05/12/16 – Rupert Stone – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Rupert Stone from Newsweek Magazine.
He's got this very important new piece.
I do hope you'll look at it and pass it around.
Science shows that torture doesn't work and is counterproductive.
Welcome back to the show, Rupert.
How are you?
I'm fine, thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important work that you're doing.
And so I really appreciate you sharing some time with us today to explain about this.
You get right into it here in the article about how the point of the torture regime under well, I don't want to be too specific and exclude Obama years, but especially if we think of the Mitchell and Jessen and the CIA torture program after the dawn of the terror war.
It's what we talked about on the show actually just last week about this new lawsuit.
The theory is one of learned helplessness, that if you torture someone, especially at random times and in random ways and in a way where nothing that they can do has any control over whether they get tortured or not, then eventually they'll just give up and become helpless the same as if you do the same kind of tortures to a dog.
At some point they just quit trying and then they're putty in your hands and you can do what you want with them and you can make them tell you the truth about where is that ticking time bomb.
And you're saying here that what brain scientists know better than that?
Yes, that's exactly true.
I mean, in this piece, we we assemble various pieces of scientific research from neuroscience and from the psychological sciences as well.
But starting with the neuroscientific stuff, I interviewed a brain, a professor of brain science at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland called Professor Shane O'Mara.
And he's just written this very detailed long book, which is very interesting and original called Why Torture Doesn't Work.
And basically in this book, he gathers evidence from neuroscience that's relevant to interrogation to show that the sorts of interrogation techniques that Mitchell and Jessen developed and implemented for the CIA affect the brain in such a way that they impair memory and compromise mental faculties.
So that detainees basically won't be able to remember things in an interrogation context, which is, you know, basically means they won't be able to answer questions and interrogators asking them and provide intelligence, accurate intelligence.
That's that's the long and short of it in terms of the neuroscientific work.
Well, why not?
What is it that torture does?
Um, well, I mean, we can zero in on maybe some specific techniques.
I mean, in the story, we devote quite a bit of space to waterboarding for obvious reasons.
It's so notorious.
I mean, in the case of waterboarding, Shane O'Mara shows that, well, let's just describe the technique briefly, just for the listeners.
Basically, what waterboarding involves is putting a cloth over someone's mouth and pouring water over the cloth so that they they can't breathe.
I mean, they're strapped down on a on a board.
So it basically deprives captives of air and suffocates them effectively.
I mean, waterboarding is called simulated drowning, but that's really nonsense.
I mean, it really is drowning because people can't breathe and they will die if that procedure continues.
And Shane shows in his book that basically by starving the brain of oxygen and by ensuring that carbon dioxide builds up in the body, you are impairing someone's cognitive faculties that the brain needs oxygen to function normally and that an excess of carbon dioxide induces fear and panic.
And, you know, this is a very suboptimal situation to be recalling information and presenting it in a coherent and comprehensible manner.
Well, it makes sense when you put it like that, that, you know, if you're if you're trying to survive in that level of emergency drowning that, you know, your lizard brain keeping your heart and your lungs going is basically everything right.
And the rest of your brain is all of its faculties are diverted to the very base survival.
So, you know, what are the names of all the guys in the room at the meeting three years ago is going to not necessarily be that easy to retrieve at that point.
That's exactly it.
Yeah.
I mean, you've hit on the key issue here, which is survival.
And basically a person undergoing waterboarding feels that they are about to die.
Again, you know, just to reiterate points, it's very important.
I mean, this is not simulated.
This is in the game.
I mean, a captive in the situation that the CIA prisoners are in really clearly were pushed to the brink of death.
I mean, you can see in the Senate torture report that Abbott's abator was almost drowned.
I mean, you had a scene where he passes out and there are bubbles rising out of his mouth.
So obviously, someone in that situation is going to be terrified that autonomic nervous system will take over and they will do what they have to do to survive, which might be giving a confession or an admission in an intelligence gathering context that, as you say, they remembered such and such being at the place three years ago when, in fact, that person wasn't there.
And obviously, this means that the sort of intelligence you gather under these very coercive techniques of torture is likely to be inadequate and unreliable.
And now the science that you're referring to, at least some of this, and I think this is the part you're talking about, the waterboarding part.
They tested this on American special forces who they go through waterboarding as part of their SEER training anyway, obviously not the degree that Abu Zubaydah went through it.
But that's how they know this, right?
This isn't a guess.
They didn't test this on rats.
They tested this on America's toughest guys.
Yeah.
I mean, waterboarding actually has now been discontinued as part of the Navy.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I mean, for a start, it was only ever used on the Navy, on Navy SEALs as part of their resistance training.
It was never standard for the entire military.
And it was discontinued in 2007.
There's an interesting piece actually by Jeffrey Kaye, who's a psychologist and journalist, where he actually obtained a document, internal document, expressing concern in the military about the waterboard because it was such a terrifying technique.
And even then, I mean, okay, so let's grant that it was used by the military on American soldiers.
Even then, it was used under very controlled conditions.
It wasn't repeated in the way it was for the CIA.
And obviously, you know, these soldiers knew that it was being applied by, you know, in training by ultimately friendly forces, not by hostile forces in real captivity, you know, repeatedly.
So, I mean, defenders of the CIA program still say that, well, we do this to our own soldiers.
So why shouldn't we do this to captives?
And that's really a very misleading analogy because it's not used anymore.
It was never used routinely in the first place.
And it's just a very, very, very different procedure in training to reality.
Well, did I get it right, though, that that's where a lot of this information comes from as far as the effect of it on memory and so forth?
Oh, right.
Oh, so you're talking about the scientific.
Right.
Well, there's sort of, I mean, I should have reread the article this morning.
I read it two days ago.
Oh, no, that's no problem at all.
It's I mean, in Shane's book, and we replicate one of these in the story, is an important experiment by the psychiatrist Charles Morgan, Charles A. Morgan and colleagues.
And I think what you might be alluding to is that he subjected some special operations forces to a kind of prisoner of war scenario.
Oh, I see.
So he had special forces guys as his volunteers, but it wasn't as part of their training kind of thing.
Exactly.
And I don't think waterboarding was part of that procedure.
I mean, you know, it's very difficult to test these enhanced techniques in a lab setting and in particular waterboarding just because, you know, for ethical reasons.
So it's which experiments did he do on them on the special ops guys?
Yeah, that was.
So he there they were subjected to some confinement conditions which are very similar to or similar to CIA techniques like temperature extremes, sleeplessness, you know, some dietary manipulation.
And you know, those are all CIA techniques one way or another.
And basically what Morgan found is that the level of cognitive performance in the special ops soldiers under those stressful conditions was markedly reduced.
So you know, their ability to concentrate, their ability to remember information, recall information was depleted.
And you know, an important caveat here is, you know, these guys were motivated to cooperate.
They weren't detainees who are trying to, you know, potentially resist interrogation.
So, you know, the fact that even these very fit, very strong, cooperative soldiers had impaired cognitive function as a result of these techniques is, you know, very revealing of how of how, you know, damaging they are to memory and other other cognitive faculties.
Yeah.
But, Rupert, maybe we're missing the point, which is that, yeah, but you still got to learn them helplessness.
They still have to give up.
And even if they lose their memory somewhat, you know, what are we supposed to do?
Not beat the hell out of them until they tell us the truth about them and their friends' plans to kill us and our neighbors?
I mean, what the hell?
Well, I mean, I think it needs to be said, and maybe you said this before, you know, in an earlier episode when you dealt with this stuff, but I mean, learned helplessness is not was I mean, that's a theory really propounded by Martin Seligman, psychologist.
And you know, he in all fairness to him, it was not I mean, this is some decades ago now, but it was not he didn't propose it as an aid to interrogation.
I mean, it's not supposed to be an information gathering procedure.
He basically used it to explain depression.
So how Mitchell and Jessen came to use learned helplessness in the context of information elicitation is very bizarre.
So, you know, that's the first thing needs to be said.
It's you know, it's not an obvious tool for gathering accurate information.
And secondly, you know, most experienced interrogators say that, you know, detainees are actually quite often prepared to cooperate.
And the idea that, you know, this kind of 24 Jack Bauer fantasy that they're all sitting there, you know, stony face staring at the floor, refusing to answer questions, apparently is just not how it tends to work in reality.
And again, using the example of Abu Zubaydah from the Senate Torture Report and other, other evidence, for instance, Ali Safan's memoir, as I recall, who is one of the interrogators at the time, he did cooperate initially with the FBI when he was captured, and he did provide useful information.
And then when the CIA turned up the heat and got stuck in with these harsh tactics, then he climbed up and produced rubbish, basically.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's another famous one where bin Laden's Treasury Secretary or whatever was in Sudan back in the late 90s, the I guess it was the CIA or whoever was FBI, maybe they offered medical care for his wife, she needed surgery and bin Laden wouldn't pony up for it.
And they said, we'll save your wife's life.
And he said, I'll give you everything I got.
And come on, that's easy.
And I should say, not for my own self, but for hundreds of millions of Americans, or at least 10s of millions of Americans.
A lot of us knew better all along anyway, that anybody who had ever saw a Sam Jackson movie before knows that the way you negotiate with somebody is you pretend to be their friend.
And you, you know, just like the cops do when they're solving a murder mystery or whatever, they go, Listen, man, we know that you didn't really set out to intend to kill the guy, you kind of accidentally killed him, right?
And the guy goes, Yeah, okay, I did it.
Right?
That's how you do it.
Everybody knows that you don't torture them until they admit it.
Come on.
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, if you, if you torture someone, then it's just very that the information is very suspect, because it has been coerced.
And I mean, let's not forget that coerced information is not admissible in a court of law.
And that tells you something, I think, about its veracity, likely veracity.
All right, let's stop here for a quick break.
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And now in your studies here, do these guys differentiate between someone saying, hey, listen, man, if you're torturing me, I'll tell you any lie you want to hear and deciding to lie versus being so traumatized and sensory deprived and every other thing that they end up believe in their own lives and they just start spouting, you know, whatever they can.
But they can't even really differentiate between truth and fiction anymore or.
That's a really good point, actually, which I don't think is raised enough in this specific area, which is that, I mean, let's just focus on the issue of false confessions and actually in this case in the criminal justice system, which is the Innocence Project in the U.S. you might have heard of which assembles basically which documents, you know, wrongful convictions basically and has tied quite a few of those wrongful convictions to false confessions.
And basically what they found is and the overall data on wrongful conviction, false confession shows that some people who do falsely confess to committing crimes actually do come to believe they committed the crime.
So it's not just a question that they coerced into into making an admission they actually know in their heart of hearts is false.
And I mean, I think that seems to have relevance to the CIA context.
I mean, in the course of research for this article, I interviewed and she's quoting the story Elizabeth Loftus, this very, I mean, very well-known psychology professor in California.
And she in her actually the work that made her famous is relates to this notion of false memory, the memories when we tend to think of memories as like stable fixed entities in the mind, like objects in a safe and you just need to reach in when you remember something and pick them out.
And she basically shows in her research that they're malleable and kind of constructed.
So every time you remember something, you have to piece it together.
And that means they can be false and you can you can have false recollections of what happened in the past.
And basically, the long and short of it, I've got a long digression is that under duress, it seems that people can be susceptible to, if you like, suggestive interrogation and come to and come to have adjusted memories of what happened and distorted memories, if you see what I mean.
So basically, in answer to your question, yes, coercive interrogation can actually adjust people's memories and convince them that something happened that in fact did not.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, they had there's a new movie out about this where it's not even about torture, but just about, you know, people strongly, you know, being strongly suggestible to false memories and the whole, you know, there are all kinds of, you know, the whole witch hunt of the satanic child abuse and all that kind of thing where people confess to it.
People admitted that, oh, yeah, it's all true when none of it was true.
But geez, everybody seems real sure I just must not remember it or something.
And they just go along because, you know, because of all kind of incentives that have nothing to do really with whether they really have a memory of it or not.
You know, all other things, all other things come into play.
In fact, the easiest kind of torture that cops get away with all the time is just two big fat stinky cops with bad breath in a small room in somebody's face saying, admit it, admit it, admit it, admit it.
And they say, you know, you promise you'll let me leave this room if I admit it.
And the next 40 years in the state penitentiary is not really at play.
All they're thinking is, you know, promise me I get to go home now if I say what you want me to say.
And they'll do it.
They get false confessions all the time like that.
And that's, you know, try to get a judge to call that torture, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, Elizabeth Loftus in our story does say that, you know, she points out that some coercive interrogation techniques are used in the domestic U.S. criminal, I mean, justice slash law enforcement system, for instance, sleep deprivation, I mean, not anything like the sleep deprivation used by CIA, but, you know, the cops will keep someone up late into the night interrogating them, depriving them of their sleep.
And then, as you say, under that kind of, you know, stressful interrogation, the prisoner will just confess falsely just to end it and get some sleep.
Yeah.
Well, so now we know from anecdotal evidence that they were able to get Abu Zubaydah and Sheikh Al-Libi and I guess others too, although now I'd have to go back and look, to implicate Saddam Hussein for some kind of operational relationship with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
But I wonder, has anyone ever tested, and it's, you know, it's kind of a joke to say, oh yeah, torture works great at getting lies, if that's what you want.
But I wonder whether anyone has ever really studied that.
Is torture a really good way to get lies, the lies you want?
Tell me about that time Saddam taught you how to make sarin or whatever.
Um, yeah, I mean, it's testing torture, again, is something that can't really be done, at least scientifically, directly, because, you know, because it's, you know, you really have to be in Nazi Germany to do something like that, to put, you know, to put prisoners under the kinds of conditions the CIA did and be able to get away with it ethically, you'd have to be, you know, in a very different kind of country.
Or at least at a former Nazi base in Poland, but yeah, sorry, go ahead.
But you can, there are ways of coming to, you know, a decent appreciation of the efficacy of torture.
And I mean, one is just going through historical, the historical record, and looking at, you know, cases such as the al-Libi case, and determining from the publicly available information how effective coercion was.
So that's one way you can do it.
And I think it's very clear from what we know about the post 9-11 period that these tactics were very ineffective, indeed.
And then the second is, yeah, I mean, as we show in the piece, and the neuroscientific literature suggests that the effect these sorts of torture tactics have on the brain is not conducive to remembering information accurately.
And then third, there are actually studies of, say, eliciting of false confession and eliciting admissions from suspects, which have some bearing on this issue, too.
So there is, I mean, on the one hand, you can't test torture scientifically.
On the other hand, there is actually quite a lot of evidence related to its efficacy.
All right, and then, I guess, just to wrap up here, can you tell us a little bit about what the Swedes are doing here with, you know, taking the opposite tack from torture?
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, that comes at the end of the story is there's a group in Gothenburg in Sweden led by a professor of psychology there called Per Anders Granhag, who is, and they are studying the work of a, actually of a German interrogator from the Second World War, which would send up alarm bells immediately, most listeners probably, but he was actually seems to have been quite a, I mean, not a Nazi, some typical Nazi, basically, anyway, he used quite soft, non-aggressive interrogation techniques, and on the captives he interviewed, and basically, the way he would do it, this guy's name was Hans Scharf, is he would pretend he knew everything already on the, this was one of his methods, on the assumption that then the prisoners would deem it futile to withhold information, because if the interrogator knows what I did, a couple of years ago, then there's no point me lying and concealing it from him.
That was the logic there.
And it's basically a subtle interrogation tactic, where the point is, you don't tell the prisoner what exactly you want to know, you just tease the information out of him subtly.
And that's the diametric opposite of torture, where, you know, you've got the kind of, you know, the interrogator shouting at a prisoner, you know, you saw Osama bin Laden four years ago, didn't you?
So you're making it explicit to the prisoner exactly what you want to know.
And the Scharf technique, it covers up those sorts of information objectives, and tries to elicit the information subtly through various, if you like, depth, underhand forms of interviewing.
Mm hmm.
That's all very interesting, because again, you know, it depends on whether you really want good intelligence here, or whether there are other incentives at play, which could be as, you know, as obvious as lying us into war, or just showing that you're a better interrogator than Jenkins in the next room, or God knows what, you know?
Yes, I mean, I think the competitive aspect of this does seem to be important to, you know, interrogators competing to be tough and, you know, and macho does seem to be a part of that.
Well, so yeah, I guess it I mean, it obviously makes sense, right, that you would get smart cops, really smart ones to go in there and, and be clever and figure out how to get people to admit the real truth, if you want the real truth, or at least, you know, the best approximation of it you could get from somebody.
But it doesn't seem like much of the torture regime in the last, and we'll include Obama years here, has much to do with, you know, that I mean, yes, it's interrogation, but they seem to have a lot of confirmation bias built in there.
Otherwise, you know, why wouldn't at least some of the CIA guys resort to going back to the Ali Soufan method and be nice for a minute or where, right?
They just keep up with this, even though they're not getting good intelligence.
They never were.
They're chasing what a Muslim Brotherhood suicide squad around Montana or whatever, because that's what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said.
It's ridiculous.
These people I don't know.
Well, I think I mean, there is clearly something seductive about torture.
And I mean, it's it is clear from the Senate report and you know, plenty of other bits of evidence that it torture does produce information, lots of it, it's just most of it's rubbish and totally unreliable, and impossible to verify, because it's been coerced.
So that that is the I think, part of the seduction of torture combined with the fact that, you know, human beings are human beings they like, I'm afraid, power and, you know, the Stanford prison experiment, you know, the Phillips and Bardo experiment from the 70s showed how, you know, if you put, if you put human beings in a situation where they can inflict, you know, violent power on defenseless people, and change the rules to make that seem legitimate, then, you know, take take to it like ducks to water, you don't have to be a psychopath to revel in this stuff.
I'm afraid human beings do have a very dark streak to them, not entirely, but you know, a propensity to this kind of behavior to enjoy them.
Yeah, afraid so.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your work on this subject, as always, Rupert, and your time on the show.
Not at all.
Pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Great stuff.
Thanks.
All right, so that is Rupert Stone.
He's at Newsweek.
Science shows that torture doesn't work, and is counterproductive.
Newsweek.com.
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