From Harpers Six Questions for Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’

3. In America today, the debate seems to focus on the efficacy of torture—whether it is a useful tool for getting at the truth. You note the flow from the Roman Ulpian, who accepts torture as something quite normal to be used in interrogation (though he does at some points express skepticism about its usefulness) to Cesare Beccaria, whose monumental denunciation of torture did so much to influence European ideas about torture and criminal justice in the eighteenth century. But today we seem stuck in a debate in which those who use torture are eager to try to justify themselves but unwilling to let a bright light shine into their conduct, ostensibly for national security reasons, though many will inevitably suspect that secrecy is driven by concerns for their own culpability. You offer up a very lengthy and nuanced discussion on the efficacy of torture, and in your Washington Post column on five myths you have pulled some chestnuts out of it. One of them is that “people will say anything under torture.” But isn’t the claim rather the way Shakespeare put it in act III of the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ that people will say what they think the torturer wants them to say? And doesn’t that explain why societies that put a premium on confessions like torture to extract them, and why al-Libi told the CIA about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD plans? Don’t you think that the efficacy discussion has to address the broader consequences that a decision to use torture has to reputation, and conversely to the ability of a terrorist foe to recruit?

Yes, I do. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Shah’s torture was the best recruiting tool the opposition had. Prisons were places where prisoners met each other and professionalized their skills, as I and others have documented. It feels like a nightmare watching American politicians make the same mistake as the Shah. I like to believe that with every mistake we must surely be learning, but sometimes it is hard to believe.

When I talked about people under torture saying anything, I was especially interested in the cases where torturers interrogate for true information. That’s what I document doesn’t work. But it seems pretty clear that torture works to generate false confessions, which serve equally as well as true confessions for many state purposes. When judges and juries value confessions as decisive proof, police are happy to generate confessions for convictions. This can happen in domestic crime, as it happened in Chicago in the 1980s where African Americans were sentenced to death on the basis of coerced confessions. They’re also good for international show trials, trials that exonerate the state’s failures. Stalin wanted show trials to demonstrate that terrorists and saboteurs caused his failures, and he wasn’t the last leader who liked show trials to vindicate his decisions. And lastly, states use false confessions as blackmail to turn prisoners into unwilling informants. Torture allows one to collect dependent and insular individuals, spreading a net of fear across a population. This can happen locally (as in a ghetto) or in a whole state, like East Germany.

It’s also true that torturers often hear what they want to hear. In fact that’s one of the big problems with torture that I document in the book and the “Five Myths” article. Even if torture could actually break a person and they told you the truth, the torturer has to recognize it was the truth, and too often that doesn’t happen because torturers come into a situation with their own assumptions and don’t believe the victim. Moreover, intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to deception. In police work, the crime is already known; all one wants is the confession. In intelligence, one must gather information about things that one does not know.

And let’s remember, torturers aren’t chosen for intelligence; they are chosen for devotion and loyalty, and they are terrible at spotting the truth when they see it. In the “Five Myths” piece I talk about how the Chilean secret service lost valuable information in that way when they broke Sheila Cassidy, an English doctor, and she told them everything but they didn’t believe her. And one can just repeat dozens of stories like this. My favorite is when Senator John McCain tried to explain the concept of Easter to his North Vietnamese torturer. “We believe there was a guy who walked the earth, did great things, was killed and three days later, he rose from the dead and went up to heaven.” His interrogator was puzzled and asked him to explain it again and again. He left, and when he came back, he was angry and threatened to beat him. Americans couldn’t possibly believe in “Easter” since no one lives again; McCain had to be making this up."

no no, that's all wrong. you need to take 15 chocobo wings and 3 arctic winds, a gemsteel and a bat fang to the merchant at mt. bur-omisace, then he fashions... oh. english. i thought it said elvish.

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Thanks Calvados and everyone else.

It's a weird feeling for us to be the receivers of all your generosity - it makes us want to redouble our efforts here though - to be honest I would like to strip all ads from the site, and tell the sleazy ad merchants to shove off.

I probably wouldn't make a very good televangelist- but please don't give till it hurts - just what you can spare.

I need one of those rings, I already have my initials in old typewriter keys as earrings!

@Fletch. "I've heard theists argue that science can't disprove god, as if that 'fact' reinforces their belief in his existence. Science can't disprove the existence of something that doesn't exist any more than I could to a true believer. That's not what science is. And that's not what science tries to do."

Well said. This shows that thinking about God's existence isn't a waste of time - even if you and I think there are many faults about believing in something you cannot see or even hear.

@mrcrosby4: The Merchant of Venice, act 1, sc. 3, l. 97
The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose(WS).

How about breaking the bible down in a language we all can understand? Just a thought.

I like the bits about the Islamic Empire as a comparable to the Roman Empire in its influence on science, technology, and arts. But I wouldn't call the Ottoman Empire "great" for the same reason I wouldn't call any other empire great.

This video is overly reverent. It linguistically presumes Mohammad actually received "revelations". The act of a "religion of peace" being founded through forceful conquest of the known world is at best hypocritical.

Rather then re-re-re-interpreting scriptures to re-re-reconcile Islam with the changing moral zeitgeist, I'd rather read great philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, and think about ethics as its own subject. A cosmic despot's declaration cannot affect the ethicality of a deed to which he is not a party.

Even to put myself in a theist's shoes, if God declared certain acts good and evil, he must have had reasons for doing so, and we should seek to understand those reasons. If we can, there's no need to rely on fallible scriptures based on fallible memory of fallible oral recitations from a fallible slave-owning illiterate merchant named Mohammad who might or might not have had a revelation.

To treat what was probably mere trickery or hallucination as if it were some unquestionably glorious thing is to me a bit offensive because I value truth above almost everything else. The video devotes only about three seconds to skepticism about Mohammad's alleged revelation in the part about the life of Mohammad and quickly dismisses it with Mohammad's own fallacious argument involving combat victories. This is plainly pro-religion bias.

Peace

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Stephen Merchant is a funny, funny guy in his own right - and magic with Ricky.

While we're on the topic, test cutting was not only popular, but vital for seventeenth century Samurai. One of the requirements for a worthy blade was that it must be able to sever a man in two (I believe from one side of the neck down to the opposite hip). What better way to test this than on an actual person?

Well, where did they find volunteers? They . . . didn't. It was considered perfectly acceptable (among the Japanese, at least) for Samurai to pounce upon unsuspecting foreigners (usually merchants) to perform a . . . test cut.

*blog for what looks to be no more than an ad for a web merchant.

The American goverment would like us to believe that 9/11 was a result of massive inter-agency intelligence failure regarding the threat of a terrorist attack on US soil. The American goverment would also like for you to believe that despite the given massive intelligence failure, the entire cause and nature of the attack was worked out in a mere 72 hours of investigation. Primarily because of one key piece of evidence that implicated everyone else in the plot.

"# FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted officials had no idea this kind of attack could happen when in fact the FBI had been investigating the possibility of EXACTLY this kind of attack for almost TEN YEARS. Numerous previous attempts at using planes as weapons, intimate knowledge of terror plans called Project Bojinka, and knowledge of suspicious characters attending flight schools who were being monitored by the FBI make his utterance a clear lie on its face.

In the weeks before 9/11, the U.S. received warnings from all over the world that an event just like this was about to happen, but FBI investigations into suspected terrorists were suppressed and those warnings were deliberately disregarded.

# The names of the alleged hijackers, all ostensibly Muslims, were released to the public only hours after the attacks, despite Mueller saying we had no knowledge this would happen. This is an impossible twist of logic. If he didn't know of a plan to strike buildings with planes, how would he know the names of the hijackers? Various artifacts were discovered in strategic places to try to confirm the government's story, but these have all been dismissed as suspicious planting of evidence. Since that time several names on that list have turned up alive and well, living in Arab countries. Yet no attempt has ever been made to update the list. And why were none of these names on the airlines' passenger lists?"

# The Patriot Act was presented in the days after the tragedy supposedly as a response to it, yet it was clear that this heinous act, drafted to nullify provisions for freedom in the U.S. Constitution, was put together long before 9/11. In addition, testimony by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even reading it. This was a vote to eliminate the Constitutional Bill of Rights, which has defined American freedom for 200 years, and it was accomplished when legislators voted for the bill without even reading it.

# The invasion of Afghanistan was presented as an attempt to pursue the alleged perpetrators of 9/11, yet it had been discussed for years prior to the tragedy and actually planned in the months before the attacks on New York and Washington. Statements by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Republican-written Project for a New American Century have stressed that America needed a formidable enemy to accomplish its aggressive geopolitical aims. The supposed enemy we attacked in Afghanistan was a diverse group of men from all over the world who were initially recruited, encouraged and supported by the American CIA.

http://www.serendipity.li/wot/911_a_hoax.htm

"In 1992 Rick Rescorla warned the Port Authority (owner of the World Trade Center) about the possibility of a truck bomb attack on the pillars in the basement parking garage, but was ignored. When Islamist terrorists used this method in the 1993 attack, Rescorla was instrumental in evacuating the building, and was literally the last man out. He and Dan Hill then prepared a report that warned of another attack, this time from a commercial aircraft crashing into the complex, but he was again ignored.

Rescorla recommended to his superiors at Morgan Stanley that the company leave Manhattan. Office space and labor costs were lower in New Jersey, and the firm's employees and equipment would be safer in a proposed four-story building. However, this recommendation was not followed as the company's lease at the World Trade Center did not terminate until 2006. At Rescorla’s insistence, all employees, including senior executives, then practiced emergency evacuations every three months."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla

* Who benefited from the suspiciously high numbers of put options purchased prior to September 11 for shares in companies whose stock prices subsequently plummeted, on the supposition that whoever was behind the hijacking was also behind most of the purchases of these put options? And what was the role of the new executive director of the CIA, Buzzy Krongard, who handled these transactions?

* Why was the debris from the collapsed Twin Towers removed from the site with no forensic examination? Why was almost all of it sold to scrap merchants and shipped abroad where it would not be available for scientific examination?

* Why does the government refuse to release any transcripts of communications or any records at all relating to signals of any form transmitted by those jets?

* Why do all the major U.S. media continue to act as if none of these questions is legitimate or relevant?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saleh_Ibn_Abdul_Rahman_Hussayen

I agree with you about oil. The typical Gulf rentier state is in need of reform if it is to survive beyond the era of oil. It's interesting, because in pre-oil Gulf economies, the Sheikh exchanged political power for loans and financial support from the middle classes - normally merchants, fishermen, those in the pearl trade. Oil essentially broke this mold and allowed the Sheikh to take back the vast majority of political power in exchange for oil revenue. Now oil is running out, and furthermore, as the Gulf states expand they require increasingly large bureaucracies to run them. These two factors are changing the balance of power and should lead to political and economic reform.

While there has been a lot of mismanagement in Dubai, 85% of its GDP is derived from non-oil sources. While it remains to be seen if the economy can survive without oil I think positive steps are being taken. For example, not only are there th free trade zones that you mentioned, there are also institutions like the Dubai International Finance Centre. Similarly, countries like Oman, with very small oil reserves are having to invest heavily in tourism - and I think that this may provide the standard development model for most of the small gulf states. One of the biggest problem in the Gulf is nepotism - most businesses are family owned and this means that it is unlikely that they will open up a private business to the kind of financial and accounting scrutiny that is standard in the West. Another problem is capital flight - as long as there are wars, political instability, and a lack of financial transparency, most Gulf arabs will choose to invest their money abroad for security reasons. Furthermore, the same factors deter foreign investors.

It's funny, because the locals in Dubai used to joke about the modern Gulf and say that if it all failed they would just go back to the simple life of their forefathers (I'd like to see the younger generation try and live without luxury!). They would often point at Dubai's skyscrapers and quote the following passage from the Gabriel hadith: "the herdsmen of the sheep will compete with each other in raising lofty buildings".

30 September 1942- 28 February 1968
Harlem, New York, New York,
USA-Heroin Overdose

Used this song in the film, "This Boy's Life" with d' caprio, and "Pink Flamingos" scene where Divine hides meat between hers legs, at the market....


........Despite recording a strong album, his novelty appeal waned when his voice broke. By 1961, the teenager was a heroin addict and entered Manhattan General Hospital on a drug rehabilitation programme. Although he tried to reconstruct his career with the help of Dizzy Gillespie and even took dancing lessons and studied as a jazz drummer, his drug habit endured. In 1964, he was convicted of possessing narcotics and his finances were in a mess. His private life was equally chaotic and was punctuated by three marriages. In February 1968, he was discovered dead on the bathroom floor of his grandmother's New York apartment with a syringe by his side. The Teenager who never grew up was dead at the tragically young age of 25. His former group continued to record sporadically and in the 80s, surviving members Santiago and Merchant formed a new Teenagers and Pearl McKinnon took Lymon's part. They were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1993.


from.....http://www.oldies.com/artist-biography/Frankie-Lymon.html

I agree, Extras has been a disappointment. I think Gervais/Merchant have soaked in too many American influences and come up with something that doesn't really work with the exception of improving their showbiz contacts.

Interesting that their next project is mooted to be something along the lines of U.S HBO dramas.

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I hope it comes back. We have to find out if he hooks up with Maggie. The second season did drag a bit - but still had some of the most drop-dead funny moments on TV.

I have to go find that scene with Merchant and his egg beater.

Edit: ahh... here we go!

Really up in the air Dag, Gervais has stated that he can't see himself doing a third series, as he and Merchant have this "thing" about doing only two series (like The Office).

However, after the second series had finished, he was quoted in the Mirror as saying that there was "some mileage in it" and suggesting there could be a third series.