Is Water Boarding Worth It?

Interrogation and torture remain poorly aligned. Proficient interrogators eschew torture for the same reason that modern physicians no longer use leeches and advertise their expertise by wearing blood-stained scrubs into the surgical suite. These things just don't work. Perhaps there is some highfalutin philosophical summit from which to look down on bloodletting as a primitive form of medical treatment. But the effectiveness argument surely casts any sanctimonious argument aside as inconsequential in light of the current understanding of medicine. Similarly, good interrogators don't torture not so much out of affronts to their fine sentiments about slippery slopes and moral high ground as out of the ineffectiveness of approach. Torture does not work because the person tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, thereby casting into doubt the credibility of the intelligence so gleaned.

If one accepts this operational axiom about interrogation and torture, then why would water boarding work, regardless of whether it really is torture or not? Consider: the best interrogation techniques involve uncertainty and exploiting the prisoner's own fears and imagination while stopping short of realizing them. Perhaps what made water boarding effective is that the enemy had no idea of what it was or where it would stop, thereby reducing the value of his training on how to resist standard interrogation techniques.

My own experience under interrogation would tend to support this hypothesis, as I had no trouble resisting standard techniques but found extended periods of sitting blindfolded and handcuffed on a concrete slab surprisingly more enervating than being manhandled and questioned aggressively. In the age of You Tube and perpetual questioning of our own national motives and resolve during political contests, do we leave any doubts for our adversaries about to expect, even if water boarding were to resurface to unprecedented levels? Forewarned, they have no reason to magnify their own fears, hence no way of helping us psychologically by according more mystery and success to our tactics than the tactics alone merit. Consequently, the greater the debate and description of water boarding, the easier it will be to resist and the less value it will have as an interrogation tool.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Torture vs. Interrogation: Agendas or Answers

Torture and interrogation are not synonyms, and even less likely to become so in countries where interrogation is an actual means of collecting intelligence, such as ours. This may not be as self-evident as the lay observer imagines.  Why?  Anyone who has practiced HUMINT collection internationally and been trained in interrogation soon discovers that, for many authoritarian regimes, intelligence collection is often a secondary or even tertiary objective of interrogation.  In much of the world, two objectives routinely trump intelligence collection: suppression of political adversaries through intimidation or advance of nationalist propaganda through parading of the enemy defector.  The latter is the more benign.  Even in friendly and ostensibly democratic countries, however, the national propaganda objective finds its expression at the expense of intelligence collection.  This is why a high-profile defector may be lionized and showcased by an ally for a year before anyone is allowed to actually ask a useful intelligence question. Why?  Country A wants to show the world and its historical rival, Country B, that B's defector came to A for a better life and in obvious recognition of Country B's societal failures, in contrast to Country A's clear advantages.  Meanwhile, time-sensitive intelligence goes stale and even Country A's intelligence collectors grind their molars waiting for the day their political leaders will deign to allow them to interrupt the propaganda tour with a question or two about Country B's military capabilities and intent.

For tyrant-controlled milieux, it's worse.  There the purpose of interrogation is to beat and defeat.  Questions are unnecessary, because no one is interested in the answers.  Look at Michener's account of AVO interrogations to suppress the 1956 Hungarian Rebellion to see that glass shards and brutalization had less to do with true interrogation than with dispensing and magnifying fear.  True interrogation is about getting answers to questions (also called EEIs, or Essential Elements of Information in war, or intelligence requirements at other times). Which brings us to the next question.

Are we getting productive yield out of intelligence interrogations?  Of course we are. Else why do it?  If our objectives were to brutalize or propagandize interrogation, we're certainly doing neither at a journeyman level. All the legal analysis and executive branch deliberations that preceded water boarding were hardly consistent with the Dirty Harry-style rush to expedite Q&A that some appear to perceive.

More importantly, we know that HUMINT yield against Bin Laden was made all the more valuable because of the dearth of SIGINT and other INTs that failed to produce much on him.  How do we know?  His actions -- which bear mute testimony to NSA in a backhanded way.  Since his days in the Sudan, Bin Laden began practising communications security to a nearly obsessive level, hence his chronic reliance on couriers while the rest of the world came to rely increasingly on cell phone and Internet.  He knew what audit trails modern telecommunications produce and how they can be exploited.  The more he denied us these traditional means of discerning his intentions and whereabouts, the more he increased the value of HUMINT and, by extension, of interrogation of his cohorts.  To claim that we just don't know whether any of the product of interrogations could have helped find Bin Laden because we lack the necessary clearance or esoteric briefing on the particulars, or to argue that all such details must somehow forever remain beyond our grasp is to argue against our own ability to reason, discern, and analyze.  Why, it is tantamount to arguing that any form of interrogation that an adversarial press or an opponent labels as torture must necessarily be torture, regardless of whether this is true.

-- Nick Catrantzos