Enhanced Interrogation Research Articles

Historicizing waterboarding as a severe torture norm

The debate on waterboarding and the wider debate on torture remains fiercely contested. President Trump and large sections of the US public continue to support the use of waterboarding and other so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as part of the ‘War on Terror’, thus putting the anti-torture norm under pressure. This article demonstrates that the re-imagining of waterboarding as ‘torture-lite’ is contradicted by the long history of waterboarding itself. Examining pre-modern uses and descriptions of torture and waterboarding, this article highlights that the post-2001 identification of waterboarding as a relatively benign interrogation technique radically inverts a norm that has predominated for over 600 years. This historical norm unequivocally identifies waterboarding not only as torture but as severe torture. The article highlights the value of historically contextualizing attitudes to torture, reviews how and why waterboarding was downgraded by the Bush Administration, reveals the earliest explicit description of waterboarding from 1384, and argues that the twenty-first-century re-imagining of waterboarding as torture-lite is indicative of the fragility of the anti-torture norm.

Incommunicado detention and torture in Spain, Part III: 'Five days is enough’: the concept of torturing environments

Torture is changing in western societies, evolving from pain-producing torture to more subtle mixed psychological methods that are harder to detect. Despite this, there is not an adequate understanding of the complexities of contemporary psychological techniques used in coercive interrogation and torture. The interrogation and torture techniques used on 45 detainees held in short-term incommunicado detention in Spain during the period 1980-2012 were analyzed. The list of torture categories set out in the Istanbul Protocol (IP) were assessed quantitatively. Software-aided qualitative analysis of the testimonies was conducted, using both inferential and deductive approaches to deduce a classification of torture techniques from the point of view of the survivor. The most frequent methods according to the IP categories used against detainees were isolation and manipulation of environment (100%), humiliation (93%), psychological techniques to break down the individual (91%), threats (89%) and forced positions and physical exercises until extenuation (80%). Additionally, with a frequency of between 51 and 70%, mild but constant blows, being forced to witness the torture of others, hooding (mainly dry asphyxia) and unacceptable undue conditions of detention were also frequent. Sexual torture was also widespread with sexual violence (42%), forced nudity (38%) and rape (7%). Qualitative analysis showed that most detainees were submitted to coercive interrogation using a wide array of deceptive techniques. This is often a central part of the torturing process, frequently used in conjunction with many other methods. It was found that giving false or misleading information or making false accusations was most frequently used, followed by maximization of responsibility or facts and giving false information regarding relatives or friends. Different patterns of harsh interrogation, ill-treatment and torture are described that appear to have been tailored to the profile of Basque detainees. The study shows the need to improve the conceptualization of psychological torture suggested by the IP. Key to this view is the idea that we must not concern ourselves with 'torture methods' but with Torturing Environments. The concept of Torturing Environments is defined and proposed as a focus for future study.

Debates over Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Mental Health Evaluations at Guantánamo

Ethical debates over the use of mental health knowledge and practice at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have mostly revolved around military clinicians sharing detainee medical information with interrogators, falsifying death certificates in interrogations, and disagreements over whether the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) “enhanced interrogation techniques” violated bioethical principles to do no harm. However, debates over the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the mental health evaluations of detainees have received little attention. This paper provides the first known analysis of such debates over MRI use in the case of Abd al-Rahim al- Nashiri. Through a close reading of open-source legal documents such as defense motions, prosecution motions, judge rulings, and al-Nashiri’s mental health evaluation, debates over MRI use become interpretive contests over the very meanings of mental illness and the extent to which MRI results can verify whether he was tortured in CIA custody. Such work can revitalize interest in the neuroethics of national security.

Going beyond Human Terrain System: Exploring Ethical Dilemmas

ABSTRACTModern technology-dominated methods of warfare have proven to be inadequate to counter threats presented by non-state actors. Today’s conflicts are increasingly waged among the people instead of around the people. It is therefore not a surprise that social scientists are recruited by governmental, military, and intelligence institutions. The use of the “Human Terrain System” (HTS) brought to the forefront ethical debates regarding the potential involvement of social sciences and social scientists in various military activities, with an ultimate aim to reduce the pain and suffering of war victims. However, this involvement brought also criticism of such involvement. This article discusses three main ethical concerns associated with HTS, namely, the possible usage of knowledge in enhanced interrogation techniques; the issue of clandestine research; and the sources of funding. Due to ethical controversies, I will propose three models of cooperation between social scientists and governmental, military, and intelligence institutions, which might help them find a common ground. Furthermore, the paper concludes that there is much social scientists can and should do in field work that goes beyond the Human Terrain System. United Nations peacekeeping operations can be a fertile ground for establishing mechanisms that might clarify the role of social scientists in the battlefield.

The American Psychological Association's Hoffman report allegations of my association with the "CIA torture" program.

Until now, I have not responded to the undocumented and untrue portrayal of me in the Hoffman report, or the newspaper and email accounts of my alleged role in “torture.” I have waited several years because I believed that the American Psychological Association leadership would completely disavow the Hoffman report and find a way to restore my reputation as well as that of the other former American Psychological Association presidents and the small number of its senior staff who were also falsely accused. Although this has not yet happened, I remain optimistic that it will. Here I present the facts as they relate to me.

Black sites, “dark sides”: War power, police power, and the violence of the (un)known

The US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture and the Guardian’s exposé of the Chicago Police Department’s “off-the-books interrogation compound” at Homan Square have again thrust torture into debates concerning the nature and limits of state and police violence. Following a longstanding pattern, key actors framed both cases as revelatory and exceptional and used them as fodder for public condemnation and calls for reform. In order to confront and contest similar patterns of facile outrage, we theorize a cultural-cognitive process of disavowal, whereby the inherent violence of the US state is willfully situated by its subjects in politically and culturally redacted black spaces. Here, black spaces allow political subjects to disavow the many horrors—rendition, torture, murder—committed on their behalf and in the name of security. We argue that these are not simply metaphorical, imaginary spaces, but rather material landscapes linking the certainties of US imperial violence to routine and uncontested acts of police violence and the interrogation rooms, jail cells, and prisons of an intensely racialized, yet largely disowned mass-carceral regime. Our aim, then, is to map the state’s black spaces in order to demonstrate the reciprocities between war and police and to situate the politics of redaction within broader systems of violence and dispossession.

Public Reactions to Male Versus Female Terrorism: Experimental Evidence for the Male Warrior Hypothesis.

One of the most consistent findings in the domain of criminal justice is that female and male offenders are perceived differently, often resulting in milder sentencing of women compared to men. Although previous studies have sought to identify factors that shape public reactions to terrorism and support for harsh interrogation techniques in its aftermath, empirical studies on differential reactions to female (vs. male) terrorist violence remain scarce. Here, it is argued that the often-violent evolutionary history of our species has shaped the way in which we perceive and react to female (vs. male) terrorist violence. Based on the framework of coalitional psychology-and specifically, the male warrior hypothesis-the assumption is tested that terror-suspect sex, in interaction with other threat cues such as in- or out-group membership and size of coalition, affects support for interrogational torture. This prediction was tested by conducting a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 2,126 U.S. adults. Results demonstrated that terror-suspect sex significantly shapes reactions to and perceptions of terrorist violence. Further, nuanced responses based on respondent sex revealed that these associations were exclusively driven by male participants. Gender attitudes and mere punitiveness did not account for the findings, suggesting that male coalitional psychology is deeply ingrained and readily activated by cues implying intergroup conflict.

Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art

Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art

Psychological Perspectives on Interrogation

Proponents of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the United States have claimed that such methods are necessary for obtaining information from uncooperative terrorism subjects. In the present article, we offer an informed, academic perspective on such claims. Psychological theory and research shows that harsh interrogation methods are ineffective. First, they are likely to increase resistance by the subject rather than facilitate cooperation. Second, the threatening and adversarial nature of harsh interrogation is often inimical to the goal of facilitating the retrieval of information from memory and therefore reduces the likelihood that a subject will provide reports that are extensive, detailed, and accurate. Third, harsh interrogation methods make lie detection difficult. Analyzing speech content and eliciting verifiable details are the most reliable cues to assessing credibility; however, to elicit such cues subjects must be encouraged to provide extensive narratives, something that does not occur in harsh interrogations. Evidence is accumulating for the effectiveness of rapport-based information-gathering approaches as an alternative to harsh interrogations. Such approaches promote cooperation, enhance recall of relevant and reliable information, and facilitate assessments of credibility. Given the available evidence that torture is ineffective, why might some laypersons, policymakers, and interrogation personnel support the use of torture? We conclude our review by offering a psychological perspective on this important question.

Research-Based Instructions Induce Sensitivity to Confession Evidence

Evidence is mixed on whether or not laypersons have sufficient knowledge of false confession risk factors. Procedural safeguards such as judicial instructions may assist jurors who are unable to effectively evaluate confession evidence. Participants were randomly assigned to one of five conditions that varied in the quality of a confession and the presence of instructions on coercive interrogation techniques. The results indicate that instructions induce sensitivity by altering verdict decisions and perceptions of evidence strength and confession voluntariness in line with the quality of the interrogation. Furthermore, the presence of instructions in low-quality interrogations resulted in participants completely discounting the confession. These findings suggest that research-based instructions on coercive interrogation techniques may be an effective safeguard against the use of potentially unreliable confession evidence.

Human rights abuses at the limits of the law: Legal instabilities and vulnerabilities in the ‘Global War on Terror’

AbstractLaw following and law breaking are often conceptualised as polar opposites. However, authorities in liberal democracies increasingly deploy a strategy of what I callplausible legalityin order to secure immunity and legitimacy for proscribed practices. Rather than ignore or suspend law, they construct legal justifications for human rights abuses and other dubious policies, obscuring the distinction between legal compliance and non-compliance. I argue this is possible because instabilities in legal rules make them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. By tracing American rationales for contentious ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, indefinite detention, and ‘targeted killing’ practices in the ‘Global War on Terror’, I show that law need not always be abandoned or radically reconstituted to achieve troubling ends and that rule structures enable certain patterns of violation while limiting others. The international prohibition on torture is robust and universal, but provides vague definitions open to interpretation. Detention and lethal targeting regulations are jurisdictionally layered and contextually complex, creating loopholes and gaps. The article concludes by reflecting on implications for the protection of human rights. While law is not wholly indeterminate, human rights advocates must constantly advocate shared legal understandings that constrain state violence.

Exploring the Concept of Torture: An Analysis of Kashmir Valley

AbstIndia is considered as world’s largest democracy. The country has a civil society, free media, and independent judiciary. Still, the country is engaged in quotidian violence like torture, which is widely prevalent in the name of national security, investigation crimes, extracting information and punishing criminals. Torture is an instrument of state power in an authoritarian system which applies all means to silence the political opponents or bend them towards rule of law. Nevertheless, torture occurs in the democratic countries in which rule of law is highly respected likely in maintaining peace and public order, national security and fight against terrorism. It is clear that in democracy when the rights of an individual have been weakened and are on the mercy of those who are in power, the result is that quotidian violence and other cruel punishments can occur. Torture is a brutal method of social and political control which relies on complex networks of technology, training, facilitators and perpetrators. It demands classified structures located within enclaves of barbarism in order to achieve its aim of inducing terror. Modern states have built burgeoning detention facilities like immigration centers, prisons and police cells that engage in torture and other cruel, inhuman treatments. The law enforcement agencies engage in torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment in the name of counter-terrorism, security threats and soon. The states use violence like methods to control and terrorize its people to maintain the status quo or to destroy internal or external political, ideological or military threats. The state uses torture and makes it clear that enhanced interrogation techniques make a person from kidnapping to extraordinary rendition, from citizen to unlawful enemy combatant and from human to terrorist. The valley of Kashmir faces torture and other cruel inhuman treatments since the insurgency began in 1990’s, with the violent uprising and have elicited terrorism. Methods of torture are used as a tool of counter-insurgency by Indian security forces. The government of India used all efforts to crush the movement of self-determination of Kashmir. The strong response from India violates the human rights and international humanitarian laws. The law enforcement agencies, army, and para-military forces have engaged in reprisal attacks against civilians resulting in indiscriminate firing, search operations, gang-rapes and burning of houses in the valley. After 1990, the situation in the Kashmir valley deteriorated and Kashmir was declared a disturbed area and laws like Disturbed Area Act (DAA) 1990, Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 1990 and Public Safety Act (PSA) 1978 were imposed. The purpose of the paper is to examine the concept of Torture in Kashmir.

Revenge versus rapport: Interrogation, terrorism, and torture.

This review begins with the historical context of harsh interrogation methods that have been used repeatedly since the Second World War. This is despite the legal, ethical and moral sanctions against them and the lack of evidence for their efficacy. Revenge-motivated interrogations (Carlsmith & Sood, 2009) regularly occur in high conflict, high uncertainty situations and where there is dehumanization of the enemy. These methods are diametrically opposed to the humanization process required for adopting rapport-based methods-for which there is an increasing corpus of studies evidencing their efficacy. We review this emerging field of study and show how rapport-based methods rely on building alliances and involve a specific set of interpersonal skills on the part of the interrogator. We conclude with 2 key propositions: (a) for psychologists to firmly maintain the Hippocratic Oath of "first do no harm," irrespective of perceived threat and uncertainty, and (b) for wider recognition of the empirical evidence that rapport-based approaches work and revenge tactics do not. Proposition (a) is directly in line with fundamental ethical principles of practice for anyone in a caring profession. Proposition (b) is based on the requirement for psychology to protect and promote human welfare and to base conclusions on objective evidence. (PsycINFO Database Record

Lay perceptions of interrogation techniques: Identifying the role of Belief in a Just World and Right Wing Authoritarianism

AbstractFalse confessions due to overtly coercive interrogation techniques have led to the development of more ethically‐minded alternative techniques. Several studies have surveyed the public about their perceptions of confession‐oriented techniques (e.g., Leo & Liu, ), although none have examined the use of information gathering and strategic interviewing techniques or individual differences in such perceptions. Thus, the current study assessed public perceptions of a wide variety of techniques by recruiting a total of 332 participants. Results indicated that our participants would rather risk releasing a guilty person than convicting an innocent. Overall, confession‐oriented techniques were rated the least acceptable and effective across participants. However, perceptions of these techniques varied as a function of Belief in a Just World (BJW; Lipkus, ) and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA; Zakrisson, ). Specifically, those higher in these two individual differences found confession‐oriented techniques to be both more acceptable and effective than those scoring lower on these measures. The results speak to the importance of individual differences and the potential for such differences to bias juror decision‐making when interrogation evidence is at stake.

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

Medical Doctors in Torture Program. The Need for Virtue Ethics in Medical Conscience Formation

In December 2014, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released their analysis of the summary of the Committee Report of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. PHR focused on the involvement of health care professionals in the CIA torture program, concluding that the health professionals’ commissions and omissions violated the prescriptions of many fundamental bioethical documents, including international declarations of bioethics and medical research ethics. The medical doctors’ involvement evokes some thoughts concerning bioethical education. It seems that instead of developing virtues through practicing morally good habits, the experience of clinical training undermines the moral ideals that medical students identified themselves with at the commencement of their medical education. The hostile response they sometimes get from their mentors when trying to question morally troubling situations may shape the habit of ‘turning a blind eye’ to unethical behaviour, since the students do not want to jeopardize their grades and future medical career. Maybe it was the development of this habit and the failure to develop the habit of moral courage instead that prevented the medical doctors participating in torture programs from defending moral ideals of their profession more effectively.

Regulating the Commander in Chief: Some Theories

Recent events have caused scholars to consider a long ignored issue: the relation between the commander in chief (CINC) and Congress's powers to regulate the armed forces and captures. The famous Bybee memorandum brought this issue to the fore when it asserted that Congress could not interfere with "the President's direction of such core war matters such as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. The memo's critics scoffed at this claim, insisting that Congress may regulate the detention of enemy soldiers. With their articles in this issue, Dean Harold Koh, Neil Kinkopf, and others have added their voices to the clamor against the Bybee memo.Although one might generate any number of theories about the interaction of the Commander in Chief Clause and Congress's war regulatory powers, four seem most plausible. This essay sketches these theories with sufficiently broad strokes that none of these sketches will satisfactorily answer questions about who may regulate certain aspects of a war. In particular, these theories will tell us nothing about whether the Bybee memo or its critics have the better argument about whether Congress can limit the CINC's ability to order coercive interrogation techniques.First, it is possible to suppose that congressional and presidential powers do not overlap at all. A second thesis (the Coterminous Thesis) posits that the powers are coterminous, or at least largely so. A third possibility is what we might call the Partial Overlap. It is possible to suppose that the two powers overlap in some ways, but that each also has an exclusive sphere. The final theory posits that the President has all the powers that Congress has and more, but when Congress acts in its more limited sphere, its rules always trump the President's. Arguments about the structural Constitution that seek to further a particular moral view are likely to be utterly feckless. Torture may be an evil necessary for the successful prosecution of war against Al-Qaeda, or an unspeakable act that benefits absolutely no one. Whatever it is, these difficult moral questions have little to do with whether the Constitution enables the President to order the use of coercive interrogation techniques in the face of a statute that prohibits such means.

Can Expert Testimony Sensitize Jurors to Coercive Interrogation Tactics?

ABSTRACTLay knowledge concerning false confession risk factors appears to be insufficient to safeguard against wrongful convictions, and research on false confession expert testimony has not led to a clear understanding of its impact on juror decision making. Thus, the current study sought to clarify whether expert testimony can induce sensitivity to a wide variety of false confession risk factors. Furthermore, jurors bring a variety of predispositions into the courtroom that may shape the way they view evidence. Yet, little research has evaluated the impact of individual differences in cases involving confession evidence. The current study assessed 330 participants’ self-reported likelihood of falsely confessing. These participants subsequently read an abbreviated criminal trial transcript where the defendant confessed to committing murder, but later recanted. We varied police use of four psychologically coercive interrogation techniques as well as the presence of expert testimony during the trial. Generally, participants were not sensitive to variations in the psychological coerciveness of the interrogation with or without an expert. However, self-reported likelihood of falsely confessing influenced perceptions of the detective and confession voluntariness, which in turn predicted verdict decisions. Increasing belief that one could falsely confess decreased the likelihood of conviction by decreasing perceptions of detective credibility and confession voluntariness. The results suggest the need to take into account individual differences of jurors who evaluate confession evidence. Current remedies may also need modification to assist jurors in deciphering confession evidence quality.

Interrogation After 9/11: The Law on the Books and the Law on the Ground

Since the Abu Ghraib photographs were released, there has been no shortage of books and articles alleging that U.S. interrogation practices violated military, civilian and international law. Writers have offered two causal narratives to account for the illegalities. At one extreme, it is claimed that a few “bad apples” abused detainees in knowing violation of clear interrogation law. At the other extreme is the claim that high level officials ordered soldiers to use abusive interrogation techniques. What both accounts have in common is the assumption that the “law” against which interrogators’ conduct should be measured consists only of formal prohibitions – the ones officials claim the “bad apples” violated – or formal orders – the ones that military interrogators claim they were following. These accounts have the virtue of being simple and straightforward; of fingering the bad guys and providing solutions that fit clear legal paradigms. The problem, however, is that both explanations are false. They are false because their underlying assumption – that law consists only of formal rules – is false. In fact, however, the causal relationship between official interrogation rules and on-the-ground conduct was much more complicated than these accounts acknowledge. There were not one but two sets of interrogation laws in play: formal or de jure interrogation law – as laid out in official legal documents – and de facto interrogation law – as it was understood and practiced in the field. In this article I chronicle the rich and complex relationship between de jure and de facto interrogation law. This detailed historical account, drawn largely from the government’s own investigations, traces how the legal positions contained in Army documents, military orders, legal memoranda, and policy statements made (and or lost) their way from the halls of Washington D.C. to the interrogation cells of far-flung U.S. detention centers. Many of the abuses were not specifically authorized by the formal rules on the books. In many cases, however, interrogators believed they were acting lawfully and at the behest of commanders and high level officials. This historical account is a classic example of the (sometimes) dissonance and (sometimes) harmony occurring in the space between de jure pronouncements and de facto practices and the necessity of attending to the law as it was understood as well as practiced by actors on the ground. My account aims to focus attention on the right issues. The cause of the interrogation abuse was neither bad apples who flouted the rules nor malicious officials who ordered detainees to be abused. The causes were more complicated, which also makes potential solutions more complicated. It will not do simply to punish the individuals who engaged in the abusive conduct (although some individual sanctions are appropriate). Nor will it do simply to change the formal rules on the books (although clarifying the rules is an important first step). Any successful approach to preventing abuses in the future must take account of the mechanisms that gave rise to the de facto interrogation law that sanctioned what the formal law forbade. My account also has implications for assessing blame in connection with interrogation abuses that have already occurred. Is there a difference – in terms of causal responsibility and culpability – between the official who directly orders abuse and the one who contributes to an environment in which it is de facto practiced? I believe so, but this does not mean that the latter is off the hook. Top officials who pressed interrogators to obtain intelligence but failed to provide operational guidance and lawyers who declared that traditional rules of international and domestic law were not applicable cannot claim that interrogators who followed their lead were just a bunch of bad apples.

Unbalanced Policy Priorities and the Interrogation of Terror Suspects

Why do states shift from opposition to torture to its employment in the face of widespread abhorrence and claims that it generates unreliable information? The expected value of acting upon unreliable information depends on the state’s appraisal of the type of error it might be committing. States may value avoiding Type I errors, which result from acting upon incorrect intelligence, differently than avoiding Type II errors, which result from failing to act on an undetected threat. Interrogations yield a mix of truth and lies; operations employing this information will avoid making Type II errors but will also make Type I errors. A state’s preference over error type changes with circumstances (as we show, occurs in Turkey and the United States), leading states to adopt coercive interrogation techniques despite secular abhorrence of torture. Our results suggest anti-torture advocacy might be more effective targeting preferences over error types than reinforcing anti-torture moral imperatives.