Torture revelations

Our whole approach is painfully wrong, as we give them prayer rugs and flat-screen TV's. We treat the enemy like moral equals instead of trying to crush their illegal-combatant souls, while they have no qualms about torturing and decapitating Western humanitarian aid workers on camera. Indeed, they revel in it.

I'm just buying the line on how it's sold. Pull someone's fingernails out and sodomize them, then get world peace? Ok I'm in.

I just realized that this thread offers a good opportunity to repost the best politics/policy blog post in the history of the internet, by Daniel Davies:

The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA – Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101

Literally people have been asking me: “How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?” No honestly, they have. I’d love to show you the emails I’ve received, there were dozens of them, honest. Honest. Anyway, I note that “errors of prewar planning” is now pretty much a mainstream stylised fact, so I suspect that it might make some small contribution to the commonweal if I were to explain how it was that I was able to spot so early that this dog wasn’t going to hunt. I will struggle manfully with the savage burden of boasting, self-aggrandisement and ego-stroking that this will necessarily involve. It’s been done before, although admittedly by a madman in the process of dying of syphilis of the brain. Sorry, where was I?

Anyway, the secret to every analysis I’ve ever done of contemporary politics has been, more or less, my expensive business school education (I would write a book entitled “Everything I Know I Learned At A Very Expensive University”, but I doubt it would sell). About half of what they say about business schools and their graduates is probably true, and they do often feel like the most collossal waste of time and money, but they occasionally teach you the odd thing which is very useful indeed. Here’s a few of the ones I learned which I considered relevant to judging the advisability of the Second Iraq War.

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. We were discussing the subject of accounting for stock options at technology companies. There was a live debate on this subject at the time. One side (mainly technology companies and their lobbyists) held that stock option grants should not be treated as an expense on public policy grounds; treating them as an expense would discourage companies from granting them, and stock options were a vital compensation tool that incentivised performance, rewarded dynamism and innovation and created vast amounts of value for America and the world. The other side (mainly people like Warren Buffet) held that stock options looked awfully like a massive blag carried out my management at the expense of shareholders, and that the proper place to record such blags was the P&L account.

Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were. Since the tech companies’ point of view appeared to be that if they were ever forced to account honestly for their option grants, they would quickly stop making them, this offered decent prima facie evidence that they weren’t, really, all that fantastic.

Application to Iraq. The general principle that good ideas are not usually associated with lying like a rug1 about their true nature seems to have been pretty well confirmed. In particular, however, this principle sheds light on the now quite popular claim that “WMDs were only part of the story; the real priority was to liberate the Iraqis, which is something that every decent person would support”.

Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford’s Law.

Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to justify a war” or even “some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs”. My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.

The Vital Importance of Audit. Emphasised over and over again. Brealey and Myers has a section on this, in which they remind callow students that like backing-up one’s computer files, this is a lesson that everyone seems to have to learn the hard way. Basically, it’s been shown time and again and again; companies which do not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve.

I hope I don’t have to spell out the implications of this one for Iraq. Krugman has gone on and on about this, seemingly with some small effect these days. The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of “giving known liars the benefit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.

And so the lesson ends. Next week, perhaps, a few reflections on why it is that people don’t support the neoconservative project to bring democracy to the Middle East (a trailer for those who can’t wait; the title is going to be something like “If You Tell Lies A Lot, You Tend To Get A Reputation As A Liar”). Mind how you go.

1 We also learned in accounting class that the difference between “making a definite single false claim with provable intent to deceive” and “creating a very false impression and allowing it to remain without correcting it” is not one that you should rely upon to keep you out of jail. Even if your motives are noble.
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Particularly relevant in this case are the first and third points: 1) good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance and 3) the vital importance of audit.

The fact that proponents of torture were obviously and massively lying about its alleged usefulness should have been a dead giveaway that, regardless of whether or not you have moral objections to torture, torture is useless and was, if anything, getting in the way of gathering good intelligence on average. If torture worked as an intelligence gathering tool the torturers would find some clear-cut examples with ample proof that could be publicly revealed with minimal national security concerns rather than repeatedly uttering vague assertions without any evidence and a constant invocation national security as a reason that nothing can be revealed.

And, of course, the vital importance of audit speaks for itself in this case. No oversight means bad, bad behavior.

TLDR

Those are some Daytonesque thread titles.

All I will be saying on the topic is this: The Buck Stops Here. Bush and Cheney need to go behind bars after a full public trial. It's the only course of action that'll save the US' reputation as a country abiding its own laws. While everybody and their mothers kinda knew what was happening, this report puts it black on white. Time to act or lose any moral high ground that may be left after 2003.

I'm on the outrage bandwagon along with everybody else, but let's not try to convince ourselves that this report is in any way difinative. First of all, it was totally partisan (I know...shocker). Additionally, the talk I'm hearing is that the Senate didn't interview a lot of the people they're throwing under the bus to get their side of the story...and they can't even come out and defend themselves because of non-disclosure laws. True, it's looking like the CIA did some irredemable things whether or not the committee is right about no actionable intelligence being found through torture, but this report still kind of stinks a little.

Is it perfect? No. But I don't think we'd be having this conversation if they'd waited for a republican majority in the senate, and that stinks even more.

Well first of all, we've been having this discussion for the better part of a decade or more, and currently this is less a discussion and is more a bunch of politicians saying, "AHAAAA!". But all I'm saying is that it's hard to claim that this report puts it all out there "in black and white" when it's anything but bipartisan, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know, and we still have the Democrats in the Senate claiming that no actionable intelligence came from torture, and we still have the CIA claiming that it did.

Something I've always wondered about...

Torture has been around for thousands of years.

And it's not until this generation that certain groups suddenly decided it doesn't work?

No one in thousands of years figured that out?

Well, assuming none of the twenty people killed during the Salem witch trials were really witches...what do you think?

Human knowledge in all kinds of areas has grown exponentially because of the communication age. We have the tools now to effectively evaluate things that, for thousands of years, we didn't.

Because in thousands of years no one noticed it didn't work?

This isn't something you need technology to figure out.

Why do you assume nobody argued against the efficacy of torture before the current generation? Did you bother to check first?

Torture does work. If you know what you're doing. If it didn't then it wouldn't be used.

That said there is really no need to use it given that we have other methods that work just as well.

Hmmm.......it grew exponentially, fair enough. Thus 500 years ago we didn't have the wherewithal to figure it out. 50 years ago same thing. And apparently didn't have it 1 year ago, but we do today? Just askin'

People have known that torture is of dubious effectiveness for more than just the past year.

Yes I know that. I was being sarcastic.

Ah, OK.

I already know the one sure-fire method to get anyone, anywhere to talk. I lived to tell the tale, but the shame will be with me forever. Instead of Bill Murray - we get his half brother. No shit!
Instead of Rodney Dangerfield - we get Jackie Mason. No shit again.
I will stop now before my PTSD kicks in.

Wow. You can't seriously believe that, could you?

Substitute "prayer" or "astrology" or "homeopathy" for "torture" just to show how much of an imbecile you'd have to be to believe your own argument. People, for no good reason, widely do a seemingly infinite variety of things that don't work.

You're an idiot. Torture works. If you know what you're doing. That's why so many countries use it or have used it in the past.

And like I said we now have tools to use and that work without the torture being needed.

If you steal a bunch of money from the mob or a Mexican drug cartel and they catch you, I'm pretty sure you'll become convinced that torture works pretty darn well.

When did it work during the witch trials in the early modern period? You've got 300 years and 40,000 people executed for witchcraft to work with and you only have to come up with one actual witch.

Ahh yes the old let's use a stupid example from way back then knowing there is no way anyone can prove anything......

Are you saying it's an invalid question because we have no proof that they weren't witches?

Okay, Dayton. Show us.

I'm saying it's stupid because no one is talking about witches other then idiots such as yourself.

We are talking about torture of people for information of things which exist in the world.

If all you're going to do is be a bitch like Garamet and refer back to witches instead of having an actual conversation then please feel free to set yourself on fire and die. Like a witch.

And as I've said twice now and I will say it a third time: There is no need to torture in 2014 because we have far better methods of gaining information now.

To be fair, I have no doubt that torture works at getting the answers that you want to get...and sometimes the answers that you want to get happen to be the truth. But that doesn't seem like a very reliable way of getting answers. Even a blind pig can find an acorn every once in a while.

So torture only works when they tell you things that happen to be right? Well duh. The torture during the witch trials would have worked if any of them would have been a witch.

Why do you keep repeating that when nobody's arguing against it?