This post presents a false choice.  The real choice here was whether the guy should have been interrogated before or after a Miranda reading; it was not a choice between Miranda or torture.  It would still be respecting his rights if he was interrogated without Miranda, the statements would merely not be allowed to be used against him in court.  AM is just misleading her readers about the nature of the debate, to their detriment.

Wow, are you illiterate?  I’m not talking about false choices or even debating this issue with nutbar conservatives.  That it was even brought up is a joke.  There is no good faith conservative argument on this, so hair-splitting is stupid.  It’s all a distraction technique to even bring it up.

But the guy cooperated after getting Mirandized, anoNY.

I think you can make TWO points in a post without misleading your readers.  1) Mirandizing suspects isn’t some awful impediment to justice.  2) The assumption that torture is in any way helpful is a weird assumption.

For what it’s worth, the most recent World of Warcraft expansion includes MULITPLE instances of the player torturing enemies to extract accurate information from them.  It’s ludicrous, and to my knowledge unprecedented in an otherwise pretty decently moral game.

Well, aside from an early instance of executing political prisoners who might otherwise have escaped capital punishment.

I was mistaken, sorry about that.

I was thinking about this the other night when I happened upon the 1993 Western “Unforgiven” while channel surfing. I suppose it would also be interesting to re-visit depictions of torture in other pre-9/11 popular culture documents as well.

Near the end of the movie, the Gene Hackman character tortures the Morgan Freeman character to find out information about the Clint Eastwood character. Two things stuck out about this sequence for me. The first, which supports Amanda’s point, was the underlying assumption that torture works. The more Freeman got whipped, the more truths he let spill out about Eastwood.

The second, more intriguing aspect, however, was the thematic purpose of torture in the film. Hackman tortures Freeman in order to further convince us who the bad guy is. The film as a whole interrogates the nature of violence and the moral ambiguity of the main characters. We’re supposed to be rooting for Eastwood, obviously, but he’s not exactly a White Hat. As a younger man, he had been a murderer and what we would nowadays call a terrorist. Hackman is the sheriff, but he’s got a sadistic streak of his own.

There’s no question that his use of torture resolves much of the moral ambiguity and lets us know for sure he’s the bad guy. Torture used to equal wrong. End of discussion. But those days are long gone, I guess.

no, AM merely neglected to complete the republican thought process (an oxymoron, but i digress): no miranda rights, torture him, try him in a military court, where they think the results of a “confession” from torture will be admissable. since these are mostly the same chickenhawks who bailed from service because “they had better things to do”, they don’t realize the UCMJ also has rules of evidence, not dissimilar to those of civilian courts: information gleaned under “duress” (read: torture) isn’t admissable.

i must be watching all the wrong shows. say what you will about dick wolf (and jeralyn merrit certainly does), but his “Law & Order” franchise tends to stick to the law: suspects get read their miranda warnings, they aren’t tortured to get info, and use of such methods normally results in evidence being tossed out, and the cop perpetrator being punished. the same is true of both the CSI and NCIS series.

It’s such a problem that TV Tropes has an entry for it.

TV Tropes has an entry for everything.

It really pissed me off when Fringe did this crap in its first season. However, space-opera TV has had a fairly good record on dealing with torture in a mature and responsible way (ie, as either ineffective or the result of sadism rather than genuine interrogation). See Babylon 5’s Intersections In Real Time and ST: TNG’s Chain of Command or even Farscape’s Aurora Chair episodes… hell, ALL of Battlestar Galactica it seemed sometimes. Even Firefly’s “pain is scary” bit kind of fits in.

Tivo has been presenting us with episodes of probably the greatest cop show of all time, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and I’ve started to notice that even that show is a little too fond of smashing suspects’ heads into walls and tables during interrogations.  However, it doesn’t necessarily seem to make the interrogations any more successful.

I was never huge on NYPD Blue, but one of their most famous episodes was “Lost Israel,” where Bobby Simone induces the suspect to confess, not with violence, but with empathy.  He pretends to understand and be sympathetic to a particularly creepy child molester.  It’s really, really difficult for him and he has to go off to a different room and rant about it to his colleagues, but he gets the confession.

You might look into the British original version of Life on Mars (I’ve never seen the US version, but I hear it ended very differently). The premise of the show is that a 21st century cop is hit by a car and wakes up in the 1970s. The writers used this scenario to explore the ways that policing changed between the 70s and the present day (=more violence, racism, sexism in 70s) with the main character trying to inject some 00s policing into the beat-the-suspects culture he found himself it. It’s also, however, a commentary (full of visual puns and references) on cop shows - especially old British cop shows like The Sweeney - and the image of policing they put forward. Over the course of the show it was made very clear that the writers were operating on that self-aware level as well and it’s interesting to see how they manipulate the main character into accepting some bits of the more violent policing style while still maintaining his ethics.

I think TV shows are kind of a red herring in this case.  When I was a kid, I assumed there was sound in space, because Star Wars portrayed it as such.  When I started learning about sound waves and vacuums in school, I had the choice of either discarding my science books in favor of my TV, or prioritizing reality over fiction.  Captured terrorists present torture apologists with a similar choice, but reality is messier than fiction, so torturers jettison reality.  That willingness to discard inconvenient facts, I think, is the real issue, not what Jack Bauer does on TV.

Part of the problem of engaging in the debate over the usefulness of torture is that by doing so, we implicitly cede part of the argument. Whether or not torture is “effective” (for whatever definition of effective is being proffered) is nearly irrelevant to the question of whether we ought to do it. Torturing people degrades not only the victims but the perpetrators as well; if we allow torture to take place, what makes us better than the other guy? Torture has no place whatsoever in any society with pretensions to a humane civilization, and I wish our political leaders would stand up and speak that moral language once in a while.

There’s nothing you can do: the vast majority of people accept something on da telebision simply because it’s on da telebision, as long as it’s within the understood range of human ability (and torture is safely within that range). And the more dramatic the scenario, the more they’re gonna buy the trope.

You can show them interviews with Mossad interrogators who say point-blank it isn’t effective; you can show them someone like Hitchens changing his mind about “mild” torture; you can ask them if we really want our government to act like the Iranian or Saudi ones; you can talk about the tradition of Magna Carta —whatever you do, people who don’t read or know history (and the surveys indicate that this describes most conservatives) will tend to believe the military and spy shows, the cop shows, the pundits.

However, space-opera TV has had a fairly good record on dealing with torture in a mature and responsible way (ie, as either ineffective or the result of sadism rather than genuine interrogation)

Agreed, but sci-fi is for nerds and weaklings and pointy-headed intellectuals who think too much, amirite?

I was never huge on NYPD Blue, but one of their most famous episodes was “Lost Israel,” where Bobby Simone induces the suspect to confess, not with violence, but with empathy.

And even more effective are ruses, the favourite interrogation method of police departments, which usually deal with, shall we say, less sophisticated suspects. In the last season of “The Wire” they had a sequence (based on an actual incident) where the cops fooled a “corner kid” involved in a shooting into thinking a copying machine was a lie detector to turn over on his accomplice. Which seems utterly ridiculous and foolhardy, until you consider that these cops have given some thought to their subject, and understand that he’s likely never set foot in an office or has any interest in media that depicts office life.

But no, easier to slam heads against the wall to get someone to turn on a friend.

I am sure that this will not be all that shocking to most readers of this blog, but: “The Ticking Time Bomb” scenario is bullshit. There are just too many variables. How do you know (without a doubt)a suspect has information pertaining to an imminent attack? Maybe they don’t know anything. Maybe they have been fed misinformation by someone else. Beat on a guy long enough and he’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear (most of the time). There, I feel better now.

That having been said, great post. I agree that popular media has significant influence on our perception of torture and it’s supposed effectiveness. If you don’t think about it much torture seems like it ought to work( leaving aside for a moment the morality aspect). If I were being tortured; would I talk? Probably. I think many TV viewers don’t give the idea much more thought than that. And besides we never torture innocent people, right?

schism, I think there’s another component, which is everytime you see violence, you become desensetized to it. 

Anecdata: The Road Warrior was gruesome to me as a teen.  Then I saw Robocop one week at Sunday Flicks at college followed by The Road Warrior the next week.  TRW didn’t seem so bad anymore for two reasons: 1. I’d already seen it, so things such as slicing off fingers with a metal boomerang weren’t as shocking or as difficult to see a second time. 2. Robocop upped the violence, so RW isn’t as bad in comparison.

Even though the movies can’t change your morals all by themselves, they make accepting violence easier.  It takes more to shock you the next time.  Once you have violence as an essential part of your entertainment, it’s not so far from making “bad guys” the protagonists, and then not so far from making “good guys” torturers.

My kids aren’t allowed to see PG-13 movies, much less R-rated ones and their TV diet is restricted for just this reason.  My kids are also oddities, as most of their classmates have seen violent crimes as entertainment from at least age 6 on.  I worry about this, b/c these people will grow up, and who’s telling them that good guys don’t torture?  It’s just not going to be as shocking or upsetting to them b/c they’ve seen it all before.  Yeah, it’s pretend-like sound in space-except it’s a constant drone of violence as a proper solution.

Jerry Vinokurov FTW, btw.

And this is why everyone should watch Burn Notice instead.

“L&O;” is a notable exception to the rule.  I considered mentioning it, but thought it was too much of an aside.  “L&O;” is a good influence in many ways, but it also means that other cop shows deliberately flout its conventions to be edgy.  Which isn’t to say that I hate that as a viewer.  I love edgy!  “The Shield” is fucking awesome, even as it’s unbelievably silly in parts.  But it really does make you realize how “L&O;” created a standard that everyone else is reacting to.

Homicide: Life on the Streets is soooo good and that show is all about the interrogations. I remember them hitting someone every so often but mostly I remember them getting confessions through a mixture of empathy and fear of a worse sentence.

In a way the antidote to torture is effective is 1984. Maybe its a bit of a cliche to go back to that but in the book (I remember the film less well) they showed that torture was only good for brutalizing someone and making the torturer into an worse human being who gets off on said brutalization. There’s no reason they couldn’t do that in a show.

That and torture probably does work to an extent. If they are torturing someone and they want to know, “where did you park your car” the person will probably give that up because there is a definite answer that they can know and its something they did in the recent past. Questions like “who persuaded you to buy your car, how is the carshop run, how did they come up with capital and how are the carshop owners connected to one another, what motivates their car selling” is a lot more imprecise and likely to give bad answers because the person being tortured will give up bad answers for the reasons everyone is aware of. Its all very well to natter on about a ticking bomb, or in the case of the first episode of the shield a child in an airtight room but I’m guessing that the goon squad spend much more time asking imprecise questions because those are the important big picture ones. That and they don’t want true answers, they want to hear something crazy so they raise the terror alert color thing to make people shit themselves.

The most insidious examples of this are the Clone Wars CGI cartoons, because they’re marketed to children.  In the season 2 episode “Children of the Force”, three Jedi combine their powers to break the mind of a bad guy who’s not cooperating, even though there’s a risk of him suffering permanent damage.  The interrogation works, the kidnapped Jedi babies are rescued.  End of moral and end of story.

Another episode, Brain Invaders, has future Darth Vader and wife beater Anakin Skywalker force-choke an alien bad guy and slam him against walls in a bid to save his apprentice, Ahsoka Tano.  The torture works, and she is saved using the information Skywalker gets.  At least the moral of the story is “Attachment is not compassion,” but that’s going to go over most children’s heads. 

The Clone Wars is mostly watched by young boys (with some girls in the audience because Ahsoka is a major character).  But yeah, a whole generation of children is going to grow up with the value that torture is justified in desparate circumstances, and that it works.

An article discussing the issue, with a video of the scene discussed.
http://trueslant.com/level/2009/12/28/should-your-kids-be-watching-cartoon-torture-star-wars-clone-wars-george-lucas-lucasfilms-cartoon-network/

Something seldom mentioned in arguments about the “pros” of using torture is that its practitioners are not necessarily using it to gain information but to produce an aura of fear and intimidation around the organizations which practice it.  I’d refer you to the NKVD in Stalinist Russia or the Nacht und Nebel practices of the SS - torture in and of itself was used not to gain information but to terrorize the “suspects” into confessing to whatever crimes the authorities saw it necessary to smear the reputations and/or secure a “just” sentence in a kangaroo court.  The goal was to ensure confessions, to terrorize potential dissidents with a presentation of the fate which awaited them should they dissent, and to reinforce an aura of invincible fear around the SS and NKVD, not to gain information which those organizations for the most part already possessed.

Yes, torture as an intelligence technique is of only marginal usefulness, but as a tool of terror and fear it’s unparalleled.  One would think the conservatives would understand that given the shouts of horror they emit every time a terrorist organization issues a video showing captured Americans held in obviously horrible circumstances.

I think we’re mostly a nation of Walter Mittys, habituated to casting ourselves as film badasses as an escape from our own lives.  It’s kinda like a drug habit, really.  Conservatives seem more susceptible to it, probably because the shallower, more visceral narrative structure of popular entertainment supports a simplistic worldview & flatters underachievers’ sensibilities, but it’s become pretty bad across the board… hell, look at reality shows and you’ll find To Die For fairly benign.  I won’t be around, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some future scholars definitively link America’s final decline to our becoming what Al Gore diplomatically called “a well-entertained society.” 

And ironically, I’m someone who almost always defends entertainment as a rare functioning model of laissez-faire capitalism.

Jerry, rooting the argument strictly in moral terms buys right into the dangerous TV trope that I’m discussing.  On TV, not only does torture work, but it does so after the squishy liberal character denounces it, and then regrets their own moral qualms.  Should your audience buy into the idea that the victims are evil, the immorality of torture won’t matter to them.

TV resorts to violent interrogations because TV writers know that violence is exciting for viewers. That’s really all there is to it. Lots of people seem to forget that TV is not interested in reflecting reality at all, but in attracting attention. Violence is a surefire way to get eyeballs on the screen. Plus, it provides the audience with the satisfaction of seeing a bad guy get punished immediately and cathartically, so everyone can feel good about the world in time for the next commercial break.

I wish our political leaders would stand up and speak that moral language once in a while.

Also sad is the fact that many elected representatives are completely ignorant of the core principles of Western rule of law that they’d be incapable of speaking that language even if they were so inclined to do so.

But yes, worse are those who do know and remain silent.

Torture works just fine—-if you’re a sadist who’s looking for justification in America today. It never was about the truth. It was about these assholes getting off.

A bit OT, but the copier thing on “The Wire” is an interesting example of how something “real” can become unreal over time, but still feel real on TV.  The real life incident that the copier ruse is based on happened in the late 80s.  But on “The Wire”, it felt ham-fisted and unrealistic to me, because in the 21st century, even a young corner kid involved in a murder would know what a copier machine looks like.  In the 20 years that have passed since the real incident, copier machines have become way more common on TV.  I doubt very sincerely that the ruse works nowadays.  They still use the lie detector ruse, though.  I just suspect they do it differently. 

Incidentally, the lie detector ruse works because of TV. The vast majority of what people “know” about lie detectors comes from their use as devices on TV shows, including talk shows that use them to out liars.  In reality, they don’t work very well.

I’d refer you to the NKVD in Stalinist Russia or the Nacht und Nebel practices of the SS - torture in and of itself was used not to gain information but to terrorize the “suspects” into confessing to whatever crimes the authorities saw it necessary to smear the reputations and/or secure a “just” sentence in a kangaroo court.

Landa in Basterds capitalises on this fact. He proudly regards himself first and foremost as a detective (or as they’d call it on The Wire, “a real police”), and his interrogation technique mainly involves convincing the subject that he knows he’s done or is planning to do something “wrong,” (like hiding Jews or hating the Nazi occupier), with the torture-driven terror you mention looming in the background as a sure consequence if a confession isn’t forthcoming.

Again, it’s not torture, but it struck me as possibly unethical. ore to the point, though, is that the technique wasn’t presented as controversial—it’s assumed, in the cop show genre, that the end (confession) justifies the means (misrepresenting your evidence to a suspect).

It’s called a ruse, and in real life it’s legally acceptable as long as it doesn’t veer into entrapment. It’s ethically dodgy (especially when the goal is to obtain a conviction rather than to obtain justice), but that’s one of the accepted costs of doing business in a place where everyone lies.

MULTIPLE = 2, in my experience, Ferox.  I have two lvl 80 mains, one horde, one alliance, and I’ve seen two quests that used torture (actually one was in Burning Crusade, and one in the latest, Lich King).  How many have you had? Curious.

Cris, that’s actually one of the most common ruses that real police detectives use when interrogating people they know were in a criminal conspiracy.  From what I understand, it’s effective because most criminals are stupid and easy to anger.  You switch the “bad guy” in their minds from being the cops to their buddy, and they start to talk.  As long as they’ve been Mirandized, I don’t really see the issue with the ruse.  If you fall for it, you’re an idiot, but you were an idiot to respond to the cops with anything but, “I want my lawyer.”

Basically, the cops had two suspects in custody. One wouldn’t confess, so they went to the other and lied to him, telling him his accomplice had ratted him out. This frightened the second suspect so he spilled the beans.

That’s a variant on the old prisoner’s dilemma, and I don’t think it’s technically against the law.  Generally speaking, a smart guy will get his lawyer before he takes a cop’s word for anything.

I think in TV we’ve had a desire to get darker and grittier heroes.  People want “real” drama, not the Knight In Shining Armor who never compromises and never fails.  Anti-heroes are supposed to be flawed, and what better way to show an anti-hero’s flaws than to have him doing the bad guy’s thing?  But, on the flip side, the hero still needs to triumph in the end.  And there’s only so many minutes in a show.  So it’s hard to have the anti-hero do the wrong thing, fail, and still succeed in the end.

Besides, it’s worth noting that it’s not just the heroes who successfully interrogate people.  Villains do it too.  Sure, if the main character gets tortured, he’ll hang tough.  But if you torture his family, he caves.  And if you torture random red-shirt or expendable scientist, those guys will cook up whatever nuclear weapon or give you any secret super formula after a few rounds through the Pain-o-tronic device.

Bottom line, I think people portray torture working because they really do believe torture works.

Chris, it has been ruled in American courts that an officer can lie to a suspect in order to get information. 

In the first episode of L&O;: Criminal Intent, a pivotal plot point is when Goren does just that to one of the suspects he’s caught in order to get information from them to find the main perp.

I often wonder if this easy acceptance of torture as some sort of legitimate technique is a symptom of deep-seated American neurosis of some kind.

IMHO, it’s definitely not as simple as OMG there’s violence in movies and on TV.  There has been plenty of violent material in American culture for a long time.  But it seems to me the revulsion at torture we had post-WWII and exposure to the real life behavior of the Nazis and the Japanese has disappeared. 

Even through Vietnam, the treatment a man like McCain received was abhorrent (and not something Americans would have been thought of as doing to others), and lead him to talk against it — until, of course, political expediency convinced him to throw out that moral stance, along with any others he may have had.

I was shocked after 9/11 how easy it was for people who I thought of as liberal, level-headed people to just roll over and accept torture.  Picture from Abu Ghraib seemed to just go in one eye and out the other, with few to no ruffled feathers in between.

I don’t want to just sound like some old guy bitching about the modern world, but we’re fucked up.  And if we were the same back in the day, at least we pretended we thought such behavior was bad.  Now we don’t even pretend.  We’re sick.

I’m surprised that tapes of Cheney blowing a wad in his pants while using a cattle prod on a “detainee” haven’t shown up yet…

In the 20 years that have passed since the real incident, copier machines have become way more common on TV.

Good point. These days, they’d probably use Powerpoint, plastic laundry pins and some wire to create their magical “computer software” lie detector. Those computers can do anything.

In any case, rule one amongst effective interrogators seems to be: understand your suspect. Which is probably why moms are so eerily effective at it.

BTW anyone interested in the (non) effectiveness of torture in the real world must read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (at least the first chapter, on torture).  Really persuasive when she points out how intense physical pain obliterates your world (think: dentist drill hits nerve—you see stars) and temporarily destroys identity and language, etc, compromising speech, info, testament, nationalism, etc. Great argument against the idea of effectiveness. I’ve read that her treatise is relied upon by Amnesty Int’l to this day.

Jerry, rooting the argument strictly in moral terms buys right into the dangerous TV trope that I’m discussing.  On TV, not only does torture work, but it does so after the squishy liberal character denounces it, and then regrets their own moral qualms.  Should your audience buy into the idea that the victims are evil, the immorality of torture won’t matter to them.

I agree as a practical matter. I guess what I’m saying is that even granting the evil of those about to be tortured, we still shouldn’t do it, and that has nothing to do with the question of effectiveness. Of course, there are multiple ways of combating the harmful influences of this trope, one of which is to point out that it’s basically a fabricated illusion that someone thought would make good TV. But on the other hand, I think a lot of people can be motivated by appeals to some sense of decency; a lot of that translation from 24 to public policy happens unconsciously, and I think a lot of people would recoil from the moral consequences of that position if it were traced through completely. Maybe that’s me being idealistic though. When it comes to what politicians say, I think the extent to which they should engage what happens on TV is to say that it’s fiction and it’s irrelevant to the way the world works.

soph @23, I agree that it’s that violence is exciting, but I really do think more of TV writers than that.  It’s not all pandering.  Your main job as a writer is to move the story forward. Shows that have groups of people at violent odds (cops/criminals, Cylons/humans, Buffy/vampires) necessarily involve one group concealing useful information from the other.  Unless you raise the possibility that Group A will get the information from Group B before it’s Too Late, you don’t have much of a story, because there’s no tension.  The plot will go forward without any chance of it being stopped.  A lot of storytelling is about trying to find out the truth, and torture is one of the devices.  As is spying, research, good detective work, etc.

God knows that watching a torture scene on TV is easier for me to take than watching someone look something up on the internet.  Every time a character sits down at a computer, I bang my head against the wall.

Since 90% of exciting storytelling involves Not Knowing The Full Truth, I’m fascinated by the obstacle that cell phones have created for writers.  You can’t have characters that don’t have them.  That’s stupid.  Since so much of what you need to know from someone friendly can be cleared up with a phone call, writers have to devise other ways of withholding information.  Watching shows prior to the explosion in cell phones is fun, because so many plot lines simply wouldn’t be possible nowadays.  Like, oh, all of “Buffy”.  A critical moment in the last episode of season 2 involves Xander being sent to give Buffy a message, and he lies to her.  This could have all been avoided (in theory) if Buffy had a phone and Willow could just call her.

It takes more to shock you the next time.

This is called the Law of Diminishing Returns (see: Coleridge) and has been a topic of the pros/cons of representation for some time (actually even Plato scratches at it, I think). You probably know this, Caren.  I’m just being <strike>pedantic</strike> helpful to thread-users looking for easy terminology.

Cris, lying to suspects to get a confession out of them really is non-controversial in law enforcement.  It’s been repeatedly upheld as constitutional.

And, as much as I disagree with other practices that are “okay” by Supreme Court standards, I think lying to suspects is actually acceptable.  It’s not designed to extract a false confession (although there are cases where a lot of duress can make people confess falsely, without any violence/torture involved), and it doesn’t inflict harm on the suspect.  Guilty suspects are made to feel panicked, and innocent suspects are made to feel bewildered, but those are both acceptable consequences for me.

And I agree with Amanda - opposing torture on just moral grounds isn’t enough.  The image of the mealy-mouthed liberal opposing the badass hero on moral grounds is just too strong a trope right now.  We have to point out that torture isn’t just morally wrong, it’s also stupid if what you want is accurate information.

Anyway, I think torture is escalating in part because other ways to create ignorance to knowledge processes are being shut down by technology.

Something seldom mentioned in arguments about the “pros” of using torture is that its practitioners are not necessarily using it to gain information but to produce an aura of fear and intimidation around the organizations which practice it.

Ooh, yes.  That’s another thing Scarry documents.  Discussion of power etc. Thanks for reminder.

<i> Should your audience buy into the idea that the victims are evil, the immorality of torture won’t matter to them. <i>

I’m noticing something related to that a lot more, its when the badass character beats someone up because they are just that badass but its ok because retroactively it turn out they were bad people. Later you and they find out the carnival clown they beat up for no real reason is a child molester etc.

dammit

As long as they’ve been Mirandized, I don’t really see the issue with the ruse.  If you fall for it, you’re an idiot, but you were an idiot to respond to the cops with anything but, “I want my lawyer.”

Definitely. The issue of Miranda Rights and TV is an interesting one, too—it’s been repeated so many times on TV and in the movies that more unsophisticated people regard it as empty ritual and mantra rather than what it is—a declaration of the suspect’s substantive legal rights. So those same people often don’t have the knowledge to demand “a lawyer,” let alone the means to demand “their lawyer.”

Gracchus @43: this is HUGE.  The right to remain silent is an enormous right, which criminals constantly fail to employ.

It’s good for society, ultimately, since I would rather criminals spontaneously confess even if they have a right not to, but it’s interesting how glossing over the right in television so constantly has diminished awareness of the actual right.

Jerry, to your point, I think TV has really undermined the moral arguments, too, by using willingness to torture a character trait to make a character morally ambiguous.  Again, as a literary device, I don’t really give a shit, but most people don’t really spend a lot of time interrogating their own assumptions that come from ingesting a lot of fiction.  So if you have an English degree like I do, the experience of watching Vic Mackey on “The Shield” beat the shit out of a kid until he talks is a matter of saying, “Fascinating how I’m being drawn into this morally ambiguous space of loving this character but also loathing his behavior.”  But most people don’t watch themselves watch something.  They should, but they don’t. 

It’s a conundrum, because I’m firmly against the “write to the morons” mentality.  That some audience members can’t tell Don’s the villain on “Mad Men” tells me more about them than the show, for instance.  But the way TV can manipulate people is amazing.

Amanda, there was an episode of The Commish where they did just what you described, using something high-tech looking(“Let’s see if this Star Trek thing really works” is what they said in front of their suspect in the episode) to fool them into believing that they have a functioning lie detector at work on them.

I’m curious: are there instances in TV shows where someone does make a convincing moral argument against torture?

Incidentally, the lie detector ruse works because of TV. The vast majority of what people “know” about lie detectors comes from their use as devices on TV shows, including talk shows that use them to out liars.  In reality, they don’t work very well.

I loved the episode of Mythbusters where Kari, Grant and Tori took on different types of lie detectors. Sure enough, Grant was able to beat it. It’s just icky how people think these things are so reliable. There was also a scene in the beginning of an episode of Lie to Me, which is a cheesy show but I like Tim Roth so I watch it. Essentially the government brings in a lie detector for him to inspect. He quickly shows how a pretty woman in a short skirt can make the machine think a straight male is lying about his name. He compares it to a tribe in Africa that used to make people on trial hold an ostrich egg, if the egg breaks in your hands you’re guilty!

The flip side of that, Gracchus, is that people who aren’t read their rights will know that something is amiss.

A small part of a fantasty genre book I read as a kid addressed the ineffectiveness of torture in a way I always felt was obvious and after 9/11 I was flaberghasted to hear that anyone hadn’t thought of it… but still to this day most people don’t understand how it works.

The book basically said that it’s easy and key to train operatives to lie and tell the truth in equal measures, making both as realistic as they could, so that by the time you can’t keep your story straight (if that ever comes) your captors won’t believe you.

For example, I know that there’s a sleeper cell in the city with a plan and I am captured. I give them convincing details of a possible plot that fit the information I know they have, same chemical make-up for the bomb, but a different trigger, a different target and a different time-frame. They waste time searching that out and discover I lied, so they come back to me, and I do the same thing over again… different bomb-type, new trigger mechanism, new people’s names… they investigate… come back… and eventually even when I tell the truth they aren’t going to believe me, and maybe in the interim I’ve given the cell time to realize I’ve been captured and they can get to another location or set off the bomb early or whatever.

Torture doesn’t work, and operatives have been trained for many years what to do in the case of torture. The only thing torture is good for is propaganda (for both sides sometimes). And ya, it’d be great if someone showed that on the small screen…

That’s interesting the character Giles doesn’t respond to torture. Much like Giles Corey, right? I wonder if that was intentional.

Hmm…some notes

1)  People shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which TV is a propaganda device.  It’s well and good to enjoy what’s being shown, if that’s your tickle, but the chief purpose of the idiot box is social control.  If you don’t believe me, trying buying an ad on primetime TV with something that has any sort of “counterculture” sentiment—as opposed to Football Star Could Have Been Aborted!

2)  Many discussions about torture is far too grounded in individualist interactions and sentiments.  Torture plays a role that is fundamentally about terrorism and is meant to interact with groups and not individuals.  What you see on TV are efforts at legitimizing torture in culture-specific terms.

3)  The State and its institutions routinely use torture and the threat of it to inculcate docility in the populace.  Moreover, they take every opportunity to normalize and increase acceptance of the various kinds of torture used—everything from police beatings, sexual violence in jails, withdrawing needed resources or personel.  Lastly, there needs be no The Man around giving orders as to what is and what isn’t acceptible.  Just the control of patronage and attention (whether in person or broadcast).

4)  Absent the use of torture as a means of encouraging passivity to the prescence of a regime, most leaders and police and all that jazz do not want torture, because it’s a central tactic in acumulating political power that should have gone to the regime leaders.  Typically, most regimes that are anything like healthy have to kill the beaurocrats in charge of political terror, like Beria.  JE Hoover was always more politically circumspect.  Again, no particularly healthy regime particularly desires their agents to be torturing (even soldiers) for various reasons.  Those reasons were a big part of the elite support in DC for ending lynching and Jim Crow, and they never did have very much to do with right, reason, morality or anything like that.

5)  Much like Obama’s spending freeze rhetoric being directed at international finance, but spoken in terms of domestic politics and assumptions so as to get people to buy into and accept certain situations that they might otherwise not (and still may not), torture on TV has everthing to do with what TV does best, construct part of your identity via creating context (symbols/memories onto physical constructs, like diamonds to gifts to spouse) and then threaten it (That’s Cubic Zirconium!  Don’t get Taken In!).  The role torture plays (outside of the good stuff) is either about protecting the status quo (ticking bomb scenario) or asserting the moral goodness of the status quo (We are so morally upright/intelligent that torture is beneath us).  It’s a rarity ( I think) to see torture used properly on TV, especially outside of gang stuff.  You know, torture as a weapon of terror, or torture used when someone has enough knowlege of what information is desired and how the canidate would know.

Saw Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure the other day, which is a documentary about the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The scenes with the dude who was in charge of determining what, in all that was done to those detainees, was criminal, was especially eye-opening. So much of the fear-inspiring and humiliating tactics weren’t viewed as criminal. Just “softening them up.” Even the ‘stand the hooded guy on the box with wires attached to his fingers’ was simply, in their view, a psych-out, since the wires weren’t live. But isn’t the threat of electrocution, whether actual or imaginary, against the Geneva Conventions? Or am I being quaint?

Also compelling were the interviews with the old-hand interrogator, who understood that the abuses he saw were stupid and weren’t going to get any good information. His frustration and anger were evident, even though he did his best to effect a ‘well, not my call, whatev’ attitude.

Lying to suspects has been around and accepted forever. My place of work was burgled 22 years ago, and all of us were questioned. The police were convinced it was an inside job, and told us all a bunch of lies to try to trip us up, and implicate ourselves or others, but the lies were so blatant and hamfisted that we all just walked away thinking that the police were dishonest, incompetent assholes.

After that experience, I’m saying the word “Lawyer!” before they even get the cuffs on if I ever get arrested.

It does bring up a good question:

Did the Cheneyites know that the info would be bad, so torturing was their way of doing “reverse-terrorism” — terrorizing the terrorists?

Or were they stupid enough to think that torture really works?...

Generally speaking, a smart guy will get his lawyer before he takes a cop’s word for anything.

In particular (bear this in mind if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of police interrogation) cops can’t make deals; only prosecutors can.  If a cop ever tells you to confess and there will be no charges, don’t believe him

The thing that really bothers me is that the moral argument isn’t acceptable at all in America these days—-is it just America? You can’t argue against torture by saying, no, it’s wrong, it doesn’t matter what the other guy does, this isn’t a contest——you have to come up with something practical!  You can’t argue about health care with morality, either:  people just don’t accept those arguments any more. But they’ll use morals for other arguments, especially when they want to justify, well, stuff that stops short of torture: forcing women to endure unwanted pregnancies, etc., etc., That kind of thing. 

9/11 did way more damage to use than we think, and we did it to ourselves.

“I’m curious: are there instances in TV shows where someone does make a convincing moral argument against torture? “

Human Rights First gives out awards each year for shows that deal with human rights issues.  A couple of years ago the theme for that year was torture.  I know this mostly because Criminal Minds won for Lessons Learned.  Which was a pretty awesome ep, btw.  They even managed to have a ticking time bomb and still effectively argue that torture was a bad way to try to get accurate information quickly.  They also managed to lie to the suspect while still clearly being truthful about giving a shit about all the bad stuff that happened to his family before he became a terrorist.

Veronica Mars - despite employing a decent amount of the “beat them up/threaten them for info” throughout the series - did a similar type of ep (pretty much the same lie, too), except that it was of course university students in an experiment, not criminals.

Personally, I think a lot of the “torture works!” writing on TV is lazy writing.  It’s something you know is going to be very dynamic visually and will move the story along with minimal exposition/plot.  It’s a very overused plothole cover.  And that’s before you even get into all the human rights issues involved in promoting it as a useful technique.

(That said, those eps aren’t really moral arguments against torture.  As ginmar points out, they are more practical arguments against it.)

Ginmar: THat is a VERY interesting point that you raise.

It’s funny; the moral arguments work on ME and (duh) most of the people I know who are my age (@50); but apparently they don’t work on anyone else! And the real House of Mirrors thing is that, the Clearly IMMORAL side, the side that doesn’t want gay folks to have civil rights and wants to torture suspects and force women to die from pregnancies that have gone wrong and let rapists off the hook and let working class Americans die from lack of access to medical care are ALWAYS CLAIMING THE MORAL HIGH GROUND, even when their political positions are in direct opposition to the teachings in their Holy Book and the Words of Their Boyfriend Jesus.

It is like, the ENTIRE public sphere is an ocean of Propaganda.

Re: TV shows
I FOR ONE am all for holding TV writers and producers to a HIGHER STANDARD. No, from me they don’t get a pass for showing torture being effective and used by the “good guys” in a standard operating procedure sort of way.

“We” (Feminists) got the sexual assault shower bubbles pulled…..We could no doubt get all this Torture Propaganda pulled if we write enough letters and boycott enough advertisers.

9/11 broke our country.  Who would have thought it just took 4 planes and a couple dozen assholes to destroy the country that saved the free world from Nazism?

Well, besides Osama bin Laden.

Writers rely on torture because it is easy. Like a thirty second phone trace, which has nothing to do with reality either, it lets you have the good and bad guys communicate, dramatic tension is built in, and it allows you to move the conflict along without figuring out what clue gives the target of the manhunt away.

I tried really hard to figure out how to fix this in my Dungeons and Dragons games… Player: “I break the goblins fingers and ask him again.” Me, the sighing DM: “Roll your intimidate check.” I starting bringing throw-away encounters to my games, and the torture victims would start leading them into traps or coming back to get them at the end of the adventure. Even as those punishment encounters got tougher and tougher to survive (and never produced treasure), they refused to approach interrogations differently. Trust me—lack of creativity was a hug factor.

You know, Kmtberry, I’m only a few years younger than you. So I wonder—-is it a generational thing? I know it’s politics-oriented; for all their supposed morals, you can’t argue with a conservative, because what they claim is moral is just whatever keeps the power in their hands. I don’t think they even recognize abstract morals, because that would require they value every human being the same.

Yes, nerds need more hugs.  Then they won’t torture.

I’m not interested in moral arguments against torture on TV, because they are too easy for hysterical thugs to avoid dealing with. “We’re at war! Shit happens! 9/11!” And, to an extent, they are right… innocent people die in war, but we make a pragmatic choice to tolerate a certain amount of civilian casualties because the need is great.

The best anti-torture episode (hasn’t someone brought it up?) is the Star Trek TNG episode where Picard is captured by the cardassians on the eve of a cardassian military campaign. They do an MK Ultra thing on him with drugs and what not, get what they can, and then the torture begins… except, at this point (which is the bulk of the episode), it isn’t about information, it is just about forcing submission.

That’s all torture is good for, and historically, that has been the use of the practice. Forcing confessions. Forcing John McCain to record confessions for the Viet Cong. It is just one more form of violence that enforces hierarchies.

No wonder the GOP fetishizes it.

Ginmar at 63… I think it is just that morality doesn’t concern conservatives because, deep down, they are motivated by cowardice rather than morality.

How many times have you had a conversation with an evangelist who brings up hell early in the conversation? It happened in basically every theological discussion I ever had with people from that tribe. And my answer is the same, “I don’t want to live my life in submission to some bullshit rulebook because I’m afraid of hell. I’ll be the best person I can be, and if that lands me in hell, fuck him anyway.”

Warrior Jesus will save them from the end of the world, and Warrior Cheney will save them until that day. As long as they cling to Warrior Jesus, all will be forgiven and they will be saved.

Of course if he hadn’t been read his Miranda rights conservatives would have complained about that instead.  It doesn’t matter what anyone in the Obama administration does, conservatives disagree with it.  If he hadn’t been read his rights his testimony wouldn’t have been admissible in court and the conservatives would be pointing that out as a major disaster instead of saying, as anoNY does in the first post, that it would result in whatever evidence he gave as ” ... merely not be allowed to be used against him in court.”

It doesn’t matter what evidence can be presented against using torture.  Conservatives aren’t interested in facts.  Morality to them is only about not being gay and loving Jesus.  You can’t reason with them.

I think it would be easy, and even more interesting for the plots, for TV writers to employ the trope that torture gets you the answer you want rather than the answer you need. What you have now is often people telling lies to the torturers because they haven’t been broken, but it would be easy to turn that around and have them tell lies because they have.

ginmar, i think it’s more of a “who are you actually talking to” thing - and a political thing, as you mention.  I know plenty of people who are 50+ who wouldn’t respond to moral arguments re: torture, but might respond to practical ones.  And I know all kinds of teens and young adults who would respond to both moral and practical arguments re: torture.

And this is why everyone should watch Burn Notice instead.

“It’s like getting groceries with a flamethrower. It doesn’t work and it makes a mess.”

I agree with Paul at 68, that torture on TV could be a lot more effectively portrayed… NYPD Blue is actually a good example, and I’m glad people brought it up. When they smack around suspects—which isn’t infrequent—it is almost always because they’ve got the guy, they know he did it, and they want a confession to secure conviction. It is ... in a gray area, but it certainly doesn’t ever save a schoolbus of kids from a mad man with a gun.

Likewise, when they use it on The Wire, it isn’t even an interrogation thing. It is a frustrated or unhinged cop beating on a guy because he can. It comes across as, “yes, this happens, and the cops won’t be punished.” Note, it doesn’t advance the plot or their case whatsoever.

I am really disappointed with Sayid’s character on Lost… they could have explored these realities deeply and honestly through him, and instead, the torturer—who in reality knows better than anyone exactly what torture accomplishes—is the guy who says, “Let’s torture him and find out.” Fuck you, Lost.

“Guns make you stupid. Duct tape makes you smart.”

In response to: “We’re at war! Shit happens!”——torture isn’t happening the way they’re representing it, so that argument is invalid. Also, for a nation of couch-sitting Faux News watchers, it’s not war; it’s War with a capital, cartoonish W, because what we’re dealing with are people who watch shit like 24 and think it’s great. These aren’t grownups; anybody who falls for the GOP’s black and white crap is either stuck at some pre-pubertal stage (OMG! Sex is ugleeee!) or just plain mean. Essentially, they don’t have morality; they have power concerns.

Jennygadget….that’s good, I guess? Of course, maybe it’s merely that we’ve been kept in a constant state of fear and fury for the past eight years. All that adrenalin can’t be good.

#66: that’s a very good way of putting it. One day their useless asses might face competition from POC and women who’ve been unjustly and unnaturally suppressed—-by them!——and they’ll face retribution. And, yeah, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve argued with some religious asshole and had him go, “But…but….Hell! And…they do it too!” Yeah, asshole, I’m a good person because I don’t want to inflict pain on other people, and I don’t base what I do on if somebody else is getting away with it.

Yeah, and that’s the only reason I don’t care for the moral argument… I find them persuasive, but you and the other side just talk past each other, and I, personally, find a realism hat to be a lot more persuasive when arguing from the left.

You tell them they shouldn’t torture, they say why you should. You tell them that torture won’t work, and they say it will. And then you destroy their position with facts… which is exactly what is putting torture apologists on the hot seat now, that not torturing the undiesbomber and calling his parents instead worked.

I don’t know why the conservative complaint about reading a terrorist suspect his Miranda rights should surprise anybody. Conservatives don’t like non-terrorists to be read Miranda either and they certainly don’t want to be told that procedural safeguards are as good for the cops as they are for the accused.

Unfortunately,  there no way of painting a bright line between dealing with terrorists and dealing with conventional offenders or even people who simply disagree with the authorities. Once the police have the right to decide that an individual is a non-person, what is supposed to stop them from applying the same method to anybody inconvenient. The historical precedents are not favorable: one thinks of the GESTAPO as using particularly barbarous and lawless methods, but the KRIPO, the supposedly civil police authority, quickly followed their lead in ignoring the rights of the accused, relying on anonymous denunciations, beating suspects, and often not bothering with legal trials at all. The same sort of thing will happen here if the right triumphs. Barbarism is barbarism.

I don’t think facts would work either.  Elaborate on the D&D;DM thing…Did altering incentives not work?  Did you talk to your friends about those incentives as well?

In the hands (mind) of the individual consumer, torture is a demostration of control, and people are highly attuned and driven towards feeling a sense of control.  That’s why torture on TV tends to emphasis personal control over someone, or control over a situation via a simple axis across a dastardly antagonist, pro torture or not.  Telling torture enthusiasts that their security blanket doesn’t work is analogous to weaning Linus off of HIS security blanket.  They’ll just deny all evidence (and how, really can you tell them otherwise, besides waterboarding them to find out how many licks it takes to eat a tootsie pop).

Last comment directed at humanadverb, ‘scuse me…

Humanadverb I was in Iraq. I talked to some of the bad guys that the conservos would wet their pants over. I’ve argued with these assholes. If what you say doesn’t please them they attack you, so obviously it’s not getting information that concerns them.  (OMG, liberal female combat veteran? But what would Rush say?)  Basically, all the world’s a cage and to these guys you’re the next occupant. It’s probably what they fantasize about—-the power, much like the anti-gays-in-the-military people fantasize about being the object of desire. (For once.)

Ron O: sadism is the GOP party plank.

“The same sort of thing will happen here if the right triumphs. Barbarism is barbarism.”

...I think it’s already happening.  The gratuitous use of Tasers is just one example.  What about the way people who had the wrong bumper stickers on their cars and other slights were prevented from participating in political events under Bush Jr.?  Or the way routine phone taps and geolocation of cell phones seems to be completely ignored? Let alone our blithe acceptance of torture committed by the US.

I think our casual acceptance of Security Theater at the airport is really frightening too.  We’re being prepared for that dictatorship the wingnuts will start to demand if another good attack occurs on American soil…

Mike, you can interpret Al Qaeda’s lack of serious attacks on US soil in a couple of ways, meaning, maybe more than a couple:

1. They’re laying low, planning the next huge attack;

2. They’re not laying low, they’re laid low.

The fact is, the US has not experienced a major terror campaign that would justify this shit. Two attacks by losers that were stopped by stressed-out, tired airline passengers? (Let’s leave anti-abortion terrorism out of this.)

It’s hard for AQ to operate in the US. I find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone will ever attempt an airliner hijacking in the US at least ever again. 

From the TSA’s and the Bush administration’s actions, you’d think we’d been subjected to constant roadside bombings,  suicide bombings, hijackings, etc., etc.

Caren hits it on the head.  And 9/11 also gave conservatives carte blanche to go nuts with all of their paranoid delusions of bad-assery, torture included.  It the same sort of nonsense you get from people who are convinced that if normal citizens had guns at Columbine, or VA Tech, they would have taken down the shooters before innocent people died.

I have a friend in law enforcement who laughs his ass off at people who believe the CSI franchises are accurate portrayals of forensic science.  People now think you can wrap up some complicated case in the span of a couple of days once you send in Horatio Caine or Gil Grissom.  It’s a tad bit more complicated than that.  I know it’s tangent to the discussion here, but it warranted mentioning.

I am really disappointed with Sayid’s character on Lost… they could have explored these realities deeply and honestly through him, and instead, the torturer—who in reality knows better than anyone exactly what torture accomplishes—is the guy who says, “Let’s torture him and find out.” Fuck you, Lost.

To be fair, Sayid has spent the entire series wracked with guilt over torturing Sawyer in the first season.  Also, that episode is one of the few examples I can recall on television where the torture explicitly doesn’t produce useful information: Sawyer breaks and “confesses,” but then it turns out the confession was false.*

In this week’s episode, the final season opener, Sayid says he believes he’s going to Hell because of all the people he tortured.  He doesn’t even mention the people he killed.

* Usually, if torture “doesn’t work” in a movie or TV show, it’s because a character is strong-willed and refuses to crack, not because torture itself is a bullshit way of getting information.  Kudos to those old “Star Trek” and “Babylon 5” episodes, as hamfisted as they may be in retrospect, for illustrating that the real purpose of torture is to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes.  THEH!  AH!  FOUH!  LIGHTS!

Ginmar at 79—I’m a bit confused by pronoun usage, there… but, I think we agree. My thoughts:

You can never win with a Wingnut. You simply have a fundamentally different set of values (hey, Cheney says that a lot!). I once saw someone really get into it with Ralph Nader, until Nader said. “Yes, Bush was horrible, and no, it is impossible to say Gore would have done A B and C the same way. Still, that doesn’t make up for how horrible Gore would be.” (Paraphrased, natch.)

The point is to win the argument with everyone else. The wingnut will attack you for being soft on Da Enemy! Nader will rail about corporate corruption. (Not that I’m equating the too—no question which I’d have a beer with.) But then there is someone outside of the conversation who says, “Huh, actually, it makes sense that torture doesn’t keep me and my kids safe.” Or “Yeah, corporate personhood is weird and fuckity, but… Iraq War.” That’s the target.

I agree completely with shah8 at 76. It is a narcotic effect of power, too.

In Dungeons and Dragons, you sit around the table with your friends and pretend you are wizards and warriors and shit, running around a pseudo-fantasy world slaughtering dragons and goblins and stealing their loot. Depending on the game, the loot is the point, or there is a passing gesture towards protecting villagers and stuff, which just justifies the real point… killing monsters, getting loot, and building up your character’s power.

Which is why no matter what I did, the characters went for the knuckle-screws. You could say it was an in-character decision, I guess. (“It is what my CHARACTER would do” is a notorious, whiny player complaint when they want to get away with something.) But no, it was fun to inflict pain on an imaginary creature that poses no threat. Seriously, Intimidate and Diplomacy and Bluff are all related stats (the interrogator three), so it would be just as effective in-game to try to make a deal with or trick the creature (stuff actual cops use in actual interrogation). Nope. Knuckle-screws.

Even when I made them suffer for it, which, no, I made it clear in game that they were being fucked over for torturing a guy, but didn’t belabor the point. When you kill a monster, you get experience points, and thus are more powerful. I should have fucked with their loot instead.

CSI pisses me off so much because they spend more on an episode than most cities spend on forensics.  The mood lighting and labs with glass walls and all this walking around space… I just can’t watch it.

I really appreciate your clarification on Lost, at 83 Shaenon. I hadn’t remembered if Sawyer made a true or false confession… Still, I think it would have been a lot better if they’d demonstrated just how horrible Sayid’s job was by playing up what torture is all about, both before he came to the island and after.

(I’m mad at Lost right now. I had a really clever explanation for something that was wiped out in the premier.)

Sayid is probably my favorite character on the show, though, even given some huge problems I have with his conception, from a creative standpoint. He’s maybe the best actor on the show, though (save Ben), and his character arc has been really excellently handled.

You know, Kmtberry, I’m only a few years younger than you. So I wonder—-is it a generational thing? I know it’s politics-oriented; for all their supposed morals, you can’t argue with a conservative, because what they claim is moral is just whatever keeps the power in their hands. I don’t think they even recognize abstract morals, because that would require they value every human being the same.

Again, this research

RWA is characterized by [...] (b) “a general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, which is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities”;

You are assuming morality would involve recognition of the inherent rights of every human being.  The way they define morality first depends on the division of humanity into the Worthy and the Unworthy.

And they have no mercy for the latter - the welfare mom, the sand-nigger, the godless communist.

http://imago.hitherby.com/?p=668

“The nuclear device is going to go off in less than four hours,” says Brad.

“And we don’t even have a suspect,” sighs Steve.

They look gloomily at the dingy gray wall of their lab.

“Would it help? I mean, at this point?” Brad says.

“We could torture them,” says Steve. “And find out where the device is. Then we could evacuate people and save thousands of lives.”

“Point,” says Brad.

Both of them sigh.

“What if we torture you?” Brad asks.

...

“Gya!” screams Steve, not much later. Then he babbles. Then he begins to talk. “I’ll tell! I’ll tell you anything!”

“Where’s the nuclear device?” Brad demands.

“It’s at 1010 Rue de la Forge!”

Steve pauses. He blinks. Even through the mist of pain, he’s surprised by the fact that he said that.

“I’ll send someone to check that out,” says Brad, darkly, threateningly. He does.

“It’s the truth,” says Steve. “I don’t know how I knew. But it’s the truth.”

Slightly OT, but good stuff.

A LOT of screen time is devoted to Sayid’s backstory as a torturer.  There’s a whole episode about Sayid’s work for the Americans in the Gulf Was as an interrogator/ translator,  another one where he is an interrogator for the Iraqi Guard and is ordered to torture and execute his childhood sweetheart, another one where he is captured and confronted by a woman whose arms he burned while torturing her.  In addition to torturing Sawyer, he also tortures Ben when is first captured by the crash survivors (and his torture fails to get Ben to admit to being an Other).  On several occaisions he refers to himself as a torturer.  Torture is kind of the major thing in Sayid’s backstory. (sidenote: Ana Lucia uses torture on a suspected Other who turns out to be innocent and gets killed.  So, fail there.)

Also, Buffy: there are multiple examples of characters getting tortured and not spilling the beans.  Spike gets tortured by Glory in Season 5 and doesn’t give up any info about Dawn.  Angel is tortured by Vampire Willow in Season 3.  Also in Season 3, there’s a switcheroo where Buffy and Angel conspire to let Faith torture Buffy in order to get information from Faith.

I actually think there is another way torture is used in TV and movies besides as a way to reveal information, and that is as a way to reveal a character’s moral, well, character.  Either a good character shows a dark side by engaging in torture, or reaffirms his rightousness by refusing to torture a bad guy who clearly (in dramatic terms) deserves it.  And of course, if the torturer is a bad guy it shows us that he is sadistic and evil.

Yeah, I’m clearly way more interested in talking about TV than about torture.

I’ve just been watching New Amsterdam on Hulu—it’s about an immortal cop in NYC who can’t die until he finds his true love thanks to a blessing (curse?) put on him by a mystical Indian woman he saved from Dutch settlers 400 years ago (yes, my eyes rolled too.) Mild episode spoilers below if you plan on watching it:

The show’s got some interesting interrogation stuff in it; the main character John is pretty saavy about people, being 400 years old, and he absolutely only gets results nonviolently. Without any physical threats he uses lies and “evidence” very cleverly—in one case he forges a confession from a murder victim, blaming the man’s wife for his death, in response to the forgery *she* made of her murdered husband saying she was innocent (she was guilty, and made that pretty obvious when she was basically like “hey, that’s not what I wrote!”)

Interrogation (even the non-violent kind) as a tool is also critiqued in the show: in one episode John questions a homeless vet until the man confesses to having murdered his therapist—too bad that wasn’t what had happened at all, and the man was in fact up to his ears in PTSD and only barely acquainted with reality at that point, and was convinced by the interrogation itself that he had done it. The main character quickly realizes that the guy’s testimony is worthless and feels like crap that he basically convinced this man that he was a murderer—it’s made very clear that he got the answer he expected with his skillful interrogation, but not the right answer.

Additionally, the above story is all framed in an episode about how people create memories under duress—the murdered therapist had been embroiled in a lawsuit over the false “recovered memories” of abuse that had ruined her clients’ lives. After publically confessing that she had led them to believe in those memories incorrectly she was murdered by her colleague, who liked the power that controlling what people believed gave him. Basically you have 3 different people performing a form of “interrogation” and getting very very wrong results, and it’s made very clear how terrible it is to force people to come up with an answer, anything, no matter what, under duress. The person who refused to admit that the subjects of this were not speaking the truth, and who benefited from it, was blatantly the bad guy in the episode.

So I would say it’s a pretty good show re. portraying torture/physical violence as useless and inappropriate, and even going so far as to say that duress of any kind can twist reality in some serious and troublesome ways. The most honest confessions that John ever gets are brought about by cleverness and sympathy (the latter often feigned, of course.)

Anony, I thought the most egregious use of torture took place on “Angel”.  It was Season four when Faith is working with Wesley to find Angelus, and Faith questions a drugged out young woman.  The woman lies and says she never saw Angelus.  Faith shoves her against the wall, but won’t go further.  Wesley stabs her and twists the knife.  The woman tells everything she knows.

I really am still shocked by that scene, because I have a high regard for Whedon.  OTOH, many have made an interesting case that Season 7 of buffy was a glorification of militarism.  So maybe it’s not that surprising.

Regarding the efficacy of torture in the real world: I get nervous when someone asks me for directions to the point that, in my own hometown, I sent a woman directly south when she needed to get downtown (which was perfectly *north* of our location at the time.) I can only imagine how accurate I’d be after any kind of torture—I’d probably tell them in all seriousness all about my evil plot involving giant mecha, Stargates, and a bomb made out of pop rocks and Coke and then insist that Harry Potter was secretly Voldemort all along. People have very fluid memories and perceptions at the best of times; you’re just *not* going to get something coherent out of someone you’ve been trying to break down and probably they’ll just tell you exactly what they think you want to hear, like asking a 4-year-old if she’s washed her hands (”...um, yes?” “Reeeally? Are you suuure?” “Yes! I’m sure!” and now she really is sure that her hands are clean, despite it not being true.)

Speaking to the morality argument issue, here is the thing. For the conservative nutjobs, forcing women to bear children they do not want IS the moral thing to do. As sad as it is, there is no such thing as a universal morality. We need actual REASONS for why we should or should not make a rule/law, not just ‘I think that is immoral’.

When I rant about reproductive rights, I often get angry about other people attempting to “legislate my morality”. I know “morality” is used to write legislation all the time, but in this day and age, we should aspire to use more than ‘morals’ as a justification for laws.  That, or a more widespread acceptance of every human as human and deserving equal rights and respect, but I’m not going to hold my breath for that one.

AngiScarlett: That, to me, is an example of torture being used to reveal the character of the torturer.  Wesley goes pretty effing dark in Angel; having him cross that line and torture is a quick way of signaling to the audience that his moral character is suspect and even though he happens to be on the team we’re rooting for, that doesn’t mean he is good.

And of course on of the big things on shows like Buffy or 24 is that the torturers know (in the script) that they’re not torturing a civilian bystander. There are pretty much no civilian bystanders. (I’m using “civilian” to refer to people not part of the game/conflict/whatever; when I was doing sorta deadline journalism, we used to refer to anyone with a 9-5 job as a civilian. It’s the only shorthand term I can think of.)

“Burn Notice” has been brought up a couple of times…that’s one show where I’ve been relieved to see those who advocate for torture treated as naive, and their suggestions dismissed out of hand:

“You don’t want him screaming; you want him asking questions.”

“Why don’t I just make you tell me, then kill you?”
“You could do that. The information might or might not check out, torture’s unreliable, as you know.”

“Torture just gets you the fastest lie to make the pain stop.”

I just went through a lot of the Whedon canon (Buffy, Angel), too, and was upset to see torture working even in the post-9/11 Whedonverse, with the heroes beating answers out of the bad guys.

But if you let 9/11 stop you from enjoying a plucky heroine kicking vampire ass, then the terrorists win!

I don’t know why the conservative complaint about reading a terrorist suspect his Miranda rights should surprise anybody. Conservatives don’t like non-terrorists to be read Miranda either and they certainly don’t want to be told that procedural safeguards are as good for the cops as they are for the accused.

This.  As much as they pin their arguments against Mirandizing suspected terrorists on the suspect’s non-citizenship, the truth is that they just oppose Miranda Rights in general… they just especially hate seeing them used with the damn furrners.

Truth be told, if they had their way, not only would we never Mirandize anyone (except wealthy caucasian white-collar criminals), we would just skip the whole judicial process altogether.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ll read a story on a news site about someone being arrested as a suspect in a heinous crime, and the comments that follow predictably will argue “If I had been the arresting officer, I would have just shot the fucker right then and there!  It’s a damn shame we have to waste my tax dollars paying for this scumbag’s lawyer!!”  And when the suspect is a POC or poor, you can increase that sort of sentiment tenfold.

I often wonder if these unhinged racist wingnuts secretly wish that we were more like Nazi Germany.

DTG: Secretly?

DTG: Secretly?

Let me clarify - when I say “secretly”, what I mean is that most of these folks would rarely come right out and say “I wish America was more like Nazi Germany.”  Furthermore, if you were to ask them bluntly “Do you wish we were more like Nazi Germany?”, they would vehemently deny it, and act as if they have been gravely insulted that you would even suggest such a thing.

Sure, it’s not secret to the extent that they don’t do a very good job of hiding the sentiment, but rarely will any of them have the gall to come right out and say bluntly, ” I wish we were more like Nazi Germany!”

It’s kind of like a lot of racists I’ve met - the ones who most adamantly deny that they are racists at all, despite repeatedly spouting off obvious racist tropes.  Think Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly and their ilk.  Anytime lots of people start calling out their racism, they immediately start screaming that their critics are playing “the race card”, and how dare anyone call them a racist.  It’s the same thing with the so-called Godwin’s Law… the moment you suggest to a conservative that any part of their ideology resembles Nazism, you’ll immediately get shot down and accused of invoking Godwinism.

There was a Daily Kos-Research 2000 Poll the other day which has gotten quite a bit of press coverage from the MSM, in particular Fox News.  Bill O’Reilly led his show off the other day by attempting to discredit the poll because it was paid for by what he referred to as a “far left loon website”.  The poll revealed common GOP beliefs about President Obama, and was quite damning to typical Republican voters.

The survey of 2003 self-identified Republicans, who typically trend much more conservative than voters who “lean” Republican, was conducted by Research 2000 for the liberal blog Daily Kos.

—-SNIP—-

- 63% percent believe Obama is a socialist.
- 39% think Obama should be impeached.
- 24% think Obama wants “the terrorists to win”.
- 31% agree with the statement that Obama is “a racist who hates white people”.
- 36% do not believe the president was born in this country.
- 21% think the liberal advocacy group ACORN stole the election for Obama.
- 23% want their state to secede from the union.
- 55% said gays should not be allowed to serve openly in the military.
- 77% opposed gay couples getting married.
- 68% believe gay couples should not receive “any state or federal benefits”.
- 73% said openly gay persons should not be allowed to teach in public schools.
- 51% believe sex education should not be taught in schools.
- 77% want creationism taught in schools.
- 31% want contraception outlawed.
- 34% believe birth control is “abortion”.
- 53% believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be POTUS than Barack Obama.

Now the thing is, all of those findings can be corroborated by simply listening to the opinions of conservatives on the street and the commentary of conservatives in the media.  And while all of those beliefs are insane, some of them are so insane that even staunchly conservative commentators don’t want to own them or acknowledge their prevalence among conservative voters.  And yet, when confronted with those embarrassing truths about common beliefs among GOP voters, the loudest screaming conservative on TV went ballistic, because when those views are so succinctly summarized as they are in this poll, they no longer look like the sort of ideas that his party should be proud of holding.

Like I said, this happens all the time with racists - many of them are “secretly racist” insofar as they will rarely if ever come right out and openly admit to being racists.  Yet they have no problem whatsoever expressing pretty patently racist opinions, and they refuse to accept that those opinions are racist in nature.  Whenever anyone dares to point out that they are expressing racist ideology they become righteously indignant.  Because in their worldview, expressing racist ideology is perfectly acceptable, but having their racism explicitly labelled as racism out is a heinous outrage.

And it it’s the same thing with torture.  You will almost never hear Dick Cheney or any other high-profile neocon come right out and say “We support the use of torture.”  Instead, they would say “We support the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’”... because they know deep down that most people have a pretty adverse reaction to the word “torture”, so they simply change the word but continue the practice, as if somehow waterboarding someone isn’t torture as long as it is referred to as an “advanced interrogation technique”.

i must be watching all the wrong shows. say what you will about dick wolf (and jeralyn merrit certainly does), but his “Law & Order” franchise tends to stick to the law: suspects get read their miranda warnings, they aren’t tortured to get info, and use of such methods normally results in evidence being tossed out, and the cop perpetrator being punished.

Except for Special Victims Unit.  The two main characters in that show (Benson and Stabler) are constantly coercing confessions, practicing entrapment, harassing and assaulting suspects, mishandling witnesses and evidence—basically breaking every procedural rule their is.  And even though the show kind of acknowledges that they’re way overzealous, often to the point of real harm to the innocent, we’re still expected to root for them because they’re intentions are pure and they do end up catch the real perp (who is, after all, a horrible child molester, rapist, and/or murder) by the end of the episode.

And even though obviously tainted evidence still gets tossed out in SVU, the writers always treat it as though it’s a gross failure of the judicial system.  The whole attitude of the show is that The System is set up in favor of criminals and only angels of vengeance who are willing to bend the rules like Stabler are able to achieve justice for the victims.

“I often wonder if these unhinged racist wingnuts secretly wish that we were more like Nazi Germany.”

I’m sure if they knew you were explicitly comparing their attitudes to the Nazis, they would deny having opinions that would be seen as being the same as Nazis had.

But I’m also sure if you were to ask them about fascist ideas without clearly indicating the link, and staying away from or treating gingerly ideas like antisemitism and eugenics (which are too closely connected to specific Nazi beliefs and would give away the game), the amount of agreement you’d get would be stunning. 

(The reverse is also true.  How many times has someone done a poll where people are asked about things in the Bill of Rights and get responses that indicate the people polled often think those ideas are “Socialism” or “Communism”?)

As DTG said, racism is similar.  You can’t come out straight and call them racists, because that brings up pictures of people hanging from trees, fire hoses used on Civil Rights marchers, black churches being bombed, and hundreds of white people yelling threats to some black kinds trying to enter the local white high school.  So they react against it, no matter how accurate the assessment.

Supposedly Sinclair Lewis said (there seems to be disagreement about this), “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”  Whether he said it not, the truth of that statement is frightening.  As long as our fascism is seen as American and never called “fascism”, I think many Americans would have no problem with it at all… maybe even most Americans…

Dick Cheney was maybe a charisma-transplant, a suspicious fire in the House of Representatives, and a toothbrush-mustache away from achieving his goals.  Maybe it’s time to watch V for Vendetta again…

Maybe it’s time to watch V for Vendetta again…

You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that more than any of his fellow wingnut commentarians, Glenn Beck is about as frighteningly close to a real-life version of Lewis Prothero as I have ever seen.

Sure, they’re all kinda crazy fascists, but Beck really takes it over the line where you listen to him bloviating about supposedly communist artwork at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (because we all know how much robber baron John D. Rockefeller idolized Karl Marx), and you think to yourself, “Is this guy really getting paid tens of millions of dollars to spout this insanity?”

Dude, where’s my country, indeed.

“Sure, they’re all kinda crazy fascists, but Beck really takes it over the line where you listen to him bloviating about supposedly communist artwork at 30 Rockefeller Plaza (because we all know how much robber baron John D. Rockefeller idolized Karl Marx), and you think to yourself, “Is this guy really getting paid tens of millions of dollars to spout this insanity?””

I’m waiting for Beck to work out a Da-Vinci-Code-style series of proofs showing that he’s really the great-great-blah-blah-grandson of Jesus and demonstrate it by attempting to walk on water.  Or maybe he’ll finally have that breakdown he’s been working toward and just blow his brains out on live TV.  I don’t see how you can maintain that level of crazy without it finally getting to you…

Just remember, “<strike>England</strike> America <strike>Prevails</strike> Wins!!!”...

I think even if you asked them about some of the specific things fascists did—making the trains run on time, putting people back to work, putting undesirables in jail, they’d be pretty much OK with that. Things just went a bit too far…

Or maybe he’ll finally have that breakdown he’s been working toward and just blow his brains out on live TV.

Malloy fan?

I love that guy.

In response to morningface:

Speaking to the morality argument issue, here is the thing. For the conservative nutjobs, forcing women to bear children they do not want IS the moral thing to do.

Of course they believe that, I do not dispute it. What I was referring to is the fact that they believe (witness: murder of Dr Tiller and “partial-birth” abortion laws) that it is MORAL to force a woman with an already dead fetus inside of her TO DIE because removing it would be abortion. I meant to highlight that, even when it is insane and accomplishing nothing other than the death of a woman, they oppose abortions for women whose fetus is not going to live anyway. I probably wasn’t clear enough, but that is what I meant by “force women to die from pregnancies that have gone wrong.”

I HOPE that cases like that are pretty obviously clear…let (or force) a woman to die because you are denying her medical treatment for purely political reasons (such as, you are against ALL abortions, no matter what the circumstances)

Let me clarify - when I say “secretly”, what I mean is that most of these folks would rarely come right out and say “I wish America was more like Nazi Germany.” Furthermore, if you were to ask them bluntly “Do you wish we were more like Nazi Germany?”, they would vehemently deny it, and act as if they have been gravely insulted that you would even suggest such a thing.

Of course they don’t.  They prefer khaki to black leather; they would never venerate a swastika when the cross is there; they can’t see the point of invading Poland; and, of course, they speak good ol’ English rather than German.

Since any other comparisons would require a degree of abstraction and perspective that wingnuts notably lack, such an equation would be an insult.

My favorite part of the ticking time bomb scenario is that I would wager that I could get the information without torture. certainly a trained interrogator could.

The skill of being a conversationalist is getting someone to talk about themselves without realizing it, and paying attention. a calm demeanor, a friendly tone, and perhaps the offer of something tasty to eat.

Keep in mind, the biggest intelligence coup from an interrogation in the whole of the War on Terror came from offering a subject who was diabetic sugar-free cookies.

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My favorite part of the ticking time bomb scenario is that I would wager that I could get the information without torture. certainly a trained interrogator could.

Well, yeah.  That’s what so great about both the eps I mentioned earlier.

(possible spoilers for both)

The thing about you having a deadline to get the info?  It ALSO means that the secret keeper thinks that they only have to keep the secret for a certain amount of time.  So it’s just as likely to give you an opportunity as it is to present you with an obstacle.

A few commenters have noted how torture accrues a general sense of terror in the population towards the agencies that use it.  The NKVD and SS were mentioned.

A couple of years ago, I saw an episode of Missing.  It’s yet another FBI cop drama with the focus on finding missing persons.  My impression is that the missing people are generally kidnapping victims.

So, on this episode I saw, the two hip, young, good-looking, and cool agents were confronting someone they believed was associated with a source of information whom they couldn’t find.  Keep in mind, this person knew nothing himself about the crime but could provide information about someone else who might.  This guy was also involved in something shady but completely unrelated to their investigation and was therefore reluctant to talk to them at all.

Now, there’s a couple of ways they could have approached this problem.  Frex, they could have convinced the guy they weren’t in the least bit interested in his shadiness and appealled to his sense of justice: a child’s life is at stake.  Or, they could have gathered evidence, or merely bluffed that they had, about his shadiness and used that against him.

Instead, they just casually mentioned that they, the FBI, could falsely accuse him of being a terrorist and have him disappeared, dropped down into the black hole of secret custody, never to be heard from again.  The guy turned white as a sheet and immediately gave up what little he knew.

I mean, think about that.  The guy’s a petty criminal, not a terrorist or kidnapper.  He is completely innocent of any involvement in the crime they’re investigating- they know it, he knows it.  Rather than treat this situation the way real cops would, the writers chose to have their heroes act like the Argentina junta: they threaten him with disappearance and the unsubtly implied threat of torture and death.  It’s treated as just a matter of course, and it works because the informant, like everybody else, just knows that the feds are perfectly capable of doing such things.

And these are the good guys.  We the audience are supposed to approve.  There is no discussion of the morality, let alone legality, of what they did, and there are no later consequences or even mention of the incident.  The entire scene is maybe four minutes long, just a throwaway scene to show how the FBI agents get info they need to move the plot along.

The writers, through the characters, showed us how they believe the system works, like the worst police state imaginable.  It’s not a bad thing: they approve of this and expect the audience does as well.

If I worked at FBI, or law enforcement generally, I would be really pissed about this.  How are they supposed to get anyone to give them useful voluntary cooperation if everybody fears them like the NKVD was feared?