Well, having your thumbs cut off or fingernails pulled out is causing permanent physical damage. Even needles under fingernails or electric shock treatment or a plain old beating with a rubber hose is going to cause temporary damage that will heal in time, so the fact that this journalist is as whole, physically, at the end of his ordeal as he is at the beginning is obviously a major distinction between what he went through and what most people think of as torture.

And it probably does degrade the experiences of what people who have been tortured in physically damaging ways when waterboarding is referred to as torture.

I think that the term coercive interrogation is a useful one. Making the subject extremely uncomfortable, or feel that he will drown, is obviously not something that we should be blase about. But it's not torture.

Stephen,

I think that's about right. This guy has clearly not been tortured by any reasonable definition of the term.

If you are laughing it off moments afterwards, it's not torture.

I also don't think we should lose sight of the whole basis of interrogation. If your subject was willing, voluntarily, to tell you what you wanted to know, it wouldn't be called interrogation at all, let alone coercive interrogation.

Re: the 'laughing off' of the treatment - it's possible for him to laugh it off because the context in which the soldier receives the treatment is markedly different from the context in which a prisoner receives it. The latter will know less about the procedure, I'd imagine, and is less likely to be able to think to himself "It's OK, it feels terrible but you won't drown". The soldier knows he will be alive at the end of the interrogation; the prisoners do not.

I accept that that's probably why it's relatively effective, but I'm not sure it's correct to say that because the soldier laughed it off, it's closer to acceptable. Better to see the response of a prisoner, and the (largely psychological) damage it causes him.

That's to say nothing of the old conundrum about the efficacy of torture. Victims will give the answer they think interrogators want to hear, which is not necessarily synonymous with 'the truth'...

Hi, Jo, by the way!

@stephen+Cleanthes

It is a very narrow view of torture to suggest that if it doesn't do permanent harm then it isn't torture. Torture has nothing at all to do with pain. Some people have an extremely high pain threshold. If pain was the only issue then you couldn't torture them. Torture is enitrely about fear. In the case of waterboarding, the fear is drowning. The guy could laugh it off because he knew that they wouldn't really let him die. If you are on the receiving end of real torture then you have no such safety net. You could also argue that abusive husbands/fathers don't *really* hurt the kids as there is no permanent damage.

Torture is fear. Fear of death, fear of pain, fear for your children, etc.

There are a couple of extremely successful torture techiques that have been used on me in primary school. In that environment they are not scary, but if they are used in anger it will destroy you. One is the technique where you are forced to stand against a wall, knees bent, as if sitting, and you are whipped if you move. Within a few minutes, your legs are on fire. I couldn't imagine lasting an hour of that. Another is to hold your arms straight up in the air. Again, there is punishment if you drop them. Same again, it would kill me.

Have you ever, even as a child, been locked in a cupboard? At the time, did you believe that you would be let out eventually? Have you ever got yourself stuck somewhere but nobody knew you were there? Can you remember the fear?

Another example - Physically, what is the difference
between sex and rape? (assuming it is non-violent)

Look at Bond films. Bond can handle any sort of physical torture (see the last Brosnan film and the testicle torture in the last one) but cannot handle being told that their loved ones are going to die.

I suppose the argument for torture isn't all that different to that of the death penalty. If you genuinely believe that the person being executed/tortured is *the baddy* then you can sleep at night. If you thing that there is doubt..

"The guy could laugh it off because he knew that they wouldn't really let him die."

Then why do we spend a great deal of time and effort putting a sizeable chunk of our front line soldiers through training courses on resistance to interrogation that use exactly these methods?

Whilst I agree that fear is necessary for torture, it is not itself sufficient. I don't think appealling to Bond films is necessarily all that illuminating either.

I think this is exactly why Juliette Kayyem was right. Looking back over this thread, I think the comments about whether the practice is acceptable are illuminating while the comments about whether the practice falls within the definition of "torture" really lead nowhere. Rather than limiting ourselves to just the two categories "unacceptable torture" and "acceptable non-torture", we should consider the other two categories of "acceptable torture" and "unacceptable non-torture".

I think Stephen's right that that the term "coercive interrogation" is a useful one. Those who oppose the term think that claiming that something isn't torture is identical to claiming that it's acceptable. But surely it's useful to draw a distinction between interrogating people by damaging them and interrogating them without damaging them, without necessarily saying that one is good and the other is bad.

> You could also argue that abusive husbands/fathers don't *really* hurt the kids as there is no permanent damage.

But no-one's claiming that waterboarding doesn't hurt. The suggestion is that it's a bad thing that is less bad than torture — just as psychologically abusive fathers are bad but arguably not as bad as fathers who actually maim their kids.


> it's possible for him to laugh it off because the context in which the soldier receives the treatment is markedly different from the context in which a prisoner receives it.

That's true, of course, but my point is that, if his fingers were being broken, the context would still be different — he might be perfectly aware that he was going to be rushed to a decent hospital immediately afterwards — but he still wouldn't be laughing it off.


> That's to say nothing of the old conundrum about the efficacy of torture. Victims will give the answer they think interrogators want to hear

I'm not an interrogator myself, but some have spoken out against this over the last couple of years, claiming that it's a bit of an urban myth. The trick, apparently, lies in asking questions where the interrogatee doesn't know what answer the interrogators want. Also, as far back as WW2, Turing and his colleagues developed some quite astounding logic for use in military intelligence, whereby you can analyse the messages the enemy want you to get in order to figure out the likely underlying truth. It's wrong to assume that receiving incorrect information from an enemy is useless; it is often very useful.

(Hi, Andy.)

Another thing that occurs to me:

> It is a very narrow view of torture to suggest that if it doesn't do permanent harm then it isn't torture.

When it comes to definitions, narrow views are a good thing. The broader your view of something, the less useful the definition. Look at the word "militant": by adopting it as their preferred term for "terrorist", the BBC have completely destroyed its usefulness. Does it refer to people who would like to bring about Socialism through mass trades union striking and civil disobedience or to people who strap bombs to mentally disabled people in order to kill infidels? In this context, taking a narrow view involves drawing a distinction between those two things.

It is a very narrow view of torture to suggest that if it doesn't do permanent harm then it isn't torture

And it's a spectacularly - some might say ludicrously - broad view of torture to include treatment whose ill effects last no more than 5 mins.