Dumb "Dumb Intelligence"

Dumb Intelligence
By Robert Baer TIME Thursday, Apr. 23, 2009
http://tinyurl.com/dkomoc
...when the U.S. began interrogating ... in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing...The wisdom inside the CIA has always been that the best intelligence is obtained through persuasion rather than coercion. ...knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract....we tortured people for almost no verifiable information....The harsh tactics--isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding--...much of it was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations ....suspected that torture can't be relied on to produce more than false confessions--because people will say anything to make the pain stop. ...whether he thought the abusive tactics worked. His answer: to a degree.... Valuable stuff, but stuff that could have been extracted through patient and relentless persuasion.
...former CIA director Michael Hayden asserts that it was only after the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah that authorities learned about Ramzi Binalshibh,...it was because of the waterboarding of Mohammed that U.S. intelligence learned about a "second wave" of attacks planned for after Sept. 11. .... maybe Mohammed made it up to stop the waterboarding.
... But torture won't get us any closer to discovering when they're going to go off.
Baer is a former Middle East CIA field officer and TIME.com's intelligence columnist

***This article is a farrago of internal inconsistency, false distinctions, conflation of disparate goals and unwarranted assumptions.

1) He first tells us that "the CIA had no idea what it was doing" but then appeals to groupthink by pointing out that the conventional "wisdom inside the CIA has always been...persuasion...rather than coercion." Which is it: no idea or wisdom?
Even here, he would be more credible if he said "cross-examination" rather than "persuasion" although the issue is whether coercion is at all persuasive.

2) He seems to conflate, either inadvertently or deliberately, four possible goals of interrogation, especially the more coercive kind.
a) First is punishment. The Constitution, although legalistically applicable only to citizens and permanent residents, prohibits that. Nevertheless, we don't do that to anyone. The standard of "cruel and inhumane" is being dropped ever lower and whether execution is in this category is an issue.
b) Second is terror: beheading, or torturing someone sadistically, terrorizes the victim, if left alive, and those who learn of it, even if not. We do not, should not, do that.
c) Extraction of confessions. Coerced confessions are inadmissible under our legal system and are generally unreliable. Any
confession that stands by itself must be disregarded absolutely.A confession that yields independent evidence of guilt is different: the evidence is admissible under the British system ( not a bad one ) but is often dismissed in the U.S. under the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine. In any case, we have little interest in confessions without information here.
d) Extraction of information. Having dismissed the first three ends of interrogation, we must consider this one more carefully since it is really the issue at hand. Referring to any of the first three is totally beside the point.Baer refers to "almost no verifiable information" but he doesn't know that. Indeed, the only kind of information worth having is what Karl Popper called "falsifiable" information. It is meaningful only if it can be independently verified.If information is obtained that a bomb is ticking behind Door #3, one can look behind #3 and verify it. If it's not, although he asserted it was, he's screwing with the interrogators and he goes back in. Gentle methods of persuasion have the same problem: when the information is "falsified" in the Popperian sense it is either true or not. If Ramzi Binalshibh couldn't be found after being given up by Abu Zubaydah, the information might have been in the tooth fairy category. He did exist, however, and was who he was said to be. If "Mohammed made it up to stop...", we can ask if anything occurred to indicate it was either true or made up. I trust Baer knows the distinction between Type I and Type II errors.

To claim that the methods came from a 1957 memo is irrelevant. Waterboarding is said to have been "discovered" during the Spanish Inquisition ( seeking goal 2c, of course )to trigger a profound feeling of panic in an untrained subject without the permanent damage of the Inquisition's less charitable methods.The danger of too much disclosure of methods is that training is possible and effective in resistance when one knows the limits used. In any case, science knows more about human thinking and motivation and more reliable lie detectors, drugs, etc are being developed. The "humaneness" and effectiveness of interrogation are being developed and eschewing every method is silly.

3) Baer's most unsubstantiated claim is that equivalent information "could have been extracted through patient and relentless persuasion." How patient, how relentless, how true is this assertion? Trial lawyers will tell Baer that they don't "persuade" opposition witnesses on the stand: they cross-examine them trying to elicit contradictions or inadvertent admissions of fact.
However, the witness can't sit there and refuse to answer; the judge has a club with which to coerce both talking (contempt) and truth-telling (perjury.) What does the interrogator do if the subject just refuses to cooperate at all? Mohammed is said to have done this prior to waterboarding, "Just wait and you'll see." While permanent damage of either a physical or psychological sort is to be avoided, and was avoided, making the subject increasingly uncomfortable by "enhanced interrogation" makes it likely that he will say something. Questions must be designed to be falsifiable and then what he says can either be verified or gainsaid. If the former, you've gained something not clearly obtainable from persuasion; if the latter, he goes back to discomfort.
If the subject actually knows nothing of utility, the case of an "innocent subject", at least interrogation can determine if he is telling the truth insofar as he knows it. When sufficient effort has been expended, someone in this situation can be released. Lack of cooperation, however, is invariably an indication that something useful is being withheld.

Within a well-defined ambit of usage, enhanced professional interrogation can be useful and its downside limited. To claim willy-nilly that patient ...persuasion is better in all cases is absurd.****