Photo: Björn Suomivuori

This is the second part of the Darius Rejali interview, a political science professor at Reed College. This robust American is not shy in his words of expertise. In this part he talks about the Obama administration, professional interrogation, how the media affects the perception of torture and much more!

But considering the note of Obama’s presidential campaign you would think that he would be different from Bush… ?

You would think. Some things have changed - the most important issues have not.

But here is the basic social science argument. It says that torture does not stop or torture practices do not change when certain conditions are not met. It particularly does not happen when there is a major economic downturn, or when a country is at war, and large countries always have these problems. And all of those things happened to America when Obama came around. The prospects that Obama could actually change anything were extremely low. You can see how he got bogged down immediately; he was unable to close Guantanamo, and here’s what is under the carpet, what nobody talks about. Torture was far more extensive in the American military than in the intelligence agency, the CIA cases count for a hundred, but the army cases count for thousands, and there is no investigation, Obama cannot investigate that. Not when he is fighting a war in Afghanistan and risks losing the American generals on this one.

An then there is the most obvious point, namely when he said that we are no longer using any interrogational techniques except for those outlined in the field army manual. That would be wonderful if he’d been talking about the 1990 version, but Bush changed this manual in 2006 so that it does not explicitly prohibit sleep deprivation, stress positions… it does say “don’t be bad”, but in the details it does not prohibit these techniques.

The second thing that the Obama administration has done is that they want more scientific ways of interrogating. The problem is that interrogation will never be a science; it has always been an art.  There are flaws in these scientific methods. For example, when you lie, a certain part of your brain lights up - but if you lie three times in a row, you believe your lies, so two lies become two truths so quickly that other parts of your brain will light up. Science cannot capture these things, only professionals can.

Photo: Björn Suomivuori

Not to mention the problem with the whistle blowers; anyone who has identified a problem when it comes to interrogational techniques has been persecuted. Not just by Bush, but also by Obama. This has not been a very good time to be a whistle blower. There will be some changes. Maybe no torture for us, but we’ll hand them over to the Kenyans. Obama is hemmed in in more ways than you could possible imagine.

Where in the world do you have the most gruesome torture?

It’s hard to compare pain!

What are the trends in torture right now? Is there an area we need to be concerned about for the future? What are the potential risks?

The biggest challenge to a world without torture is figuring out torture sub-cultures. There is no Jane’s torture weekly, where people learn the latest techniques. Yet, torture spreads, that’s why historically we have different styles, for example in the Middle East the most common combination is electricity and the beating of the soles of the feet.

But actually, we know how to stop torture, you don’t need democracy, you don’t need Amnesty International, all you need is clear rules that say what you can and cannot do and clear lines of authority, as in lines that tell you who is responsible for what, and clear punishments for violations of these rules. Add to that regular medical examination and remand before a judge between 24 and 48 hours. By doing this you can eliminate most organized torture in a system, with the exception of the occasional wacko. But when you have an established sub-culture of say soldiers who go around these rules, then that is where the real problem lies. This problem can not be solved by having more human rights training, as everything we know in social science says this does not work. For example, all personnel in Abu Graib were trained in basic human rights, in fact, ever since Vietnam all military police are trained in human rights and the Geneva Convention. Two sets of rules didn’t stop anybody at Abu Graib, where there was no clear authority, no punishment for violation of these rules. The Red Cross was lied to and the medical examinations were deceived. This is basic social science. The real solution is to prevent torture sub-culture from forming.

Movies and TV series (24) sometimes seem to popularize torture. Why is the media doing this?

The good news is that nothing that the media has done has changed the American public opinion. Nothing, there is no media effect. When we look at American public opinion they consistently oppose torture throughout the Bush administration, somewhere between 55 and 65% in every poll. But the media kept on being persistent with this issue; they would claim that “most Americans” would support torture in a ticking time-bomb situation. Yet they did not. In fact, when they were asked “would you water-board in a ticking time-bomb situation?” opposition went up to 82%. This is a complete disconnect. Interestingly, we made a survey on this and what we found is something that in psychology is called the “False Consensus Effect”, which explains why the media would say that Americans support torture. It means that when you disaggregate the data of a survey such as ours, you find that, the more pro-torture you are, the more you believe that most people agree with you. The 15% that believed torture was justified all the time believed that closer to 50% of all Americans agreed with them, when in fact the number was circa 65% against. Likewise, the people who thought that torture was sometimes justified (25-35%) also believed that closer to 70% agreed with them. In fact the only people who had an accurate image of this were the ones who believed that torture is never justified. In other words the more anti-torture you are the more accurately you understand the political situation.

The bad news is that since Obama took power, no thanks to the media, this has begun to swing in the opposite direction. Just among the republicans, there has been a 17% increase in the support for torture. Torture has emerged during the Obama administration in a way that suggests that it’s the same thing as what capital punishment is to crime.

We want to show that we are tough on crime, so we will kill people; we want to show that we are tough on terrorism, so we torture people.

Because of the increasing culture of irresponsibility, we have an increased number of people like military personnel and police men who want to be bad but do not want to take responsibility. Fine, be bad, but be prepared to stand trial, and if your actions were in fact the right thing to do, no-one will condemn you. Interestingly, no conservative could ever support this, because we are all, of course, for moral responsibility. In this way, not conservatism but a weak kind of something that passes for conservatism - something that is really supporting a culture of irresponsibility and TV-series like 24 - seems to teach that kind of moral.

FERENCZ THUROCZY

This interview was done in cooperation with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University.