Posted on 07/03/2004 7:20:27 AM PDT by Brian Mosely
Discomfort is the name of the game. When you are a prisoner, you have no control over anything. Food, water, sleep, work, warm, cold, clean, dirty, your surroundings, entertainment, contact with others, etc. Every aspect of your existance is the subject of someone elses whim.
Try going to sleep in your cell when the guards are blasting a tape of tortured sounded moaning and screeching. You can slump over all you like, but you won't get to sleep until your body is exhausted.
When you're a prisoner, you do what you're told, or they go for your comforts. Sitting at your keyboard, it's hard to have an appreciation of having no comforts, but the world revolves around them.
Why get your daily 'shower' in freezing water instead of warm? Why settle for two and a half hours of sleep when you could get five? Why eat rice when you could get some dessert? Why sleep on the floor when you could get a cot? Why scrub septic tanks when I could watch a movie?
Why not just sit in the stress position and answer a few questions?
The idea is to make people cooperate. Without any ability to influence people's comfort, anyone can hold out against interrogation. If the only tools you have to work with is asking the question again, then the person is free to ignore you until you get tired of asking.
It's not about beating people, it's about wearing them down mentally and physically by making them uncomfortable. Without the ability to make people uncomfortable, they simply won't break, and you won't get any worthwhile intel. This is what is going on now that our interrogators have been defanged.
I can sleep in pretty much any conditions, with any background noise, if I am tired and overdue for it. And I can stand freezing showers, lack of entertainment, and cold meals too. Although I have no idea whether I could resist actual torture (infliction of physical pain), I am certain that if all the enemy could do to me was what you describe, I'd never "break"; nor, I expect, would most combatants who had been well-trained.
I wouldn't even break under Abu Ghraib style "torture", which goes further than what you describe. Physical pain or threats to my family are the only things I'm not sure I could hold up under.
I know it sounds easy. Just consider these things.
Most people, when their lives are transformed into a seemingly endless cycle of exhaustion, fear, and misery, will opt to break and accept the rewards. Most Americans don't know the understand exhaustion, fear and misery more severe than the cable going out, and think that they could shrug off most any discomfort while in enemy hands.
Right.
I've also known many people who have gone to Army SERE school with the attitude of 'screw em, I'm not tellin them jack'. They've all come back with their tails between their legs. All of them. The reality of being a prisoner, under the 24 hour supervision of trained, intelligent interrogators isn't something most people can adjust to, be they jihad hardened terrorist or fearless Green Beret.
The difference is we use harsher tactics at SERE school, i.e. in TRAINING, than we do in real life. No real terrorist is going to break under harsh language. No results can be expected with kid gloves.
There are some people that simply won't break. You may be one of them. Statistically, we can and have gotten the results we've wanted out of the majority that do break, with tools that are not brutal or violent.
I'm not an interrogator. I realize I can't accurately convey what they do, and I wouldn't if I could. I do work with interrogators, though, and I know they're smart people used to making do with less than most other countries, and still getting results. What's going on now, is that they have no tools, nothing.
I'm not putting myself in any special category. I just find it hard to believe that a strong-willed, well-trained person would break under mere "discomfort". I am sure many of the Iraqi prisoners were neither strong-willed nor well-trained, and that the tactics U.S. interrogators used, which were not torture, obntained plenty of information.
In saying this, I am not arguing that the "discomfort" techniques are ineffective, nor am I arguing that we should legalize torture. I'm just pointing out the big gap between what we can immorally obtain (with real torture, inflicting physical pain) and what we can morally obtain (since the more important prisoners ought to be well-trained enough to resist interrogation that can't use torture).
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