The Bogus Argument

Supporters of the administration's attempt to colonize Iraq (aka addicts of the Blue Pill) have been starting to make the 'ends justifies means' argument vis a vis the prison abuse documented at Abu Ghraib.

This argument goes something like this: yeah, what the MPs were doing to the prisoners isn't very nice, but hey, there's a war on and it's important that we get the information we need about possible attacks on our troops as quickly as possible. It's ugly, but necessary to support Our Guys.

I'm not even going to get into the debate on this - I'm just going to shoot the premise out from under them. Because the kind of interrogation techniques used in Abu Ghraib are guaranteed to extract information; the only problem is, there's no way you can believe the information thus extracted.

This isn't just me saying this - it has been shown repeatedly, at least as far back as Torquemada, that coerced confessions are worthless.

Witness this article from a Washington Post series that investigate techniques then in use by Prince George's County police:

Beale's case was one of four examined by The Washington Post in which people who Prince George's homicide detectives said had admitted to murder were later exonerated by DNA or other evidence that persuaded prosecutors to drop the charges.

The methods allegedly used to gain those false confessions are not unusual, according to lawyers, former suspects and court and police documents. In the last three years, people have been convicted and imprisoned based on confessions they gave during interrogations conducted over 32, 35, 51, even 80 hours.

Sometimes police document sleep deprivation in their own interrogation logs. For example, a log indicates that Keith Longtin slept about 50 minutes during more than 38 hours in the interrogation room when he allegedly implicated himself in his wife's 1999 slaying. Longtin spent more than eight months in jail before DNA evidence exonerated him.

The effects of prolonged lack of sleep during interrogation were underscored during the Korean War, when 36 of 59 captured U.S. airmen confessed to war crimes they had not committed. That immediately raised fears that the communists had developed terrible new drugs or methods of brainwashing. Their tactic proved more simple: sleep deprivation.

"It was just one device used to confuse, bewilder and torment our men until they were ready to confess to anything," Louis West, a psychiatrist who served on a government panel that studied the confessions, once told an interviewer. "That device was prolonged, chronic loss of sleep."

Richard Schwab, medical director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Sleep Disorders, said depriving people of sleep during prolonged questioning can help extract confessions, even from the innocent. After one night of lost sleep, people's judgment is impaired, their reactions slow, they have trouble making decisions and they are prone to mistakes, Schwab said. After two nights, he said, people can become temporarily psychotic and hallucinate.

A respected textbook on law enforcement interrogations warns against "an unduly prolonged, continuous interrogation" that might be apt to make an innocent person confess. The authors of "Criminal Interrogation and Confession" suggest that competent interrogators should be able to obtain most confessions within about four hours.

(The entire Post series on false confessions can be found here.)

Just to recap - by using methods considerably milder than those in use at Abu Ghraib, you can persuade an innocent 17 year old to confess to murdering his best friend.

So basically the 'ends' of the ends-justifies-means argument is... a pile of bad information, possibly containing, but not guaranteed to contain, a nugget of truth.

This should really go without saying, but I'll say it anyway - we really don't need bad information; we have PLENTY of bad information. In fact, I think it's safe to say that we're in the mess we're in now because of bad information, and some people's willful refusal to listen to good information if it contradicts what they want to believe.

So please, can we all agree that torture (or 'abuse' or 'frat hazings' or whatever minimalizing wordage you prefer) is not only wrong, but doesn't work?