Promoting Torture

Josh White of the Washington Post wrote an article about a report on interrogation tactics by the U.S. Intelligence Science Board. His take on the report is that there is no evidence that coercive techniques work, there has been no significant research on interrogation in over 40 years, and that "ad-hoc experimentation" and "vague guidance" are responsible for the use of aggressive techniques by U. S. interrogators.

The reason why there has been no research in 40 years is that U. S. torturers were satisfied with the state of their knowledge forty years ago, as documented in the famous Kubark manual. The methods developed at that time were believed to "work"; it is not clear to what extent "work" means that the method extracts useful information, or whether it means that the method psychologically breaks the victim. Finally, the objectionable methods used at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and other sites were not ad-hoc or the result of vague guidance, they track very well with the recommendations of the Kubark manual.

Alfred McCoy's book "A Question of Torture" sheds a lot of light on this subject. I recommend it strongly.