Speaking Under Torture

Speaking Under Torture Tim Kenyon, Department of Philosophy University of Waterloo Arts Live and Learn Lecture 2009 I. I am going to talk about torture tonight. I am going to talk about it as a philosopher, moreover. Normally you might think this means I would focus on the morality of torture, and in fact I will touch on that question. But I am more particularly a philosopher of language and mind, and it is from the perspective of language pragmatics that I’ll be examining torture, and examining coerced statements more generally. Language pragmatics is the study of how language is used. It is one of three major divisions in the analysis of language: syntax focuses on linguistic structure; semantics on linguistic meaning. Pragmatics focuses on how utterances have the effects they have, given their syntax and semantics, and given the context. Since “given the context” has a nasty tendency to mean “given absolutely everything else that might be relevant”, language pragmatics can be a slippery endeavor. You probably shouldn’t expect anything like a mathematical proof in the following remarks. But I do hope to help you think about torture, or language use, or both, in a slightly different way. II. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg relates the following episode, remarkable mainly for its being an unremarkable example of many similar episodes in its day. In 1518, a young serving woman in Modena, Italy, is on trial for her life on charges of witchcraft. Chiara Signorini has been questioned by the vicar on two occasions. The records of the questioning, preserved in the Modena State Archives, suggest that the vicar attempts to lead her into self-incrimination, while she attempts to indulge his leading questions as far as she deems safe. For example, Chiara confesses to having visions and conversing with spirits, but she owns that these spirits are angelic rather than demonic. Indeed, she says that she has had visions of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Now, at their third meeting, she begins by attempting to deny everything she’d confessed earlier. The vicar responds by moving to interrogation by torture. As soon as she is confronted with the instruments of torture and is tied up, she re-confesses everything. In fact she adds many new incriminating elements from the leading questions put to her. She is not directly tortured on this occasion, but the threat of torture elicits these utterances, which are so clearly intended to please her interrogator. The next day, Chiara again recants everything, claiming “that nothing she had told them was true, and what she had said was all because of the fear of being tortured”. Her interrogators are dismayed by what they see as her lack of penitence, and proceed with the torture this time. “[W]hen 1 she had been raised about four cubits from the floor [Chiara] cried out from the pain,” but she refuses to say what they most want her to say – a confession of malevolent witchcraft against a particular woman. She does, however, say that she has raised demons and conversed with Satan himself. This time, when the torture ends, she does not immediately recant. This sort of interrogation was repeated thousands of times over at this stage of European history; there is little that’s unique in this particular small snapshot. But for our purposes it raises some interesting points of discussion. Something of preliminary interest is that the sixteenth-century ecclesiastical interrogators and twentieth century analysis by Professor Ginzburg agree in simply calling this interrogation by torture. They were, apparently, unable to anticipate the early twenty-first century advances in conceptual sophistication on which such treatments as being bound and hoisted into the air would be revealed as mere “stress positions” rather than torture. Of course a central linguistic theme on the topic of torture, or any practice to be justified despite its apparent immorality, is that of the words we use to describe it. Nobody will be surprised who recalls the use to which various 20th century governments put the term “pacification”, to include the detention or murder of civilians and the destruction of their property. So a preliminary note: one thing that many defenders of the use of torture have learned is simply not to call it torture. That is broadly a theme to which I will return indirectly. But for my purposes as a philosopher of language, the immediate question is this: What is Chiara Signorini doing, when she speaks in the way described by the archives and by Professor Ginzburg? She confesses, recants, reconfesses, re-recants… Her stories are inconsistent; her confessions and recantations can’t both be true. Is she alternately lying and telling the truth? That depends on what we think lying is, among other things. The question is an old and complex one; more than 1500 years ago Augustine of Hippo was writing subtle and sophisticated treatises on the matter. Many who have worked on the topic have held that lying involves asserting with intent to deceive. Never mind that this doesn’t yet tell us what asserting is; we’ll get to that momentarily. In any case it is deeply implausible that Chiara’s primary intention is to hide some truth from the vicar. Rather, she is made aware of what he wants to hear, through his line of leading questions, and she is aware also of the consequences of not saying it – she’ll be tortured. And she is already at least vaguely aware of the consequences of coming right out and saying what he wants to hear, wholly and directly – she’ll be executed. Neither of these options appeals to her very strongly, so she is simply trying to say things that will indulge her interrogators sufficiently to minimize the torture, without inducing the worst judicial consequences. There is no clear reason to think that any direct aim of speaking the truth or of concealing the truth is what underlies her utterances. She’s just trying to produce statements that will make some things happen and other things not happen. 2 So if she’s not trying to tell the truth, and she’s not trying to lie, what’s she doing with those utterances? III. The question of the acts we perform through language is not a new one by any means. While philosophers and jurists and theologians have long been concerned with it, our popular way of thinking has strongly inclined to distinguish between saying and doing. There are many contexts in which this distinction is perfectly sensible, yet many also in which it’s crucial to recognize that saying is doing. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, the philosopher John Austin was most influential in providing a framework for considering the matter. Let me explain the basic idea. Even granting that every deliberate utterance is a way of doing something or other, Austin noted that there are some broad and important distinctions between classes of utterances understood as kinds of actions. In most contexts, if you say 1. I attend public lectures. then you’ve made an assertion. It could be true; it could be false; it makes perfect sense to ask you what the evidence for your statement is. But in some contexts, if you say 2. I thee wed. you have not made an assertion. It isn’t really true or false, and one couldn’t really ask for your evidence, because that utterance doesn’t function to represent some independent state of affairs. Under the legally appropriate conventional circumstances, saying “I thee wed” doesn’t report some independently occurring fact of your marrying somebody; it accomplishes your marrying somebody. Similarly, I can report – correctly or incorrectly – on my state of mind by saying 3. I hope to pay you back next week. But I’m doing something very different if I say 4. I promise to pay you back next week. 3 Saying (3) does not itself bring it about that I hope to pay you back next week. But saying (4) does bring it about that I promise to pay you back next week. Austin called utterances like (2) and (4) “performative utterances”, to distinguish them from mere assertions. They are utterances that are used to perform some act rather than just describing it. The main philosophical, linguistic, and sociological questions centre on the conditions that have to be in place in order for such an utterance to play that performative role. Standing here right now, I could say “I thee wed” to each of you in the audience, one by one, without thereby acquiring a harem of unusual variety and sultaneseque proportions; so clearly some extra conditions have to be in place in order to produce the performative effect. And those conditions vary from one cultural and legal context to the next. Understanding how this works has been a part of the study of language pragmatics over the past 50 years. Yet Austin was himself among the people who quickly came to see that the distinction between assertions and performative utterances was not a terribly deep one. Asserting is itself a unique sort of action, with contextual conditions for its successful performance. Seeming assertions can turn out not to be assertions; and attempted assertions can fail. After all, not everything that looks like a vow of marriage is one; in our culture, you need a justice of the peace or a minister or somesuch. Not everything that sounds like a promise is one; obvious sarcasm and humor can defeat the effect. And not everything that looks like an assertion is one, either. Here too sarcasm and humor can defeat the regular connection between uttering a declarative sentence (a sentence in the indicative mood, for those who remember their grammar, like “The cat is in the hat”) and making an assertion. There are more complex ways of breaking this relation, too. Consider actors: they are forever uttering sentences in the indicative mood, on stage or on film, without anyone taking the actors themselves to have asserted anything at all. “I’m a Treasury officer,” says Kevin Costner in The Untouchables. Did Kevin Costner claim to be a Treasury officer? Obviously not. That’s not how acting works, and it’s not how assertion works. But there is something curious about the dramatic case, compared to overt sarcasm, as a way of merely mimicking an assertion. When sarcasm works, it typically works by dint of some observable or deducible cues that distinguish the sincere from the oblique. It’s the difference between “I’m sure you’re right” and “Oh, I’m suuuuure you’re right!” But good dramatic acting is just the opposite. When it works, it works by mimicking as closely as possible the appearance of actual assertion. Indeed, this fact was cited as an argument against the possibility of producing a formal linguistic sign to denote assertion, as far back as the nineteenth-century. As the philosopher Donald Davidson succinctly put it: If you try to use some explicit sign to distinguish real assertions from dramatic non-assertions, “every joker, storyteller, and actor will immediately take advantage of the strengthened mood to simulate assertion”. If we tried to say that 4 real assertions would be prefixed with “Lo!”, for example, then any actor worth her salt would immediately start prefixing her onstage pseudo-assertions with “Lo!”. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t get any acting jobs, precisely because she wouldn’t give the appearance of really asserting. Where does this leave us? Perhaps surprisingly, it leaves us with a prospective answer to the question that set us off down this path. Chiara Signorini is neither telling the truth nor lying, because she is not asserting at all. In fact, she’s doing something that has more in common with acting than with assertion: she’s capitulating, she’s saying ‘Uncle’, and she’s doing it by mimicking the surface features of normal assertion within a context that actually nullifies those assertions, in something like the way that a theatrical context brought it about that Kevin Costner never claimed to be a Treasury Officer. Explaining precisely how speech under torture loses its status as assertion is quite difficult, mostly because it’s very hard to say precisely what the conditions for successful assertion are. It’s certainly harder than with getting married, or with making a promise, and explaining those things is already hard enough. There are a lot more people who are convinced that there is something importantly conventional and socially defined about assertion than there are people who can say just what the conventions and social definitions are. But here, at least, is a rough and ready (and philosophically axe-grinding) guide: to assert something is a matter of socio-conventional entitlements and obligations. An assertion entitles the hearer to treat what you’ve said as true, or at least reliable. (That doesn’t mean it’s always sensible to treat what someone tells you as true, of course; there are lots of things we are entitled to do, but which it would be silly to do.) And an assertion obliges the speaker correspondingly, to defend the assertion in the face of countervailing evidence, or to retract it altogether if the evidence shows it to be false. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes alluded to language as a collection of games of various sorts; if you like that approach, you could say that one isn’t properly playing the assertion game if one continues to say something long after it’s become demonstrably false. If we accept that much, then we have a foothold on the question of what to say about speech elicited under torture. Because somebody tortured for the purpose of getting them to say “I confess to having called up spirits” seems to fail both of these conditions. If I know that someone was tortured specifically for the purpose of getting them to say, “I confess to having called up spirits,” it would be absurd for me to consider myself entitled to believe that statement. Why? Because the usual connection (however typically convoluted it might be) between a statement’s being asserted and it’s being true, or at least reasonably believed, has been severed in the speaker’s case. And similarly, it would be equally bizarre to suppose that the speaker, once released from torture, has an obligation to defend or even to retract the statement. She might in 5 fact go to the trouble of retracting it, but this would be above and beyond her socio-linguistic and epistemic obligations. Imagine someone who witnessed the torture, who saw the torturer repeatedly coach the victim, commanding her to utter the words, “I confess to having called up spirits,” and eventually succeeding in forcing her to utter that string of words. Now the torture session ends, and the observer says to the victim, “So, what about these spirits you conjured – can you tell me more about them?” This is someone who fails to understand the nature of assertion, it seems to me. A more homely example that I’ve examined in my own work is that of saying ‘Uncle’. When a schoolyard bully twists an arm or sits on a chest until the victim says ‘Uncle’, it is utterly implausible to suppose that this utterance is actually short for an assertoric use of the sentence ‘You are my uncle’. In fact, there is no need for either the tormentor or the victim to understand that this practice, where it exists, arose from the honorific value that the title of ‘Uncle’ used to have. You don’t have to know anything at all about why the word ‘Uncle’ is or ever was an appropriate word for a bully to demand, or for a victim to produce, in the course of inflicting and accepting humiliation, in order to understand the use of the word for that purpose. It’s not so much what you’re saying; what matters is that saying that thing in that circumstance is conventionally recognized as an act of capitulation. The content of what you’re made to say might be relevant only to the extent that saying that thing is supposed to be humiliating, or otherwise an undesirable thing to have said. IV. It’s worth considering the extent to which torture generally is of this sort: that the content of speech under torture is significant not because one is asserting it, but because that kind of sentence is recognizably a way of knuckling under and acknowledging the appropriate authority. One reason to doubt that this is an entirely general characterization of speech under torture or coercion is that we’ve been focusing on cases in which the interrogator has a particular thing that the prisoner is supposed to say. On the face of things, there is a big difference between torture intended to produce capitulation and torture intended to produce information. This difference might well threaten the answer I’ve offered to the question of what Chiara Signorini does when she utters her contradictory statements. Maybe torture intended to produce mere “repeat after me” utterances doesn’t elicit genuine assertions, but this wouldn’t mean that torture intended to draw out information on some matter of interest doesn’t elicit genuine assertions. Yet how deep and how sharp is this distinction, both in principle and in practice? One way to sketch the difference is through a distinction drawn by the moral and political philosopher Henry Shue, who distinguished between terroristic torture and interrogational torture. Writing in the 1970s, Shue wanted to take seriously the idea that someone might try to defend the use of torture – he noted that it was everywhere condemned in public, but was 6 increasingly used by many governments, including some that aspired to international respectability. Though I doubt that he envisioned a relatively near future in which the United States itself would be one of those nations, his work has a close, almost eerie, applicability to current affairs. Terroristic torture we can understand as torture used in order to intimidate, to frighten, to discourage resistance, as a display of willingness to go to any extent in the prosecution of one’s aims, or to signal a refusal to be bound by common moral codes – even one’s own moral codes. According to Shue, this is an assault on the defenseless of the sort that is plausibly seen as worse than killing. Perhaps this seems a surprising claim, but Shue points out that there are situations in which killing is commonly judged to be acceptable, while assaults on the defenseless are not. Interrogational torture, by contrast, is torture meant to pry desired information out of reticent or otherwise uncooperative subjects. This is the type of torture on which defenders of the permissibility of torture focus. In popular discussions, the claims of these defenders tend to turn on possible scenarios that could morally require such torture: in short, the need to avert a greater evil that would arise should one not torture. Hence the much-discussed “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which we somehow know on independent grounds both that a powerful weapon is likely to kill many innocent people in the very near future, and that a prisoner in our remand knows facts that would enable us to disable that weapon. Interrogational torture, it has often been claimed by the architects of the United States’ policies of the “War on Terror”, could be justified in such a scenario. But it should be clear on reflection that the justification, even in such a scenario, can’t simply be the avoidance of harm to innocent people, since we can just as easily – indeed, perhaps more easily – imagine circumstances in which the terroristic torture of prisoners would serve just such a purpose. The key moral difference, according to Shue, seems to be this: It is within a prisoner’s power to end interrogational torture by cooperating in order to end the threat to innocent lives. Interrogational torture aims at getting information, and that information is the means to some desired end. In terroristic torture, the torture itself is the means to the desired end. So in practice a morally decent justification for interrogational torture would have to depend very strongly on the absence of terroristic elements to the practices. For example, it would depend on the existence of mechanisms designed to test the accuracy of torture-gleaned information as rapidly as possible, in order to end the torture immediately upon the discovery of cooperative behaviour. Notice the lurking problem here: if the information gained through torture is sound, then the torture must stop immediately. Otherwise it becomes terroristic. But if the information provided is unsound, then we have good evidence that a fundamental assumption justifying interrogational torture was false – namely, that such torment was a reliable means of getting useful information within an emergency timeframe. There are well-known successful ways of interrogating prisoners over the longer term that do not involve torture (gaining their trust, establishing a personal rapport, and so 7 forth); so failed attempts to use torture in the short term amount to powerful reason to abandon the practice in any case. When interrogational torture fails to work quickly, in other words, the emergency-based defeater of the general prohibition against torture is itself defeated. Whether such torture quickly succeeds or quickly fails, then, there would be reason to stop it. Unfortunately, though, torture of any sort is something that it is very difficult to have a little bit of. To authorize it in principle is to suppose its practical need in some cases. Political pressures of extremism and overstatement will then speak in favour of putting it into practice. To put it into practice, however, is to institutionalize it: a system must be created; a bureaucracy must facilitate it; a class of experts whose job is to justify it must arise – and this is on anyone’s realistic account of how institutions function. How easily do such bureaus, experts, and official rationales dismantle themselves? Who, within such a system, could work well having the job of saying “Stop!”? Imagine the situation in which we are winding down such a program, judging that its utility or appropriateness has gradually failed: how easy do the administrators and implementers of torture find it to admit that the last few cases of torture they sanctioned were borderline calls, probably unwarranted? As Amnesty International notes, torture easily transforms from an emergency measure into “administrative practice”. V. Quite apart from the fact that it’s hard to stop once started, there are some clear problems with defending interrogational torture. I will only discuss two of them, one more directly moral, and one that leads us back to philosophical issues of language. Problem 1. The purported examples in which it is supposed to work well are fictional. You might think this means that the purported examples are lies, or rhetorically overblown, or in any case seem in retrospect to have been mistaken. That certainly is a problem, as shown by recent revelations regarding the much-trumpeted CIA “high-value captive” Abu Zubaida. His case was used by defenders of the so-called war on terror as a success story for the use of torture over the past few years; yet it now seems that his statements under torture produced precisely zero “ticking time bomb” scenarios. Indeed, never mind immediate and enormous threats – the officials who monitored the interrogations now admit that no real plots of any kind were thwarted as a result of statements made by Abu Zubaida under torture. As the Washington Post reported, “Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced”. 8 The problem is entirely predictable: given the moral prohibition on torture, and the correspondingly strong argument needed to overturn that prohibition, there will be powerful institutional incentives to exaggerate the necessity of torture, once it is used, by exaggerating the value of the results gained through it. But the other sense in which purported examples are fictional is that – no, really – they are fictional. In the absence of plausible real-world scenarios demonstrating that interrogational torture can be used with morally clean hands, the defenders of this idea fall back, first, on elaborate thought experiments: circumstances in which we somehow know that there’s a ticking time-bomb, and somehow know that a prisoner in our custody knows how to defeat it, but don’t ourselves know how to defeat it. A fairly reliable test for whether you’ve thought at all carefully about this is whether you think such a situation could actually arise. If you think it could, then you probably haven’t put much serious thought into the matter. Now, what might happen is that we have grounds to suspect an attack; and, having grounds to suspect an attack, we could worry that it would be major one, and that it could happen immediately. But of course the moral debasement of torture isn’t justified by the prospect of a fishing expedition. The way to make the inherent uncertainties of the world disappear in order to justify the torture of prisoners, then, is to deal with a different world – one in which these uncertainties conveniently melt away. For example, the Fox Network’s hit show 24 has for years now indulged story lines in which government agents act in full certainty of the nature of planned attacks, and full knowledge of which malefactors have the information that lets them avoid the disastrous outcomes. Faced with the uncooperative nature of the real world and the compliance of the scripted entertainment, the defenders of interrogational torture have taken to justifying the use of torture precisely in terms of the television universe. Indeed, they increasingly seem to speak as if the television universe were the real world. Example 1. Rush Limbaugh, January 12, 2009: Folks, my favorite scene of episode one last night is Jack Bauer being grilled by these pompous senators. Here's the guy who has done everything possible to keep his country safe in the midst of genuine terrorist acts, and these people want to throw him in jail forever for torture and so forth, and he just basically says, "You guys do what you want, but I think the people you claim to represent fully appreciate and understand what I and others have been trying to do."… Jack Bauer and Agent Kilner are sitting in a car on a stakeout because terrorism has broken out while Bauer is being grilled by a bunch of pompous senators. This is outside the building where there's a sniper trapped inside and Agent Kilner and Bauer have this exchange. 9 KILNER: Mr. Bauer? BAUER: Yeah? KILNER: I just wanted to tell you, what they're making you go through at that Senate hearing, it's wrong. BAUER: No, it's not. It's better that everything comes out in the open. We've done so many secret things over the years in the name of protecting this country, we've created two worlds, ours and the people we promised to protect. They deserve to know the truth, and they can decide how far they want to let us go. KILNER: Still, you don't deserve to be treated that way. Not after what you've done for our country. And I'm not the only one that thinks so. BAUER: Thank you. Rush Limbaugh: Now, I wonder how many short years it will be before this conversation is taken with somebody and President Bush, not Jack Bauer. Example 2. Bill O’Reilly, January 11, 2009: They’re trying to put Jack Bauer in jail, and I’m not going to let them! Example 3. Glenn Beck, January 12, 2009: There’s a great, great piece from Jack Bauer when he was testifying in front of Congress, and I’m telling you, this is all Americans want to hear from their public servants. What’s the upshot? There does not seem to be much evidence for either the moral need or the justifying efficacy of interrogational torture. One response to this problem is for contemporary defenders of torture to assimilate fictional cases to real life, as in the Limbaugh quote. Another response, exhibited in the O’Reilly and Beck quotes, is just to discuss the concocted cases as if real. On this question, I give the last word to Shue, whose remarks bear emphasis for their stark contrast with the secretive extra-judicial reality of torture as recently and currently practiced in the “War on Terror”: The distance between the situations which must be concocted in order to have a plausible case of morally permissible torture and the situations which actually occur is, if anything, further reason why the existing prohibitions against torture should remain and should be strengthened by making torture an international 10 crime… The torturer should be in roughly the same position as someone who commits civil disobedience. Anyone who thinks an act of torture is justified should have no alternative but to convince a group of peers in a public trial that all necessary conditions for a morally permissible act were indeed satisfied. If it is reasonable to put someone through torture, it is reasonable to put someone else through a careful explanation of why. If the situation approximates those in the imaginary examples in which torture seems possible to justify, a judge can surely be expected to suspend the sentence [against the torturer(s)]. Meanwhile, there is little need to be concerned about possible injustice to justified torturers and great need to find means to restrain totally unjustified torture. Problem 2. In practice there is little sharp distinction, and no stable distinction, between interrogational and terroristic torture. The bar for moral defensibility is set very high for purely interrogational torture. Not only must one employ the fastest and most charitable means of assessing the victim’s cooperation, but one must also have medical staff on hand to immediately treat and reverse the effects of the torture, in order to claim that one’s aims were wholly interrogational and not somewhat terroristic. If that sounds ridiculous, if your thought is that anyone who was justifiedly tortured doesn’t merit immediate full humanitarian aid when the morally defensible aims of the torture have been exhausted, then you’re not thinking of the torture interrogationally after all – you’re thinking of it as domination, punishment, revenge, or humiliation – in sum, terroristically. But it’s very difficult to enter a state of mind in which torturing a helpless prisoner is acceptable, without also coming to think of that person as deserving the torture, or worse. So this is surely a common error. Yet interrogational torture becomes terroristic by its nature, or by our natures; we’ve just explained why this is practically unavoidable in some degree. And the degree to which it becomes terroristic is apt to increase, moreover. The problem is that the marginal and dubious interrogational returns of torture, and its near-certain terroristic returns, will become appreciated for their relative worths within the torture-administering institution over time. What I mean is this: getting good information through torture seems to be very difficult and rare; whereas frightening prisoners, indulging a domestic demographic that hankers for violent repressive measures, and cowing a target population are far more certain by comparison. The propensity to reinforce what works over what doesn’t work is entirely predictable. To make matters worse, torture is no exception to the human tendency to lie to ourselves, and to outsiders, about our motives and aims. As an example of this latter point, take a look at this 11 article, written by widely syndicated American conservative columnist Cal Thomas. (It’s another fantasy about the show 24, by the way. Maybe these guys need to watch something else once in a while? Kim Possible reruns are pretty good.) Notice how relentlessly Thomas switches between interrogational defenses of torture (my bolded text) and terroristic aims and motives (my italics), including the dismissive use of shudder quotes to characterize practices about which genuine interrogational torture would be forthright. There is no reason to think this frame of mind is particularly rare. Example 4. Cal Thomas: On Fox's "24" action-drama show Monday nights, art doesn't imitate life. Increasingly, it resembles it. Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) leader Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) is ordered not to torture a man he believes has knowledge of the whereabouts of terrorist Habib Marwan. Marwan has captured the nuclear code book known as the "football" from a shot down Air Force One carrying the president of the United States. An ACLU-type lawyer shows up at CTU headquarters (he's been tipped off by a Marwan minion) with a court order forbidding torture of the suspect…. When the lawyer leaves, Bauer grabs the suspect outside CTU and tortures him until he discloses the location of Marwan… All of this is relevant to real life and the scarier drama that is being played out by the United States Army, which last week announced it is preparing to issue a new interrogations manual that specifically bars the use of "harsh" techniques of the type used at Abu Ghraib prison. The manual will prohibit stripping prisoners, placing them in "stressful positions" for extended periods, limiting food, using police dogs to frighten them and employing sleep deprivation as a tool to persuade them to talk, the New York Times reported… [T]he new manual bars physical or mental torture, slapping or humiliation. I can see the terrorists getting hold of this manual and telling their killers they have nothing to fear if they are captured by the "weak" Americans. What's next, instructing our troops to say "please" and "thank you"? 12 …If the Army nabs a person it suspects of knowing the location of a nuclear bomb that is about to wipe out an American city, would the interrogators and their military and civilian superiors refuse to use torture to squeeze the information out of the captive? …These people are evil to the core. The only way to protect ourselves is to extract information they might have by whatever means necessary. This war won't be won (at least by our side) if we impose on ourselves restrictions that the terrorists do not impose on themselves. Are we not paying attention to the beheading videos? The barbarians are at the gate. In fact, they have broken down the gate. Why are we letting them in and treating them only a little more harshly than unwelcome holiday relatives? Some will say harsh tactics will cause the Arab world to hate us even more. They already hate us enough, or haven't we noticed? This isn't about winning a congeniality contest. It's about winning a war and defeating an enemy so they won't try this garbage again. Let's put the fear of God into them and stop putting it unnecessarily into ourselves. Thomas walks us through the problem in a microcosm: we start off rationalizing torture as a remedy for circumstances that are catastrophically high-stakes but radically idealized; but we end up attached to it for its perceived capacity to cow, to punish – just like Thomas says, we want torture to remove our own deep fears and put them into our enemies instead. VI. This point, finally, takes us back to the linguistic issue. What I’m suggesting is that the boundaries between terroristic “repeat after me” torture and interrogational information-seeking torture are not very sharp boundaries at any point, nor are they likely to be very stable over time. The tendency of institutionalized torture to become more terroristic consists in part in the tendency of the torturers to seek increasingly specific kinds of utterances in their content, and to aim at broader effects of control and domination rather than merely trying to glean urgently needed information. We see this in Chiara Signorini’s case, in fact, since her interrogator at no point demands that she do anything except tell the truth, yet she is made perfectly aware of the only sort of utterance that will be accepted as true. And hence the tendency for those utterances to be more in the way of mere capitulations – saying ‘Uncle’ – almost a form of acting, and not assertions. 13 This returns us also to the opening remarks about dramatic or theatrical contexts. Again, an interesting property of dramatic or theatrical speech acts is that their success conditions implicate their mirroring or mimicking the surface features of genuine assertions, questions, and commands. I have tried to provide reasons to think that something similar is going on in the case of coerced declarative statements. What this means for utterances that are coerced in judicial contexts or in other less extreme settings is a deep and worrisome issue – one for another time, and perhaps for a more capable commenter. Amnesty International. 1975. Report on Torture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Brandt, E. 1969. The Last Voyage of USS Pueblo. New York: Norton. Bucher, L. 2001. Interview with John Gizzi. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=20257. Davidson, D. 1979. Moods and performances, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: OUP. 109-21. Dummett, M. 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. Harvard: Duckworth. Finn, P. and Joby Warrick. Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots; Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say. Washington Post, Sunday, March 29, 2009; A01 Gallery, D. 1970. The Pueblo Incident. Garden City NJ: Doubleday. Ginzburg, C. 1961. ‘Stregonaria e pieta popolare: Note a proposito di un processo modenese del 1519’, in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: Lettere, storia, e filosofia. Vol. 60, 1961. English translation by J. Tedeschi & A. Tedeschi, in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. 1987. Kenyon, T. 2003. “Cynical assertion: Convention, pragmatics, and saying ‘uncle’”. American Philosophical Quarterly 40.3: 241-7. Lerner, M. 2002. The Pueblo Incident. Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shue, H. 1978. ‘Torture’. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 7.2: 124-143 Sorensen, R. 2007. ‘Bald-faced lies! Lying without the intent to deceive’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88.2: 251-64, Thomas, C. Modified interrogation tactics: Good news for the enemy. 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