doesn't work). I'd have to reread The Body in Pain but I seem to remember that Scarry draws on interviews with torturers which suggest that the chronological order you refer to is actually inverted in practical instances of torture, viz. that the torturee will continue to be tortured after s/he has revealed the information, until s/he has become an effective speaker of the regime's fiction of power.

I guess an analogy might be the idea that Valium was avowedly prescribed to huge numbers of housewives in the 50s for their mental health, but actually functioned to keep women off the unemployment lists. Which brings us back to conspiracy theories: was there a conspiracy of doctors in the 1950s, is there a conspiracy of torturers now? How does this disparity between the actual functioning of torture and its avowed legitimation translate into concrete practices and conscious motives - on the part of the low-ranking torturers, on the part of the people who order torture, on the part of the public who might partially condone it...? And if we admit an "unconscious" element to the motives behind torture, [how] does that alter the way we think about responsibility and the chain of command?

09:37 / 24.05.04

Does anyone have any evidence as to the efficacy of torture as a means of getting information? I realise that people assert it is useless, which I am happy to accept. But I've also heard it asserted that it can work, though it tends to involve destroying the ego of the victim more than a simple 'end of pain' for 'information' transaction.

I suspect that in Iraq, the coalition wishes to instill fear in those who would oppose it. Hence the disregard for human rights, the seemingly random detention of civilians and the excessive retribution for the deaths of mercenaries in Fallujah. Torture seems a fairly natural, and possibly inevitable, consequence of that set of policies.

I have no real idea whether it is effective, but I'm inclined to believe that it does provide some measure of control over a hostile population. Saddam himself believed in it, after all.

sdv (non-human)

11:55 / 24.05.04

I'd suggest that we know that torture does work. That the assumptions that for example the neo-fascistic behaviour of the Israeli state are counter-productive are mistaken. (This state has learnt how to behave from the people who martyred it in the middle of the 20th C.)

State approved Torture and Murder - is not about information but about the inscribing of power, written across the tablet that is the bare human body. The extraction of information is always irrelevant because the intention is to write and exercise power on the body. What is especially fascinating is that the type of state power, democratic or despotic is irrelevant - it is rather that with the 'power', the desire to construct and write on the bare human body, and as a direct consequence oppress them and all others is paramount.

However the act of speech is not I think correct, it is one of writing...

00:15 / 18.05.05

an academic in melbourne australia is stirring up this debate, advocating torture be used in some circumstances; see author's article from the australian press here and its rebuttals here and here

seems bagaric is arguing that saving innocent lives by obtaining information on planned terorist attacks is morally equivalent to shooting a hostage taker if the response team gets a clear shot while the gun is at the hostage's head...

but i was always under the impression that immediate danger (as in the hostage situation) and relative danger, where the threat may be real but chronologically distant, are different. you can kick someone trying right then to hurt you, but you can't go round to their place and attack them if you hear them threaten you from afar...

and his assertion that maximum pain, minimum harm is an acceptable value is sadly misguided. torutre sufferers suffer very badly. very badly.

and even if you were a 'bad guy', torture is going to be used, if bagaric gets his way, on who we say is a bad guy. the 'bad guy' won't think he is a bad guy, he'll think he's a good guy. who's perspectve is right? how can that be judged??

the timing is interesting, post al-graib prison and while guantanamo bay debates still rage, with an australian at the thick of things there, for us.

14:31 / 18.05.05

I think torture is used more to control the population. I would agree with the idea that it is about exerting power and not extracting information. However extracting information that's usable does happen. I would be interested to see the statistics, but i doubt that there are any.
I was in the first Gulf War as part of the U.S. military. A rumor was spread throughout the Iraqi army not be caught by American forces because they would be treated badly and their religious practices would not be respected. As a result many Iraqis wanted to surrender to British and other coalition forces. It created a fear of the unknown. I think that's the purpose of torture. Torture a few and let the enemy know it. That way all you have to do is present the 'possibility' of torture. Again it seems to be about creating that culture of fear that's been so prevalent.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

15:33 / 18.05.05

there seems to be a punative element.

"you're either with us, or..." else.

the accounts of methods of torture, the unrelenting cruelty exacted upon those who haven't been accused of anything, create a sense of fear. who's next? if someone who hasn't done anything can be captured, detained and tortured, then is anyone safe?

and so, we cower from those responsible - instead of creating the means for their disposal.

ta
pablo

14:13 / 19.05.05

There's probably a case to be made that torture isn't just about the relationship between torturing entity and the tortured person, but as an instance of spectacle. I mean, really, the torturee is more often than not an unwilling player on some sort of public stage.

Burning at the stake, you know... flogging in the public square. That versus leaked photographs from military prisons.

Why take the photos? Create a spectacle. The idea of audience is an element of the torture, but the idea of torture also elicits a certain (desired) set of reactions in the audience. Somewhere between catharsis (blood! viscera!) and empathic fear (that could be me, better toe the line). Great tool for social control.

15:04 / 19.05.05

Naomi Klein Makes the same point in this article:

As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.

Elsewhere, Christopher Brauchli quotes Orwell: "The Object of torture is torture." With no utilitarian purpose (e.g. the gathering of information) and negligible deterrent value, torture is increasingly being seen as a good in itself when dealing with the Other: incarceration will not suffice, and neither will a clean execution. It is seen as nothing less than They deserve, simply for being Themselves.

21:58 / 19.05.05

klein's point is torture is to instil terror - and so if america is serious about its 'war on terrorism', it should of course be immediately announcing its whole and total renunciation of torture.

right about.....