drink deep or not at all

Torture considered as an information industry:

 It may be true that individual torturers are sadists, or the policy-makers seek to terrorize populations of people. But torture is primarily an information-gathering tool for the US, as a matter of policy. It's an information economy. And the individual prisoners are the aggregate bits of data that comprise the information-gathering tool. The justification comes a priori: information is good; information in the name of the defense of civilization is better. But torture information is an odd entity in that much of the framework narrative of what is sought through torture comes a priori as well. Bits of data make no sense otherwise. They're meaningless bits of data. Those bits have to fit into a background framework of interpretation, beliefs, assumptions, values, goals, etc. for them to come to make sense. But the information from one torture victim is unlikely to have much useful meaning.

For torture to be effective as an information-gathering method, it has to be institutionalized and used broadly. This is what I mean by aggregation. The information comes from observation of patterns generated by aggregating what the individual victims say and less from the words of an individual torture victim. Meaningful information from torture necessarily comes from torture's institutionalization.... But, while you could possibly verify concrete things like a weapons cache through torture of one person, you can't verify an alleged plot and its full details without torturing broadly and collecting the bits of information - sorting out the consistent from the inconsistent - into a patterned narrative.

You can’t torture one person because they are unlikely to know everything. You don’t know exactly how many people you need to torture because you don’t know the dimension of the threat: that’s why you’re torturing people in the first place. So you torture on a large scale and torture people who have nothing to do with the group you’re targeting.

Comments

[Phil]

Meh - very thin. Anyone interested in this stuff should read Shue, Dershowitz and Steinhoff (in that order). I don't think Agamben's much of a guide to anything.