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Breaking prisoners, but not the case

The use of torture on suspects, a common practice around the world, rarely achieves its goal.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published September 23, 2006

	[Times graphic: John Corbitt]
	GRAPHIC: Interrogation methods

While a prisoner of war four decades ago, U.S. Sen. John McCain was tortured by North Vietnamese demanding information on members of his flight squadron. McCain caved in, to some degree - he rattled off the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line.

Speed forward to last week, when a Canadian inquiry cleared engineer Maher Arar of any suspicion of terrorist activities and declared him an innocent man. Yet Arar, who spent 10 hard months in a Syrian jail, says he confessed to membership in al-Qaida to end the beatings and other brutality.

"I was ready to confess to anything if it would stop the torture," Arar told a Toronto newspaper.

The experiences of Arar and McCain illustrate a fact about torture: Though common in many parts of the world, torture rarely produces valuable, credible information.

"The only thing that torture guarantees is pain," says Joe Navarro, a former Tampa FBI agent who is an expert on interrogation. "It never guarantees the truth."

The United States is the most recent nation to be accused of torture, stemming from revelations that U.S. interrogators in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons overseas have used excessive noise, threats by dogs and other tactics to try to pry information out of terror suspects.

While denying that the United States condones torture, President Bush defends the use of harsh procedures to question detainees and insists they have helped save lives. In a recent speech, he said the "tough" interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a former aide to Osama bin Laden, led to the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the likely mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Coinciding with the speech was the Pentagon's release of a new manual that prohibits "inhumane treatment" of detainees. However, the ban does not apply to the CIA, which is accused of some of the most egregious practices, including those described in an ABC News investigation last November:

- The belly slap: a hard, open-handed slap to the stomach that causes pain but no internal injury.

- Long time standing: Prisoners are forced to stand for more than 40 hours with hands cuffed and feet shackled to the floor. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are said to be effective in yielding confessions.

- The cold cell: The prisoner is doused with cold water as he stands naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees.

- Water boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the face and water is poured over him. Although it is almost impossible to drown because the lungs are higher than the mouth, the technique produces a sensation of drowning that induces near instant pleas to halt the treatment.

Water boarding is so terrifying that military tribunals created after World War II considered it a crime. Some of the Japanese who used "water treatment" and other forms of torture on Allied prisoners were executed.

According to the ABC report, CIA officers who subjected themselves to water boarding lasted an average of 14 seconds. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed drew the admiration of interrogators when he held out more than two minutes before begging to confess.

But the techniques also killed at least one detainee and led to false confessions by others. Among them was Ibn al Shayk al Libi, who was water boarded before claiming that Iraq trained al-Qaida members to use biochemical weapons - part of the basis for the Bush administration's decision to go to war. It was later determined that he had no knowledge of training or weapons and had made up the story to avoid further harsh treatment.

In a compromise reached Thursday, Bush, McCain and other Republican senators agreed that the CIA could continue its aggressive questioning but that the United States would adhere to international treaties banning torture. Among them are the Geneva Conventions, which define torture as severe physical or mental pain or suffering intentionally inflicted under government auspices.

Navarro, who teaches interrogation techniques, says torture is counterproductive.

"When you are under stress, your mind is most tormented so you remember the least amount of information. That's the exact opposite of what the interrogator is trying to accomplish," Navarro says. "Or what if they tell you something false, then you pursue it? It ties up your investigators and they find out there's nothing to it. Then what - more torture until he dies? You're back where you started."

Far more effective, Navarro says, is making a subject so comfortable that he volunteers information.

A prime example is the FBI's handling of "Junior," a Sudanese citizen and former al-Qaida operative who has been living in the U.S. government's witness protection program for nearly a decade. According to New Yorker magazine, agents gave the sports-loving Junior money to buy a ping-pong table, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on hospital bills for one of his children and "imported" several of his wife's relatives from Sudan to keep her happy.

In return, the magazine says, Junior arguably has become "the United States' most valuable informant on al-Qaida," providing crucial intelligence about the group's operations and identifying suspected members.

"The most effective method of interrogation is the nice approach," Navarro says. "Just about everybody I've put in jail still writes to me."

There is no denying, though, that torture can sometimes yield valuable information, as shown in the 1994 kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian terrorists. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin admitted that the driver of the car used in the kidnapping had been tortured to reveal the soldier's whereabouts. He was later found dead.

The use of violent interrogation methods remained highly controversial, however, and in 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court banned such practices as hooding prisoners with urine-soaked sacks and forcing them into painful positions for long periods. Whatever was gained by such tactics, critics charged, was offset by the hatred they induced.

State-sponsored torture is used in dozens of other countries, often to silence political opposition or subdue restive populations. At the Clearwater-based Florida Center for Survivors of Torture, run by Gulf Coast Jewish Family Services, counselors will work with more than 200 men and women this year - some still in their teens - who have endured torture in their native lands.

"Every single day we talk to survivors who say this should never happen to anyone else," says Stacie Blake, program administrator. "They articulate the many, many ways in which their life has been destroyed to no good end. They weren't able to provide useful information to their interrogators; they gave information to make the pain stop."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

[Last modified September 23, 2006, 01:39:14]