How Poland sold itself to support CIA torture

[Welf]

No, actually Spiegel wrote a lot about cooperation with the BND. Too bad for your case that money is not mentioned in the documents Spiegel obtained.

Is it really better that our secret services commit high treason for free?

What do you view as high treason?

I may use the term a bit liberal, but three points:
-They delivered information to the US services that was used to kill targets. That is a direct contradiction of publicly stated policy, and worse, in direct opposition to article #1 of the constitution which puts human dignity above all. Yes, they got their piece of paper that says it won't be used, be everyone knew that.
-They helped and covered US officials to capture a traveller on Frankfurt airport. Germany is a sovereign country, only German officials are allowed to use physical force. Otherwise we can our sovereignty down the toilet.
-They covered the abduction of a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri. German officials are supposed to protect the rights and lives of German citizens, not serve the requests of US secret services.

We definitely need less Kotzebues in our secret services and more Karl Sands.

[Irbis]

Yes, just like anytime Merkel does something Germany does something. Should be obvious, no?

The difference being Merkel is actually supposedly in power, not a bribed puppet (I can link you recent quotes from the prime minister and president from that time claiming neither knew what the special services were doing, oblivious how lying and/or incompetent it makes them look). Unless you postulate Merkel is bribed US puppet, which wouldn't be surprising given some of her moves.

Not our territory, can't do anything about. Sovereignty of the USA, you know.

Ah, yes. So, if Kiejkuty was just US base (which it was in all but paper status), we could do equal shrug and say it wasn't our problem? So convenient.

I assume by quietly killed you mean having 10 CIA officers on an interpol order to detain as soon as they set foot outside the USA, aka actually having international arrest warrants out for those scumbags?

The utterly ineffective fig leaf Interpol warrant issued on fake aliases? Because, you know, the German authorities refused to just ask USA directly for extradition and victim had to sue them to actually do it: "In September, the justice ministry decided not to pursue arrest warrants issued for the suspected CIA agents."

No, actually Spiegel wrote a lot about cooperation with the BND. Too bad for your case that money is not mentioned in the documents Spiegel obtained.

So, either BND actually breaks German law for free or is just better at hiding the deals, seeing they had 60 years, not 6, to establish secret channels. Why would be either of the above better?

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Torture seems to have worked in the past when US agents have been captured and tortured, eg. William Buckley in Lebanon. Is the US lying about the effect of torture on its operative (why?), or does it sometimes work?

My expectation, based on no experience and very little reading, is that torture will eventually induce the victim to tell the torturer everything that he knows and believes to be true. It will also induce the victim to tell the torturer things that he does not believe to be true - things that he believes that the torturer believing will hurt the torturer's cause, things he believes the torturer wants to hear, things that he believes will lead the torturer to view him as a higher value prisoner and stop torturing him, and nonsense produced by the stress of the ordeal. The effectiveness of torture therefore depends on the ability to filter the true signal from the noise. That seems non-trivial but not impossible, especially if there are other sources of information against which claims can be verified.

Perhaps others are more knowledgable than me - it would not be difficult on this subject - but I am a little sceptical of claims of the complete uselessness of torture.

So what you're saying is that torture is useful if you can check out the victim's story?

Yeah, look, you're missing something: if you can falsify your prisoner's confession, you don't have to torture him. Actually, if you alredy know how to find the truth independently of the prisoner, you can skip dealing with the prisoner completely. If you have multiple prisoners, then you can find someone who'll speak without bringing out a knife. Did you miss what Thanas said about the Nazis? They tortured people, sure, but did not expect information out of them when they did; they just wanted to inflict pain. I wonder what this implies for modern enhanced interrogation. Do you wonder?

So yes, torture is completely useless in any and all circumstances. You are either wasting your time, or what you want can be extracted with a rudimentary understanding of psychology and a couple of mind plays. Of course, you are energiewende, so I guess I lost you with the 'understanding people' bit.

[energiewende]

No one informed will say torture is useless. Torture is in fact highly useful for any number of things. The issue is that for the scenario we are most often presented in the media - the ticking time bomb - it is all but useless for reliable intelligence gathering. If you don't need to know any time soon, it works great. If you want to destroy a man, it works even better. If you want him to go in front of the media and confess to things he never did, why yes, it even works for that. Notice that Hezbollah held the man for fifteen months - not for just a few hours or days.

The article quotes a US General saying, "Not long after his capture, his agents either vanished or were killed.". So the main pay-off seems to have been quick.

I agree that if you are dealing with a single man who knows some key piece of information and also knows he only has to hold out for a few hours to make that information useless to his captors, and has been trained in resisting torture, then he has a good chance of holding out for that time. I'm not sure that describes most of the situations the CIA would use torture today.

So what you're saying is that torture is useful if you can check out the victim's story?

Yeah, look, you're missing something: if you can falsify your prisoner's confession, you don't have to torture him.

...

So yes, torture is completely useless in any and all circumstances.

Not everything the victim says has to be independently verifiable, only a sample. This problem exists in practically every area of intelligence gathering, including when people simply defect voluntarily. You don't know they are not feeding you false information, or are simply lying about their knowledge for money or attention. Provided you can verify a sample of what the person is saying, especially if they don't know what you can and cannot verify, you can have reasonable confidence in things they say that you cannot verify. This is why I find it hard to believe that torture is useless, though it will surely have limitations as other methods do.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

I already said that you get nothing from torture that you cannot get from verbal questioning except for a huge sadist boner, so quit snipping my posts you wanker.

[K. A. Pital]

This is why I find it hard to believe that torture is useless, though it will surely have limitations as other methods do.

Problem is: you get reliable information from another source. Only the reliable source can be counted on. The torture-derived information is inherently unreliable. Therefore everything derived solely by torture is useless, and useful information is actually derived elsewhere without torture.

Unless you're talking about cross-torturing hundreds of people to get reliable information. We know how well that went with Iraq and... Oh wait. Oh, what a pile of shit.

[energiewende]

You are either wasting your time, or what you want can be extracted with a rudimentary understanding of psychology and a couple of mind plays.

This? Yes "a couple of mind plays" should work if the victim is stupid and/or this is a TV cop show where that's the special gimmick. Lie To Me, perhaps.

Problem is: you get reliable information from another source. Only the reliable source can be counted on. The torture-derived information is inherently unreliable. Therefore everything derived solely by torture is useless, and useful information is actually derived elsewhere without torture.

Unless you're talking about cross-torturing hundreds of people to get reliable information. We know how well that went with Iraq and... Oh wait. Oh, what a pile of shit.

I don't think that's necessarily the case, eg. if someone describes the location of several army formations in great detail, you know from other sources the location of two or three of them, and they check out, there's good reason to believe the others. Of course it might be some kind of double bluff but the chances are the person you are torturing does not know which locations you know and which you don't (or whether you know any of them), so this is much less likely.

The same is true, as I said, of people who voluntarily defect and I think it is uncontroversial that defectors aren't useless. That doesn't mean they are foolproof, eg. this Iranian defector who was probably an agent. I'm sure torture isn't either. But I see no reason to consider torture, "completely useless in any and all circumstances". That is a very extreme claim.

[energiewende]

- double post -

[K. A. Pital]

Yes "a couple of mind plays" should work if the victim is stupid and/or this is a TV cop show where that's the special gimmick

Most police interrogations do not use torture and yet get information.

But I see no reason to consider torture, "completely useless in any and all circumstances". That is a very extreme claim.

The claim of uselessness relates to the knowledge obtained solely from torture. It is true that this information is useless unless a condition is fulfilled. The condition is: presence of another source which is also reliable. Since if the other source is not considered reliable, torture-derived information remains useless even with confirmation. Since the presence of another reliable source renders torture an inferior way of getting the very same information, it logically follows torture-derived information is useless.

[energiewende]

Yes "a couple of mind plays" should work if the victim is stupid and/or this is a TV cop show where that's the special gimmick

Most police interrogations do not use torture and yet get information.

And a lot also fail to get the information they want.

But I see no reason to consider torture, "completely useless in any and all circumstances". That is a very extreme claim.

The claim of uselessness relates to the knowledge obtained solely from torture. It is true that this information is useless unless a condition is fulfilled. The condition is: presence of another source which is also reliable. Since if the other source is not considered reliable, torture-derived information remains useless even with confirmation. Since the presence of another reliable source renders torture an inferior way of getting the very same information, it logically follows torture-derived information is useless.

I agree that if the only source of information available is torture of one person, the quality of intelligence so derived is likely to be low. But that's again a much weaker claim than, "torture is completely useless in any and all circumstances". It doesn't follow that torture cannot add any information beyond that provided by the original source as the example I already gave demonstrates.

[K. A. Pital]

And a lot also fail to get the information they want.

At least they don't launch a fullscale war where hundreds of thousands die based on false information that was received by subjecting many people to industrial-scale torture.

I agree that if the only source of information available is torture of one person, the quality of intelligence so derived is likely to be low. But that's again a much weaker claim than, "torture is completely useless in any and all circumstances". It doesn't follow that torture cannot add any information beyond that provided by the original source as the example I already gave demonstrates.

No; the quality of intelligence is not low - it is negative. False claims can lead to very severe consequences - which are comparable and perhaps much worse than having no information at all. That is not a weak claim. Torture is useless when a reliable source is present precisely due to the reliability of said source, which is established already before torture occurs (otherwise the source is useless for cross-checking).

The only alternative that I offered is the industrial cross-torture. We have seen how well that works in practice; and how well that worked for the Nazis. Like shit.

[energiewende]

And a lot also fail to get the information they want.

At least they don't launch a fullscale war where hundreds of thousands die based on false information that was received by subjecting many people to industrial-scale torture.

I think you are criticising the morality of torture. You may be right but I am only considering whether or not it works. Killing people and stealing their stuff is also immoral but it nonetheless works at increasing the amount of stuff you have.

Essentially claiming that torture doesn't work is an amoral claim: in that case even a power-maximizing state with no moral considerations at all shouldn't do it because it costs time and money paying torturers and provides no advantage.

I agree that if the only source of information available is torture of one person, the quality of intelligence so derived is likely to be low. But that's again a much weaker claim than, "torture is completely useless in any and all circumstances". It doesn't follow that torture cannot add any information beyond that provided by the original source as the example I already gave demonstrates.

No; the quality of intelligence is not low - it is negative. False claims can lead to very severe consequences - which are comparable and perhaps much worse than having no information at all. That is not a weak claim. Torture is useless when a reliable source is present precisely due to the reliability of said source, which is established already before torture occurs (otherwise the source is useless for cross-checking).

The only alternative that I offered is the industrial cross-torture. We have seen how well that works in practice; and how well that worked for the Nazis. Like shit.

I'm not sure if you didn't read, or honestly did not understand. But, I repeat in a simpler way just in case: only a sample of the information obtained by torture needs to be cross-checked, not all of it. In this way, information obtained by torture can increase the amount of information available, at least in principle. This is not unique to torture. It is exactly the same as for all human intelligence including non-coercive human intelligence. If your argument is taken seriously by you then you should also advocating turning away defectors, or at least refusing any information voluntarily offered by them.

[K. A. Pital]

I think you are criticising the morality of torture. You may be right but I am only considering whether or not it works. Killing people and stealing their stuff is also immoral but it nonetheless works at increasing the amount of stuff you have.

No, I'm criticizing the effectiveness. Since if your goal has been to mug or kill thousands of people, then torture is simply irrelevant here. If your goal was acting on reliable information, then torture's effect has been purely negative. See?

But, I repeat in a simpler way just in case: only a sample of the information obtained by torture needs to be cross-checked, not all of it. In this way, information obtained by torture can increase the amount of information available, at least in principle. This is not unique to torture. It is exactly the same as for all human intelligence including non-coercive human intelligence. If your argument is taken seriously by you then you should also advocating turning away defectors, or at least refusing any information voluntarily offered by them.

Information received from torture is very similar to defector-received information if there's a looming war between equal powers: the defector may lie intentionally to misguide foreign leaders. Nazis have used this rather efficiently at times. However, in case of general peacetime defection the defector information is very useful: the defector is highly likely to oppose the politics of his government and therefore it is likely he or she is not an undercover agent. Without immediate looming war, misinformation is not critical and defectors are very likely to be genuine.

Compare that with torture, where all information is, when received, completely unreliable. Only cross-checking can make parts of it reliable, and only when a reliable source exists beforehand. So no, of course the two are not comparable in a general peacetime situation - torture-derived information has negative value, while defector-derived information is likely to be an honest presentation of events (outside the persona of the defector himself - he/she may want to obscure some details of own biography).

[Dr. Trainwreck]

You are either wasting your time, or what you want can be extracted with a rudimentary understanding of psychology and a couple of mind plays.

This? Yes "a couple of mind plays" should work if the victim is stupid and/or this is a TV cop show where that's the special gimmick. Lie To Me, perhaps.

Well I know that other people (THE HORROR) are alien and confusing beasts to you, what's next? Can you show one definite advantage torture has over interrogation?

And insinuating I actually watch any TV, let alone cop shows... I'm downright peeved.

[Irbis]

Anyway, in case someone looks here for information despite sensationalist title, here's latest announcement of the concerned made today [link]: Miller (right on photo, then prime minister) blames Kwaśniewski (then president, left on photo) for the affair, claiming he didn't knew 'operational details' and the responsibility falls squarely on the president, who he claims didn't informed him.

Meanwhile, prosecution considers war crime charges (illegal detainment of prisoners of war) to ex-leadership of intelligence agency and politicians concerned, though as Washington Post noted Polish officials had no access whatsoever to half of base while CIA was there so it's possible some indeed did not knew to what they agreed.

[Siege]

It's good to hear the Polish justice system is actively investigating this instead of sweeping prisoner abuse under the rug like has happened in many other nations.

[Grumman]

The article quotes a US General saying, "Not long after his capture, his agents either vanished or were killed.". So the main pay-off seems to have been quick.

Is there any reason to believe his spies didn't just go to ground? If their handler disappears without a trace and without any kind of forewarning that's what I'd expect them to do, even if they aren't actually compromised.

[Flagg]

The article quotes a US General saying, "Not long after his capture, his agents either vanished or were killed.". So the main pay-off seems to have been quick.

Is there any reason to believe his spies didn't just go to ground? If their handler disappears without a trace and without any kind of forewarning that's what I'd expect them to do, even if they aren't actually compromised.

Don't bother dude, he's banned.

[loomer]

While Energewiende is gone, I do think it's important that we recognize his point that torture actually does get results. The problem is that those results are usually out of date and mixed with a shitton of lies and honest mistake (often induced by the same means used to extract them), making filtering them out of the chaff both extremely difficult and rather pointless. So while the ticking time bomb makes a great moral justification, it ultimately has very little to do with the reality of how or why we torture.

But, more importantly than the prospect of being able to extract information - of whatever dubious quality and veracity - is the matter of morality. In our countries, we try and pride ourselves on being civilized, on considering 'rights' like basic autonomy and health. Torture is fundamentally incompatible with these rights. Even if it worked at one hundred percent efficacy every time, it still wouldn't be morally or ethically justifiable to inflict extraordinary pain and suffering on another person given that we view freedom from oppression and from undue suffering as essentially universal goods. So that's why it doesn't actually matter if torture works. I say this largely because I've been the one arguing it actually does work extremely well for what it's actually for (a tool of control and oppression), which is a viewpoint I'll stick to based on the material I've read - but not one I want mixed up with actually endorsing torture as somehow right or just.

[K. A. Pital]

Torture does work to keep people in line pretty well, but that's not what energiewende said. He said it works to get information despite repeatedly stumbling into the problem of that information being so notoriously unreliable that acting on it (even with inevitably biased checks) results in negative outcomes for the acting party. Unless, of course, torturing to control hasn't been the goal all along - but he denied it.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm in a similar position to loomer- I agree with loomer that torture is effective at intimidating and oppressing the public. And I suspect that in certain conditions tyrannical governments find actual use for information gained from torture- i.e. they hear something from a torture victim that could not have been found out otherwise, or could not be found out easily.

If a torturer working for a tyrant demands that Bork identify the other members of his resistance cell, and Bork spills out a mixed list of true and false names which have to be followed up on... Well, I don't know if you can say that the torture-information was useless to the tyrant because he had to go find corroboration. Often, there are more reliable ways to corroborate any piece of information... but one cannot use them until another source has told you where to look.

So like loomer, I want to point out that torture may accomplish what evildoers want from it (oppression, intimidation, with a side-order of usable information), without getting that position mixed up with any kind of defense of the torture committed by evildoers.

As I said earlier, armed robbery is a way to get money- empirically, you can end up with money by committing armed robbery. That doesn't make it any less of a crime.

[K. A. Pital]

No, that's actually true. And what you say doesn't constitute "defence of torture". If anything, this is the most damning fact about torture, displaying its true goals: the only governments capable of using it in an 'efficient' manner are those that wouldn't care if dozens or thousands of innocents get captured alongside real members of the "resistance cell" (terror cell, Al-Quaeda cell etc.) - which means tyrannical governments.

So torture can be efficient to further the goals of tyranny or dictatorial indifference, where innocence or guilt doesn't matter so as long as some "guilty" parties are locked away along with innocents, making it harder to forment resistance against the government. That is, however, generally counter-productive if we're speaking about police investigations which are meant to figure out the real perpetrators and guilty parties, or if we're speaking about achieving peace in occupied territories, for example - since if you randomly punish people based on torture data, you will quickly alienate a lot of folks and face an ever-recurring resistance. Just as it happened in reality when torture was used throughout the XX century.

It's one thing to say armed robbery can get you money. It's a totally different thing to claim that armed robbery is, say, equal to police enforcement.

[Siege]

As an aside, the point about torture's effectivity at intimidating and oppressing the public is reflected in interesting ways by American TV-shows. I cannot count on one hand the number of times I've heard interrogators in shows like NCIS utter something along the lines of "this is a matter of NATIONAL SECURITY. The PATRIOT ACT applies here. You're going to GUANTANAMO!" Whereupon the usual reply is something along the lines of "dear god please not Guantanamo".

Now sure, NCIS is shitty TV-schlock. But I've often wondered if the writers didn't realize that something had gone terribly wrong with their product and society at that point. Because in that moment Gibbs is completely interchangeable with a KGB interrogator threatening abuse in the basement of Lubyanka.

For those scenes to work the way they do Guantanamo and Lubyanka must in the eyes of TV-writers, and by extension their viewing public, serve the same purpose: the place where the regime abuses its undesirables is so terrifying that just mentioning it makes it into a highly effective tool for keeping the local systems in line.

[bilateralrope]

Would torture even work at solving the "ticking time bomb" scenario ?

Lets say someone is being tortured for the location of a massive bomb. If he's willing to set the bomb in the first place*, I can't see the first location he gives being the truth. But every location he gives must mean a reprieve from the torture, because the location needs to be checked. So his next location will be one that takes longer to check, because that delays the torture more.
Every time he isn't given a reprieve it makes less likely to give the truth, as he becomes aware that the truth will not stop the torture.

Not to mention that this assumes he knows the location in the first place.

*If he wasn't willing, or is having second thoughts, wouldn't torture be more likely to make him think the bomb was a good idea ?

[Simon_Jester]

Would torture even work at solving the "ticking time bomb" scenario ?

Lets say someone is being tortured for the location of a massive bomb. If he's willing to set the bomb in the first place*, I can't see the first location he gives being the truth. But every location he gives must mean a reprieve from the torture, because the location needs to be checked. So his next location will be one that takes longer to check, because that delays the torture more.
Every time he isn't given a reprieve it makes less likely to give the truth, as he becomes aware that the truth will not stop the torture.

Not to mention that this assumes he knows the location in the first place.

*If he wasn't willing, or is having second thoughts, wouldn't torture be more likely to make him think the bomb was a good idea ?

It would almost certainly fail, which is exactly the point.

Also, in terms of motivators for sheer blazing defiance and the will to hold out under torture, you can't get much better than "my hated enemy will have a giant bomb explode right in their faces if I can just hold out under this for X hours, if I can just lie, baffle, bamboozle, or defy them, if I just don't let them break my will in time."

Much of the hopelessness associated with torture seems to come from the idea that it won't ever actually end.