Torture on the Radio

There have been two interesting interviews on NPR recently concerning U.S. participation in torture. Fresh Air interviewed Adam Fierro, producer of the TV show The Shield — which has recently won the Human Rights First Award for Excellence in Television for portraying torture “in a nuanced, realistic fashion” — and human rights activist David Danzig. But the most interesting part of the interview was the discussion with intelligence expert Col. Stuart Herrington, a former military interrogator.

Herrington talks about the alarming way in which interrogators working for the U.S. military and the CIA seem to have absorbed fictional depictions of torture as if they were proof of its efficacy (and perhaps its moral acceptability). Herrington worked as an interrogator in Vietnam, Panama, and Iraq during the first gulf war. He points out that in his more than 30 years of experience, he has never once encountered the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario that is so often cited as a rationale for torturing prisoners. That’s the old “what if a prisoner knows something that could save lives if acted upon quickly” situation that you hear grown people discussing as if it happened all the time. It does happen all the time — on TV.

Aside from the fact that such “ticking bomb” situations almost never happen in real life, the idea that torturing someone will cause them to provide the information is another myth perpetuated by television and movies. That’s what the award was created for — to counter these TV myths. Herrington was interviewed about the same subject by the Washington Post (two years ago — sigh):

Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply “not a good way to get information.” In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no “stress methods” at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones.

I’m not sure that an award like this will make much of an impact, but I recommend listening to this thoughtful and interesting interview.

In a related but very different interview, Steve Inskeep interviewed Robert Grenier, former head of the CIA counter-terrorism center, about the film Rendition, which depicts the story of an innocent man kidnapped and sent abroad to be tortured. Inskeep points out that in trying to pin the administration down about their claims that they don’t torture, “people talk coninuously past one another, because they have different, or even hidden, definitions of what they mean”. As in almost every pronouncement from people involved in these activities, Grenier implies that the U.S. doesn’t torture, then refuses to specify the rules of behavior for interrogators. Then he declines to say one way or the other whether prisoners sent to interrogators abroad have been tortured. The man is icy.

(photo: Evan Vucci, AP)

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~ by lolarusa on October 19, 2007.