The Art of Torture and a Poor Rendering

"Well hey, it's about my pregnant wife let me pull out my cell right now and we can call her together, Officer... what's your name again?  Can I borrow a pen, any of you civilians all around me, to take a name down? You'll love meeting my boy Jeremy, he loves his constitutional rights.  How about you, Officer? Love rights? Of course you do. I was asking about kids."

I fear you speak upon the rack

Where men enforced do speak anything.

If you have never seen the movie Rendition, don't watch it on the same day as seeing The Bourne Ultimatum.  While both are Hollywood films about the darker aspects of national security, the extreme attention to detail in the title character of the former makes it much harder to connect with any of heroes in the latter.

For the record, I do not support assassination or rendition, nor do I particularly see torture as an effective tool in stopping practices like espionage and terrorism.  In fact, I think both practices are placebos worse than the disease, creating a PR nightmare for practitioners, only fueling more resentment and cause for attacks.  The whole thing, really, is a cycle of feudal escalation - the games entities like the NSA, CSEC or the CIA play in the name of national security are really just scaled-up versions of gangland machinations with cooler toys and less abrasive jargon.

But back to the movies.

There is nobody who has the superhuman abilities of Jason Bourne.  You'd need to roll up high-functioning autism, extreme social-emotional intuition, an in-depth awareness of general behavioural economics but also multiple culture variances and of course, the kick-ass fightery of a Bruce Lee (not to mention the physical indestructibility of John McClane).  I have met a few folk who work in this space and I'll tell ya, they're not perfect.  The ones who delude themselves they are tend to be the worst long-term investments.

But there aren't that many people as formulaic as you see in Rendition, either.  The performances were honest, but the writing and logic gaps of the characters were cringe-worthy.  It's as though the writers (and therefore, the production team) felt that the point they needed to make was so crystal pure they didn't want to mire it in realism.

The questions asked (and not asked) by various characters are face-plant inducing.  The whole "calls came in to a cell, ergo you're a terrorist" is the lamest, most thinly veiled excuse to render someone over.  Look at the detailed investigation into Rob Ford's acquaintances to see the sort of information one should be collating before making an assessment.  It's almost like a horror film - someone wants to scream about about following police into stairwells or going into showers, but to no avail.

But back to terrorism.

Someone will make the argument that when it becomes clear a terrorist attack is about to occur, there's no time to play nice - dirty tricks that save lives become fair tricks.

We see this kind of logic in politics all the time - pick your scandal at any level of office and behind the scenes was someone who said "we have to be quick/tough but we'll get this thing tied off and behind us."  The details were a sidebar and the consequences can always be spun with rhetoric tomorrow.

It does not work - it's trading off one one woe today for multiple tomorrow, or even more heinous, ignoring the big burning issue now only to have it blow up later.

More to the point, everyone has these grandiose visions of secret conversations in darkened booths - the fact is, a ridiculous wealth of relevant information is divulged, regularly, in random public settings like coffee shops, restaurants or even on the subway.  In other words, a lot of casual convos will have more influence on major policy decisions than evidence-based information, which at least in Canada we're stymieing anyway.

You don't need to extract and torture people for information - you need to get out there, listen and connect the dots.  It's basic Sun-tzu - if you're responding to an attack, you've already fallen behind.  

If I wanted to know what special activities someone was engaged in, I would first get the necessary legal protocols and then go through the process of getting inside a target's head, their communications flow and their narrative baseline.  Spend some time with people in different context, they reveal a lot more about their thoughts, intentions, fears, and egocentricities than they ever realize.  The true applies to information.

The goal should never be to forcibly extract information from closed minds - that's a poor approach to dismantling artificial cognitive architecture that might not be there in the first place.  If you reduce a poor person into a limbic mess, than you might as well teach the puppy tricks as expect added value.  If you break your asset in an effort to get crucial info in a short time frame, you've rendered them useless for any future uses (like behaviour change).

The Alpha Predators can keep playing their predatory game, but it's not the ones who "bend the rules" who set the future.  It's the ones who understand the inescapable laws of human nature that escape the left-right pendulum swing and push us into the third dimension that is tomorrow.

We've all gotten a little tired of the two-dimensional leaders we've had to live with of late.