There’s power in knowing how to read body language signals. 

 

There’s power in knowing how to transmit signals with your own body language. 

 

So why wouldn’t there be power in transmitting messages physically into a person’s body? 

 

Translation:  There’s power in torture. 

 

Now, I never tortured anybody for information when I was a cop.  And you know what?  I missed out on a lot of confessions because of this. 

 

That’s right, a lot of thugs walked because I was too nice—only because I had to be, of course. 

 

Still, I did get confessions.  And since I couldn’t put bamboo shoots under their fingernails, or whip ‘em with a rubber hose like they did in the old days, I had to rely on psychological means to extract what a guy didn’t want to tell me. 

 

Some of the techniques were verbal. 

 

Others relied on reading body language. 

 

But my objective was always simple, and it was exactly the same as those who’ve been interrogating Islamic extremists on behalf of the US government:  To get information that a person doesn’t want to give.

 

So the debate rages over waterboarding, and it really starts with these 3 questions:

 

1-Is it torture?  (a question of opinion)

 

2-Does it work?  (a question of practicality)

 

3-Is it justifiable (a question of morality)

 

Let’s take these one at a time:

 

Is it torture:  Early on, proponents argued that waterboarding wasn’t actually torture, but they conceded this point pretty quickly, largely because the weight of the argument just moved everyone past this. 

 

Opponents of Advanced Interrogation Techniques made a wise move here.  Because “torture” has a universally negative image, they won a sizable part of their public perception case simply through defining waterboarding as torture.  

 

Notice that opponents of waterboarding don’t even reference it much anymore, but typically refer to “torture” instead.  There’s power, even in the word itself.

 

So once this point of opinion was converted to “fact”, the debate moved to the second question…

 

Does it work:  For opponents of torture to acknowledge that it works would be to open the door to a debate they might lose. 

 

So they argue that it doesn’t work—which happens to be wrong.

 

Opponents of torture proclaim that a person “will tell you anything” to get you to stop.  But to know whether torture works or not, you need to know more about deception than you do about torture. 

 

The bottom line?  Lying is more difficult, time consuming, and mentally exhausting than speaking the truth.  Rather than take the time and effort to fabricate lies, a person under real physical duress will reach for the quickest out, they’ll start with the most accessible and easiest thing to give:  The truth.

 

Here’s where opponents of torture are correct, though:  If the truth is exhausted, and the torture continues, the person will fabricate information just to satisfy the continuing demands of his questioners.

 

Here are the only instances where torture would fail to bring accurate results:  1-the technique itself is inadequate, or 2-it’s stopped too soon.

 

The notion that torture isn’t even effective has become the primary argument against it now.  Why would anyone want to keep doing something that doesn’t work?  

 

Is it justifiable:  The last point of reasoning against torture is that it’s not moral to use it.  “As the world’s lone Superpower, we should set the highest standards.” 

 

By the way, here’s Deception Secret #54:  Don’t blindly follow the premise of a question or argument.  People do this in personal conversations, and smart publicists, activists, and politicians do it, too.  They couch their argument in terms that run parallel to the real issue—and that are more difficult to argue against than the real issue.

 

Always consider whether they’re taking you off course.  If they are, bring the discussion back to where it should be. 

 

Case in point:  Though opponents (wisely) put the argument of justification in moral terms, it should actually be discussed in terms of outcome:  Does the outcome of the torture justify its use?  In other words, does the mere pain of a single person justify saving the lives of many? 

 

Maybe you’ve heard that the Defense Department has done away with the Global War on Terror, renaming it Overseas Contingency Operations.  And that terrorism itself is now known as Man-Caused Disasters.

 

It’s third quarter already, and the advocates of waterboarding obviously don’t even understand the rules of the game they’re playing.  Long ago they should have stopped defending torture, and begun advocating Reading Body Language in Reverse.   

Tags: body language, interrogation, reading body language, torture, waterboarding

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Deception. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.