Journal geoswan's Journal: Using dogs as a "softening up" tool 10

Those correspondents of mine must have missed the story that there were photos showing the Abu Ghraib guards letting dogs bite the suspects. The photos I saw, first time around, were a completely different set.

cowering

bleeding

first aid

Here is one of the first photos in the first sequence of dog bite photos I saw. The other photos were very gruesome. Trust me, they were just as described below:

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera's view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate's leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

So, is there a pragmantic value in "softening up" suspects if you want your interrogation to produce reliable intelligence, even though it is morally questionable? On Kuro5hin I started two articles on the flaws I perceived in abusive interrogation. I argued that relying on abusive interrogation put the frontline GIs at further risk because it was so notoriously unreliable. I argued that inaccurate intelligence was worse than no intelligence.

I was surprised that some of my Kuro5hin correspondents argued that the failures of terror, torture, and plain old abusive interrogation just showed that the interrogators were incompetent. They told me that the clever interrogator would separate all the suspects, torture them, them compare the stories. If the stories continued to differ under torture, then they wouldn't trust them. But, if the stories started to converge, then they would regard that intelligence as reliable.

This struck me as dangerously naive. They seemed oblivious of the human factor, the observer effect. If avoiding torture depends on figuring out what the interrogator wants to hear, torture victims stories converging does not require the story to be true.

One of the British Guantanamo detainees, who was finally released after a couple of years of incarceration and interrogation, described how one of his naive young interrogators asked him where he would go to buy rocket propelled grenades back home in his section of Britain. Duh. You can't even buy a gun in Britain.

Using abusive interrogation techniques not only doesn't work, demonstrably doesn't work, but it strips your cause of moral authority.