The Persistence of Torture: Explaining Coercive Interrogation in America’s Small Wars William L. d’Ambruoso A dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2016 Reading Committee: Elizabeth Kier, Chair Jonathan Mercer Jamie Mayerfeld Christopher Adolph Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Political Science 1 ©Copyright 2016 William L. d’Ambruoso 2 University of Washington Abstract The Persistence of Torture: Explaining Coercive Interrogation in America’s Small Wars William L. d’Ambruoso Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Elizabeth Kier, Associate Professor Political Science Why has the United States used torture in small wars over the last hundred-plus years? After all, torture is morally bankrupt, risky, and frequently ineffective as an interrogation method. I argue that the anti-torture norm has two features that can lead to torture. First, because it is difficult to separate torture from milder acts, the norm lacks specificity. This allows practitioners to portray their behavior as something short of torture and redefine torture to exclude their behavior. Second, the anti-torture norm can, paradoxically, encourage torture by attracting those who believe unscrupulous methods confer advantages on those who use them. The two explanations interact as well: torture occurs because actors believe that torture is harsh enough to work, and the definition of torture is blurry enough that actors believe they can sell their methods as legitimate. Through archival and bibliographic research, I confirm these patterns in three different settings: the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the CIA from its founding to the Vietnam War, and the post-2001 war on terror. 3 Chapter 1: Torture and the Norm against It: Undying Rivals “It is hard to believe that we are sitting here talking about torture.” Washington Post reporter Dana Priest opened with this thought while serving as a panelist at a forum on the United States’ use of torture during the war on terror. CBS News had published pictures of American torture at Abu Ghraib – hooding, use of dogs, death threats, sexual humiliation, and more – earlier that year. Some of the torture memos describing legal justifications for “enhanced interrogation techniques” were now in public hands. Priest and her fellow panelists were calmly and politely discussing, among other gory particulars, the details of different forms of water torture that their country had recently used on terrorist detainees. Other panelists echoed Priest’s sentiment: How odd.1 For torture to make it all the way to the twenty-first century in the United States, it had to be remarkably resilient. Torture survived the intellectual assault from European Enlightenment authors like Baccaria. It had to find a way around the United States’ founding documents, which, with strong influence from European thinkers and experience, expressly prohibited cruel and unusual punishment in the Bill of Rights. Torture persisted despite an absolute prohibition in the American Civil War’s Lieber Code, a forerunner to modern laws of war. It managed to continue beyond the Geneva Conventions from the first half of the twentieth century and the Convention against Torture of 1984. Torture has also endured less legalistic admonishment. The U.S. Government’s own State Department has been a leading whistleblower for torture and other cruel treatment, with such comprehensive reports that scholars have used them to construct torture variables for quantitative analysis.2 “[T]he norm against torture has been thought to be 1 Greenberg 2006, 13-32. 2 For one example among many, see Hathaway 2002. 4 the pre-eminent manifestation of a global commitment to civilized norms.”3 This book examines why torture and the norm against it have persisted in tandem like undying rivals for over a century. Torture and liberalism make especially strange bedfellows. David Luban (2007) argues that most forms of torture, for punishment or humiliation, make no sense in combination with the liberal value of political sovereignty, because the people would be trying to impress themselves with a show of absolute control. Luban believes that the incompatibility between torture for intelligence and liberalism is less fundamental, and he discusses at length why even the promise of limited, rare torture exclusively for intelligence in high-stakes cases would unravel. Luban’s argument understates the case. Even torture for intelligence is essentially illiberal because it treats individuals as means rather than ends. Michael Ignatieff writes that “torture should remain anathema to a liberal democracy and should never be regulated, countenanced, or covertly accepted in a war on terror. For torture, when committed by a state, expresses the state’s ultimate view that human beings are expendable.”4 While liberal states have not tortured as much as their illiberal counterparts, they have done their share. In fact, they have invented their own “liberal” methods. Darius Rejali (2007) explains how international and domestic monitoring of detainee treatment has forced liberal states to develop and perpetuate “stealth torture” methods that leave no trace and help the perpetrator escape detection. Any given “enhanced interrogation” technique from the war on terror is more likely to be a descendent of American slavery or British military punishment than fascist or Communist coercion. These techniques lived on through the twentieth century, in 3 Linklater 2007. See also Foot 2006; Mckeown 2009. 4 Quoted in Lukes 2005. 5 British and French colonies, as well as in American counterinsurgencies and interrogation manuals. The U.S. war on terror brought torture to this century. The war on terror case is particular crucial for arguing that torture has been persistent, because many of the background conditions that carried torture through the twentieth century are no longer in effect. Old-fashioned colonialism is mostly done, and liberal democracies’ rejections of the horrors of torture may have even had a hand in colonialism’s demise.5 The Cold War is over, and with it the counter-revolutionary torture that clandestine U.S. bureaucracies helped to develop and spread. The three main empirical cases of this book – the Philippine- American War (1899-1902), the CIA from its founding to the Vietnam War, and the post-2001 war on terror – correspond with imperialism, the Cold War, and post-Cold War conflict, respectively. My strategy is to extract from these cases the common factors that have allowed torture to persist across the varied contexts. The hypocrisy of liberal torture would not surprise most international relations scholars, especially realists and rational choice theorists that expect states to say and do things in pursuit of self-gain, even if their words and deeds are mutually inconsistent.6 However, there are (at least) five instrumental reasons for avoiding interrogational torture. First, torture is a method for gathering intelligence. Perhaps the most persistent critique of interrogational torture is its flimsy connection to truth: Victims are likely to say anything, including false statements, to stop the suffering.7 I defend the claim that torture is usually an ineffective means of gathering intelligence – a topic that has engendered considerable debate in the popular press since 2001 – in more detail in the Appendix. Second, torture can fuel the enemy’s recruitment efforts, giving 5 Merom 2003. 6 See, for instance, Krasner 1999. 7 This argument is as old as Aristotle, runs through Cicero, St. Augustine, and Beccaria, and continues to be made today. For historical recounts, see Holmes 2007; Langbein 2004. For a recent example, see Soufan 2009. 6 life to terrorist and insurgent groups.8 Third, torture may deter the enemy from surrendering, prolonging wars and causing more casualties on both sides.9 Fourth, torture can produce extreme stress in the interrogator.10 Fifth, torture runs counter to the “hearts and minds” campaigns that many modern counterinsurgency strategists advocate.11 Torture does not easily lend itself to straightforward, utility-maximizing explanations. Why have states persisted in practicing it? More broadly, why would states do something that is both odious and of dubious instrumental value? If the reader buys the foregoing argument that torture for intelligence carries great risks and little promise, then the significance of the puzzle is clear. Torture that doesn’t work has no redeeming ethical qualities, and is therefore a horrendous mistake. Knowing why and how it occurs can hold implications for its eradication. And although the puzzle specifies torture for intelligence, people turn to torture for many reasons – punishment, forced confession, revenge, social control, sadistic glee – but it often begins with superiors’ approval of interrogational torture. Once states approve torture, it is notoriously difficult to regulate.12 Understanding why states approve torture for intelligence can have implications for preventing other types of torture as well. Even a reader that is skeptical of torture’s supposed inefficacy has reason to seek explanations. Liberal states’ use of torture is still puzzling on ideological grounds. Moreover, even if torture reliably yields valuable information, this does not imply that it was chosen for rational reasons. The choice still needs explanation. 8 For one example of this argument, see Alexander 2008. It is possible that torture, if sufficiently widespread, could