#he is one of the most accurate portrayals of ptsd i have encountered in fiction

[tempestuousserenity]

I will never forgive the 86 fandom for reducing Shin to just a love interest for Lena.

[scripttorture]

Interrogation as Torture

Interrogation is probably the scenario that comes to most Western people’s minds when torture is mentioned. The belief that torture can be used during interrogation is heavily ingrained in Western pop culture whether the story believes it ‘works’ or not.

 I’m going to go over some of the most common misconceptions about what bringing torture to the interrogation table does and does not do.

 Tell the Truth

 ‘Care must be exercised when making use of rebukes, invectives or torture as it will result in his telling falsehoods and making a fool of you.’ Japanese Kempeitai manual found in Burman 1943

 ‘The use of force often has the consequence that the person being interrogated under duress confesses falsely because he is afraid and as a consequence agrees to everything the interrogator wishes.’ Indonesian interrogation manual, East Timor, 1983

 ‘Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from distress.’ CIA Kubark Counterintelligence Manual 1963

 I can’t prove conclusively that in the history of the world torture has never ever once produced accurate information. Overwhelmingly often it does not. There are several reasons why.

 Torture produces a lot of lies. Both people with information and people without information have a good reason to lie under torture. And they both do. The person with information does not want to give it up. The person without information needs to say something to make the torture stop.

 Humans are bad at telling when someone is lying. When tested even people who think they’re good at spotting lies can’t do it consistently. It can be almost impossible to tell who is hiding something and who genuinely doesn’t know what’s going on. A person under torture might have already told the truth and started lying when the interrogator didn’t believe them. Which is exactly what happened to Shelia Cassidy when she was tortured in Chile in the 70s.

 Pain and stress destroy the human memory. Experiments with willing volunteers have repeatedly shown that stress, pain and lack of sleep make it difficult for people to remember. A 2004 paper using US military survival school as the ‘high stress situation’ which simulated capture and interment as a POW (C A Morgan et al, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27, 265-279) found that between 51-68% of soldiers identified the wrong person as their interrogator. Interrogations had lasted four hours with the interrogator shouting at and manhandling the volunteers. The low stress group identified the wrong person 12-38% of the time.

Torture results in loss of public trust. Most police and intelligence investigations live or die on public support. People coming forward voluntarily with accurate information. People reporting on suspects. In the long term torture actively recruits for the opposing ‘side’. According to the IRA this is exactly what happened in Northern Ireland when the British used torture. It also happened in Aden and to a lesser extent Cyprus.

 Torture in short produces more lies than truth and in such a mixture that it can be hard to tell which is which. Because of the pain it causes torture can make it impossible for victims who want to tell the truth to actually do so accurately. And because of the effect it has on communities it often makes it harder to gather accurate information through more reliable sources.

 Accuracy in torture is so poor it is ‘in some cases less accurate than flipping a coin’. (No that isn’t exaggeration, that’s a quote from D Rejali who literally wrote the book)

 The Ticking Bomb

 The famous ‘ticking-bomb’ scenario is a fictional situation (it literally came from a novel, written by a suspected torturer) where a disaster (such as a bomb attack) is known to be approaching and in order to save innocent lives the characters need more intel fast.

 So they start debating whether to use torture.

 Depending on the story and the characters they sometimes do torture. Usually if they do it gives them information they then use to save lives.

 There’s another problem, aside from the total lack of accuracy for information that comes from torture. Torture takes as long or longer than other interrogation techniques.

 According to the CIA’s own records detainees were put through several days of sleep deprivation before interrogation. The Senate Torture Report (testimony from Ali Soufan) estimated that their torture techniques took 30 days.

 According to British records and accounts from the IRA during the Troubles a single torture session by ‘walling’ (sleep deprivation, white noise and stress positions combined) could last between nine and forty three hours.

 I’ve selected the following quotes to give an idea of the time frame for short tortures used in interrogation. Both are from Northern Ireland by Irish men detained by the British. Emphasis is mine.

 ‘One powerfully built RUC detective would keep me pinned in a position while the other one would hold my elbow then press back on my wrist. And that could last for an hour or possibly two hours. And it’s excruciatingly painful, to the extent that I remember after three or four days I would simply go unconscious-’ Tommy McKearney

 ‘When I was taken away from Girdwood to be interned, I thought I had been there for about eight days, but it was only three. I later realised I was only being allowed to sleep for ten minutes at a time.’ Joe Docherty

 Interrogation always takes time. And that time is measured in days not minutes.

 Sanitised Portrayals

  ‘NO useful information so far….He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It’s been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing.’ Senate Torture Report, from quoted emails SSCI 2014, 41-42

 For me this is one of the most noticeable differences between torture in pop culture and torture in reality. Torture in films and books is always sanitised.

 I don’t mean that it isn’t gory or isn’t gory ‘enough’. Blood seems to be a cinematic staple and seeing the hero beaten and bloodied in a dingy lit room has become standard in a certain sort of action story.

 What I’m talking about are the body fluids and products we’re trained to think are less acceptable. Vomit. Urine. Mucus. Faeces.

 I can think of several movies where a ‘good-guy’ gets beaten to a bloody pulp on screen. I can’t think of any where they piss themselves. But losing control of bladder and bowel function seem to be pretty common in real life. A lot of the eyewitness accounts I’ve read about systematic torture mention the smell of urine and shit.

 Vomiting is something I don’t see mentioned as often in survivor accounts but I think it’s very likely to occur frequently because a lot of common methods of torture produce nausea.

The ‘Tough’ Interrogator

 ‘It may be only later, outside of that specific environment, that the torturer may question his or her behaviour, and begin to experience psychological damage resulting from involvement in torture and trauma. In these cases, the resulting psychological symptoms are very similar to those of victims, including anxiety, intrusive traumatic memories and impaired cognitive and social functioning.’ Psychologists Mark Costanzo and Ellen Gerrity.

 ‘Those techniques [CIA ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques] are so harsh it’s emotionally distressing to the people who are administering them.’ Dr James Mitchell, psychologist involved in the CIA’s EIT program.

 ‘We are where we are- and we’re left popping our Prozac and taking our pills at night.’ Anonymous torturer quoted in Cruel Britannia

 There’s a growing body of evidence that torture has a negative psychological effect on the torturer.

 The evidence is for the most part anecdotal, based on patterns emerging across interviews. Torturers, funnily enough, don’t show up in droves for psychological studies. But there is a pattern. One of substance abuse, addiction, PTSD and suicide.

 The cause of these symptoms in torturers is the same thing that causes trauma in people who witness horrific things. It is well known that seeing violent attacks on others can cause trauma in witnesses.

 Humans are empathic creatures.

 There is a measurable, automatic response in the brain to seeing others in pain. We can not control it and we can not stop it. Even when we are told that the other person is anaesthetized our brains still respond to their perceived pain.

 This, combined with the destruction of normal social interaction and dehumanisation, appears in a very real sense to harm torturers.

 If you’re planning to use torture as part of an interrogation scene it’s worth noting that some torturers do believe torture is a useful way to get information, despite the evidence. Some of them cling to the idea that they had to torture, that what they did was useful and saved lives. Some of them seem to overplay the value of torture in order to justify their own actions and jobs.

 None of that makes them immune to the effect of torturing another human being.

 Disclaimer

[Additional Sources-

‘Torture and Democracy’, Princeton, D Rejali (Only order this if you’ll be at home to pick it up, at over 850 pages it’s a monster)

‘Accuracy of eyewitness memory for person encountered during exposure to highly intense stress’, The International Journal of Law and Psychiatry C A Morgan, G Hazlett, A Doran, S Garrett, G Hoyt, P Thomas, M Baranoksi, S M Southwick, 2004 (This team have actually done a series on high stress situations and the effects on memory. Charles Morgan is the first author on this set of papers.)

‘Audacity to Believe’ Cleveland, S Cassidy

‘Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation.’ Harvard University Press, S O’Mara (Highly recommended, reasonably accessible for a layman)

‘Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture.’ Portobello Books, I Cobain (Very good history, although the author doesn’t seem to understand many of the techniques he writes about)

‘What are you feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during Empathy for Pain’, PLoS ONE, C Lamm, H C Nusbaum, A N Meltzoff, J Decety 2007 (The experiments in this paper include brain scans of people seeing photos of a needle and a hand in various different positions, some of which would be painful. There wasn’t much change in brain response if the volunteers were told the hand couldn’t feel pain.)]