On the other, Greens angrily claimed we had misrepresented their views. So are the Green Party anti-science; and if so what should they be doing to correct this?

Frank and I set out to write our article by putting nine science-themed questions to the parties. We knew that our response from the Green Party was going to be interesting when we saw this quote:

“The Green Party, for example, is in favour of increased funding for research on methods of integrated conventional and holistic treatments for cancer. [...] We would oppose attempts to regulate complementary medicine, except by licensing and review boards made up of representatives of their respective alternative health care fields.”

As Tim Minchin put it, alternative medicine by definition is medicine that has been proven not to work, or not been proven to work. Alternative medicine that works is called “medicine”. Under the Green Party, money that could be spent researching actual evidence-based treatments for cancer could instead be diverted to quack remedies like homeopathy. Genius. And to say that the $60bn dollar alternative medicine industry needs no external regulation is just moronic. Either their quack remedies have a clinical effect or they don’t; and if they do they should be treated like any other drug.

Their policies on GM and stem cell research were equally confused, and would devastate large areas of biological research in Britain. I’m neither a fanatical supporter nor opponent of GM food; but clearly any new development in GM technology has both risks and benefits. You would think, therefore, that a sensible policy would involving assessing those, and acting based on that information with appropriate regulation, along the lines of the precautionary principle. Apparently not:

“Genetically modified food presents significant and un-quantified risks to human health and the environment. These outweigh any benefits.”

If you don’t know the risks, then how the hell can you claim that they outweight any potential benefits? Surely more research would be the answer in this case? But under Green Party policy, the import of genetically modified organisms would be banned outright, making research all but impossible. It is an incredibly irrational approach, but we we see the same stunt pulled in their policy on stem cell research:

“The Green Party believes that experiments on human embryos could have unforeseen outcomes harmful both to individuals and to society. We would work for an immediate international ban on all cloning and genetic manipulation of embryos, whether for research, therapeutic or reproductive purposes.”

Again, how can you ban all research into something on the basis of unknown consequences? Particularly when research into embryonic stem cells is so vital for progress in treating numerous conditions and diseases? Again, I’m all in favour of using the precautionary principle, but to ban something with known benefits on the basis of unstated “consequences” is just plain ignorant. They would allow the continued use of adult stem cells, but in doing so they appear to have swallowed the myth that these can always act as a substitute for the use of embryonic cells.

In short, while The Greens mean well, we found that their science policies in many areas were a disaster, and so we went ahead and published out results with suitably critical commentary. The response we got back via e-mail from the party press office was frankly unimpressive, and included the following memorable quote:

“Well, what can you say? We have an election platform that is talking about creating 1 million jobs through local food, renewable energy, and energy efficiency … and our lead candidate in the North West is up against Nick Griffin, the BNP’s leader, for the final seat in that region. But the most important thing for you to do is critique our support for alternative medicine?”

No. I’m not having that. I’m not being told that we’re not allowed to criticise Green Party policy in case the BNP get in. It is a miserable gambit designed to evade criticism. As much as I despise and hate the BNP, the idea of giving the Greens a free pass goes against every basic principle of democracy and free speech.

The backlash continued on various blogs, with HolfordWatch taking flak for “misrepresenting” the party. Some of the most intense criticism came in response to an article that Mark Henderson of The Times wrote about our work to leave comments like:

“…the Green Party is not anti-science, as this misleading and extremely biased article is trying to suggest.”

“Please don’t be misled by misrepresentations of our policies.”

“Instead of reading second-hand accounts of what our political opponents say that we say, how about looking about what we actually do say?”

None of these people hurling accusations of bias and misrepresentation at us appeared to appreciate the fact that we had posted their own statements unedited on our blogs, standing next to our commentary for everyone to see. As much as they ranted, few dared to point out specific instances where these terrible misrepresentations had occurred, and when they did they were simply referred back to their own statements.

I am deeply frustrated that, rather than attempting to defend their policies or engage with criticism from scientists, party supporters resorted to mud-slinging.

The fundamental problem is that in the Green Party, anyone can propose a policy, call a vote, and get it accepted in the manifesto. It’s one of those ideas that’s cute in theory, but the fact is that since most members of most parties aren’t likely to have much of a clue about things like modern genetics or cancer research, their policies are based on a popularity contest rather than considered appraisal of the evidence. The truth isn’t democratic, and the whole structure of the party works against the idea of evidence-based policy.

So to be fair to our critics, I don’t think they were being dishonest; they probably did feel that we misrepresented them because it’s unlikely that many party members support the whole manifesto. You probably couldn’t find a Green Party member that their manifesto fully and accurately represented.

I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike the Greens. I’m a fan of a number of their members, and they’ve done vital work pushing climate change up the national agenda. I have huge respect for figures like Patrick Harvie from the Scottish party. My hope is that by ramming home this message I can encourage them to properly consider their policies.

The first and most important thing for the party to do is to acknowledge that their policies are far out of step with the scientific community. They genuinely don’t seem to realise this, and I suspect this comes from a lack of engagement with actual scientists.

The second thing they need to do then is to engage with the scientific community, and bring evidence back into the policy-making process.

The third, is to build a more coherent set of policies so that their members are all singing from the same hymn sheet, rather than noisily squawking across each other. If they do, then we can begin to take them more seriously. If they don’t they will continue to fall victim to the lunatic fringe.

If you think that’s bad, when it comes to the record of what was actually seized the ‘facts’ take on a life of their own. The AP report that 16.5 tons of drugs were seized, along with “other materials”. The BBC declare that ninety-two tons of “poppy seeds and other drugs” were seized, and Al-Jazeera continue the game of chinese whispers, changing this to “ninety-two tons of drugs”.

Since when were poppy seeds ‘drugs’? Should I be reporting my local baker to the authorities for his poppy-seed buns?!

The same ‘confusion’ occurred with another drugs seizure in Afghanistan back in February as well, as the Transform Drug Policy Foundation observed. A bewildered Steve Rolles complained that:

Somehow a story about less than a £100,000 worth of raw opium has been transformed into a story about £50,000,000 worth of ‘deadly heroin’.

In that case, not only had virtually every news organisation concocted their own, unique and largely fictitious version of events; but all of those different version conflicted with the initial reports from the MoD. Not only that, but the Defense secretary himself was quoted as referring to: “The seizure of £50 million worth of narcotics,” a description with no basis in the facts released by his own department.

It seems that two things are happening here.

Firstly, we’re seeing good old-fashioned war propaganda, where a minor local success is presented as some sort of great victory. Secondly, newspapers and media outlets are, through a combination of ignorance and a tendency to exaggerate, massively distorting the information that they receive and report.

The result – intentionally or otherwise – is that much of what the public are being told about Afghanistan is quite simply not true. The media have miserably failed to keep the public informed about a “forgotten” war that has now dragged on for nearly eight years.

A war which, incidentally, has had the effect of causing opium production in Afghanistan to rise substantially over the last few years, as TDPF plotted:

Of course, there are many aspects of heroin and opium I could tackle here but won’t for lack of space, particularly the interaction between drug policy in the West and production in Afghanistan; and more general misinformation about Heroin in the media. I’m sure you’ll have a vigorous debate about them in the comments…

But I want to concentrate on the issue of misinformation here because it’s very important. Whatever your position is on Iraq, one of the great crimes inflicted on the British people in the run up to the invasion was the spread of false information through the media. People were duped into supporting a war on the basis of misinformation – and as I’ve often stated, misinformation is the enemy of democracy.

Afghanistan is coming back on the agenda this year, and for all the talk about our troops “coming home” from Iraq, the reality is that many will be moving on to Afghanistan. The war there has not gone well: not only have we failed to secure large areas of Afghanistan, but the fighting and conflict has spilled over to destabilise neighbouring Pakistan. Britain and America will be pouring an increasing number of resources and resources into the region for the forseeable future.

With a general election potentially near, we need to be asking the main parties two questions: do you have a coherent strategy for Afghanistan, and will you give us an open, honest and un-spun picture of the situation on the ground?

And to the journalists and news outlets we still rely on to bring us this information, I have one question: why do you find it so hard to report the truth?

Dorries’ influence in the party was demonstrated in Prime Minister’s Questions on April 22nd, when dozens of other Conservative MPs sacrificed their opportunity to ask a question in order to allow Dorries to demand a personal apology from Gordon Brown over smeargate. This backfired so badly that Dorries achieved what no amount of Labour spin has been able to in recent months – she made Gordon Brown look good as he brushed her aside.

Topping this gaffe took some doing, but Dorries managed it on Question time on May 7th, during a discussion about Trident (at 5:18):

“Tridents are not weapons of mass destruction”

Well, if that’s true then I hope they kept the receipt. But it’s easy to make fun of television gaffes. More serious are the attitudes that Dorries expresses in her approach to scientific issues, which range from misguided to the sorts of ravings you might hear from a conspiracy theorist. The best (or worst) example of this is the record of her behaviour over abortion.

Ben Goldacre was an early and prominent victim of Dorries’ anti-science bent. Back in October 2007 he wrote an article looking at the role of evidence in the abortion debate, and examining some of the dubious data presented to the Commons committee on science and technology by Professor Wyatt. This data happened to support Dorries’ views, and she responded rather angrily – not with any discussion of the evidence, but by ranting:

“There should be an enquiry about how this information got into the public domain and as to whether such a personal attack represents a serious breach of parliamentary procedure.”

There was of course no such breach as Ben himself pointed out – the information was publicly available – but the episode gave a good taste of Dorries’ reaction to the open discussion of scientific evidence.

During the debates on abortion that followed, a whole stream of demonstrably false claims came from Dorries. They included the fairytale “hand of hope” story that she helped to propagate across the web; the incorrect suggestion that the NHS didn’t do abortions after 16 weeks; and the false assertion that charity Marie Stopes International supported her policy views.

One major “victim” of this behaviour was the Trent study, a scientific study that showed no increase in survival rates for infants born before 24 weeks. Dorries completely failed to understand this research, first dismissing it as an “insult to the intelligence of the public”, then when realising that simply ignoring it wasn’t working attempting various comparisons with other studies, all the while failing to understand either the data or the valid conclusions.

It’s not just scientific studies that are mangled. Opinion polls too have a tendency to mysteriously alter in the hands of Dorries, as Tim Ireland noted last year. Dorries made the claim that three quarters of the public specifically supported a 20 week limit on abortion – a claim unsupported by the cited The source for this claim was cited as ComRes poll, which gave a figure of 15%. As a somewhat frustrated Dawn Primarolo noted in a debate on the subject:

“The hon. Lady has asserted many things to be facts that are not.”

For Nadine Dorries, it is a recurring pattern of behaviour, and one complemented by a more sinister characteristic, which is a tendency to resort to dark conspiracy theories to explain her failure to deal effectively with scientific committees in Parliament.

“It could all be a complete coincidence, but I think it may go someway towards demonstrating how biased and infiltrated the BBC is. Except, it’s not just the BBC. It’s Parliament and universities at the highest level; and the BMA, the RCN, the RCOG and every organisation, which has an opinion which can influence policy. The pro-abortionists had their day and remained unchallenged for too long.”

Yes, in the world of Nadine Dorries the fact that pretty much every medical authority disagrees with her doesn’t suggest that her views on health might be wrong, but that in fact the medical establishment are part of some vast conspiracy against her, a conspiracy that has infiltrated the highest levels of our public institutions. A conspiracy that could only be orchestrated by the lizard people themselves.

But to be fair, Dorries’ paranoia is understandable: I’m sure it must feel very unfair when even the evidence itself is biased against you.

(Ffwd to 5min in to hear Dorries on Trident)

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Got ideas for next week’s post? Find me on Twitter: @mjrobbins.

The right predicted Bad Things: Drug use would explode, tourists would travel from far and wide to get high on the streets of Lisbon, law and order would collapse, and people would start riding around in modified cars and fighting in Thunderdomes. The reality was quite different as two reports published in the last 18 months have demonstrated, the Libertarian Cato Institute have declared the policy an undisputed success on the basis of a report by Glenn Greenwald, and this has been a popular assessment among liberal people.

How correct is it though? Let’s look at the evidence.

The changes were made in July 2001, and it’s important to be clear about what they mean. The new law decriminalised the use, possession and acquisition of all illicit substances for persona use. This is not the same as legalisation. What it meant was that the legal response to drug use would be changed. Instead of penal punishments – fines or prison – users would be referred to “Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction” (Comissões para a Dissuasão da Toxicodependência – CDTs).

These CDTs are panels made up of three people – a social worker, legal advisor and medical professional – supported by technical experts. The police refer people caught in possession to the panel, and the panels work to institute sanctions designed to help the offender with their drug problem. In short, the system is designed to redefine drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue.

It’s also important to realise that this wasn’t a policy implemented in isolation. At the same time, a wide range of public health initiative were brought in, for example increasing the size of drug-treatment programs, and improving drug awareness education in schools. On the law and order front, the strategy of the police became more focused on the drug trafficking network – dealers and distributors.

It was partly because things were looking so bad that the government were able to push through such a radical agenda. Anyway, let’s take a look at Greenwald’s assessment of the situation in 2009 for the Cato Institute.

As you would expect from a Libertarian organisation, the Cato report is eager to present the case that the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal has been a complete success story, and I’ll be honest, they have a good case. Greenwald excitedly concludes from his analysis of the data that:

“The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.”

The problem with Greenwald’s Cato report is that his analysis of the facts starts to get rather muddled. Consider this extract on adolescent and post-adolescent age-groups:

“Prevalence rates for the 15–24 age group have increased only very slightly, whereas the rates for the critical 15–19 age group—critical because such a substantial number of young citizens begin drug usage during these years—have actually decreased in absolute terms since decriminalization.

“Perhaps most strikingly, while prevalence rates for the period from 1999 to 2005, for the 16–18 age group, increased somewhat for cannabis (9.4 to 15.1 percent) and for drugs generally (12.3 to 17.7 percent), the prevalence rate decreased during that same period for heroin (2.5 to 1.8 percent), the substance that Portuguese drug officials believed was far and away the most socially destructive.”

What the above basically demonstrates is that if you cherry-pick the right start years and end years for an age-group, you can get almost any result you want. I’ve also picked on this quote because it’s a good example of some of the wordplay used in the report. An increase of over 60% in cannabis use and 40% in general drug use is described as “increased somewhat”, and notice the slightly subjective selection of heroin as the most important variable.

In short, while the liberal side of me really wants to believe the Cato report, I’m not convinced.

The more sober and scientific Beckley foundation report from 2007. They present the same data, and agree with the Cato report that while cannabis use has increased, heroin use has decreased, there has been an increase in people seeking drug treatment, and a decrease in drug-related deaths. Additionally they make the observation that:

“Decriminalization has enabled earlier intervention and more targeted and therapeutic responses to drug users, increased collaboration across a network of services and the increased attention to adopting policies that work. This is perceived to be reducing the level of current and future drug use and harm.”

Naturally, liberal, libertarian and left-leaning commentators have leapt on these results as evidence of two things: that Portugal’s drug policies have worked; and that they should be implemented elsewhere. I really want to agree with this, but on the basis of the evidence presented this can’t be demonstrated.

Problem with Cato’s conclusions
There are two basic problems which mean that the science cannot yet support the conclusions that the Cato institute have enthusiastically drawn from the Portuguese experiment.

The first point is that there have been genuine problems with this policy. Yes, the situation with heroin has improved, but at the same time use of some other drugs has increased, and there is some suspicion that occasional drug use may have increased. There’s also the cost in terms of money, manpower and resources: even those in favour of the current policy have conceded that state infrastructure has not kept pace with things like the increase in the numbers of people seeking treatment.

The second and even bigger issue is the role of natural variation in drug use. One of the mantras of science is that correlation does not imply causation – just because certain metrics of drug use changed after 2001, it does not logically follow that drugs policies must have been the cause.

There is actually precious little evidence that drugs policies significantly affect the use of drugs, or if so to what extent. Even measuring drug use accurately is difficult, and it’s unlikely that any of the figures presented are particularly accurate. This makes the conclusions of the Cato report unscientific and unfounded.

But there are a couple of other points that liberals can take hold of and pursue.

The first is that right-wing groups predicted disaster when the laws were liberalised, and this simply did not happen. Drug use in many categories decreased, and while it increased in some areas (notably cannabis), these increases were far too small to offset the overall trend, which has been downwards. Heroin was a major problem, along with the transmission of HIV through dirty needles, but the rates of both heroin use and HIV infection in drug users have decreased.

Nor has it happened in other countries that have taken steps towards liberalising drugs laws. It’s time for this myth to die a death, and for the right-wing to find better arguments.

The second is that there has been a great surge of Portuguese people seeking treatment for drug-related problems. This may have put a strain on social and health services, but with adequate funding clearly this is a positive effect that would be good to replicate elsewhere.

Unfortunately, with a Labour party that seems to thrive on authority, and a Conservative party waiting to come into power next year, it’s an experiment that we’re unlikely to see conducted in the UK any time soon. Which is a shame, because more empirical evidence is one thing our drugs policy could really do with.

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Got ideas for next week’s column? Find me on Twitter: @mjrobbins

Update: LeftOutside has further reading following on from this article.

This week, I’m pleased to say that a group of British Born Muslims who saw that coverage and my article, got in touch to let me know that they’ve been going out and collecting evidence to help fight for the reputation of their community. Those who saw my first piece for Liberal Conspiracy know that I’m here to advocate science-based policy, so this week I want to explore the science of opinion polls, and look at how the evidence has been abused by a network of right-wing journalists and lobbying interests.

Whether it’s intentional or not, the Daily Mail, Telegraph and a few other papers have a pronounced anti-Islamic bias. (Don’t take my word for it – simply go to their websites, type the word “Muslim” into their search engines, and see what comes up. Then try the same with “Christian.”) Now as an atheist, I’m happy for newspapers to challenge religion, but what I don’t like to see are newspapers trying to alienate or demonise demographics of our society. That way, madness lies, as 20th century history should have taught us.

The thing is, it goes a bit deeper than simply casual editorial bias. Just how deep was demonstrated by a Daily Mail article last year, which was published under the headline “One third of British Muslim students say it’s acceptable to kill for Islam.” The piece was based on a poll by a lobbying group called the Centre for Social Cohesion, and a moment or two browsing through their website shows that they have a keen sense of irony when it comes to choosing names, because they are interested in anything but social cohesion.

But I don’t want to just smear them with ad hominem attacks – it’s important to understand that their polls are nonsense too. I looked at this in more detail at the time, so if you’re interested have a look at that piece, but here’s a classic example.

The Daily Mail headline I mentioned above claims that a third of British Muslims think it’s “acceptable to kill for Islam,” and this is the conclusion the CSC report naturally leads one towards. Or rather, used to lead, since it seems that the primary data has since been removed from the web. At any rate, the actual question and answers were as follows:

Is it ever justifiable to kill in the name of religion?
Yes, in order to preserve and promote that religion – 4%
Yes, but only if that religion is under attack – 28%

There is a huge, huge difference between the headline, and the actual data, which simply suggests that some people think it’s acceptable to kill to preserve your culture – you know, like we Brits did in World War Two. As the folks at Christian Science Monitor point out:

Only 46 percent of Americans think that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are ‘never justified,’ while 24 percent believe these attacks are ‘often or sometimes justified.’”

All the way through this poll, questions were asked in a way that seemed designed to produce the “extremist” answers that the CSC and newspapers wanted to hear, even though the views themselves don’t seem substantially different from those you’d get from any cross-section of the population.

And that brings us to the science of opinion polls. Opinion polls are a very powerful tool, but they be used for two different purposes. On the one hand, polling companies are able to use very sophisticated statistical techniques in order to gain an accurate picture of public opinion for their clients. On the other hand, opinion polls can be used as a propaganda tool, with questions carefully designed to produce the desired answers, as this clip from Yes Minister aptly demonstrates:

There are obvious scientific problems with the CSC poll. It has no control group (why poll just Muslims, and not a comparable group of Christians or Atheists?), and it has been subjected to heavy interpretative bias. If the first thing you should ask when confronted by an opinion poll is “where is the control”, the second is “what does the question actually ask?” In this case, it’s clear that the question being asked is not the same as the question referred to by the Daily Mail.

The picture I’ve painted is a gloomy and frustrating one, of lobbyists concocting evidence and feeding it to willing journalists, thus helping to spread and cement Islamophobic attitudes in Britain. This drip-drip of venom is as dangerous as any hate speech – perhaps more so given the size of the audience reached – but since the government tend to cower in fear at the sight of an angry tabloid, it will not be clamped down on. Instead, a group of British Muslims have decided to go out and start collecting their own evidence.

Their survey was carried out by four guys in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, a place notorious for supposedly being a “no go” area for white people. It is the home of the “soldier beheading” suspects and the liquid bomb plot suspects, and is basically not the sort of place Judith Chalmers would visit.

They made some pretty cool use of technology as well, as Nav told me in his e-mail:

“This survey was also unique because all the data was recorded using iphones. All the questions were loaded into the app and each participant used the iphone to submit their answers. They were able to answer over 70 questions at an average time of just 12 minutes.”

Thanks to this technology the four of them (including an ex-BNP member) were able to poll 1,511 people, and they plan to poll a further 2,000 in Leicester in the near future. They are passionate people who want the rest of Britain to see the Muslim community as the vibrant, positive place that they see it, and I think it’s brilliant that they’ve been prepared to go to this sort of effort.

The results are available on the web (unlike those of the CSC at the time of writing), and they show a tolerant, open community. 98% would accept their son or daughter if they came out as gay, 96% would like to see more friendships between Muslims and non-Muslims, 98% feel better integrated into society than their parents, nearly 90% would be happy to fight in the British armed forces, and 89% share the concerns of Daily Mail readers that there is a bit too much political correctness around.

A couple of nutters turned up, but then I defy you to poll 1,500 people from any demographic and not find one or two people with more extreme views. In contrast to the Daily Mail headline, 99% of Muslims polled felt that it was not acceptable to kill innocent people in the name of Islam – a result consistent with the CSC findings, yet able to be interpreted a completely different way.

For me this doesn’t come as a surprise. What interested me most of all about this poll were the results for the questions that concerned the media. 95% believe that at least some British tabloids have an anti-Muslim bias (52% that all of them have), with 65% criticising the Daily Mail specifically. 97% agreed that “the media created a climate of fear based on their reporting of Muslims” and 58% believed that the media rather than white or Muslim people or the government were the key factor preventing the faster integration of the Muslim community into British Society.

From a scientific point of view, of course the British Born Muslims poll is open to accusations of bias due to the motivation behind it. In its defense though, the questions are well-worded and clear, and the results are available for everybody to see – two factors that don’t apply to the CSC poll. If nothing else, it provides a startlingly different counterpoint to add to the debate.

But this poll won’t be reported widely in the media, because it simply doesn’t fit in with the news agenda. Groups like the CSC are deeply connected with the right-wing press, and their press-releases are simply regurgitated by journalists who are more than happy to see further “evidence” of the “great Muslim menace” that they sell to their readers. If there is one thing that newspapers don’t like, it’s the wrong kind of evidence.

Meanwhile, this deluge of propaganda will continue to harm British society, by driving a wedge between us. We should be thankful that groups of young activists like these are willing to devote their time to getting out and trying to show people the truth about their communities. And we should be suspicious of anyone who tries to stir up fear of racial or cultural minorities with opinion polls.

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Opinion Poll Evaluation Guide

If you are confronted by an opinion poll in the press, here are the four basic questions you should ask.

1) Where is the control? Am I seeing the full picture? If the poll is talking about the attitudes of one group, or was conducted in one time frame, do we know what the results of other groups or other time frames are?

2) What is actually being asked? Does the reported conclusion match the question? Does the wording in the press release match the wording in the poll?

3) Is there a bias? How is it being asked? Are the questions loaded? Are the available answers adequate and unbiased? Who commissioned the poll, and what are their motives?

4) Who is being asked? Is the survey sample representative of the general population?

But in fact these arguments and make-believe situations are irrelevent if torture doesn’t work in the first place. On my own blog I argue for evidence-based policy, and in my first piece for Liberal Conspiracy I want to explore the evidence for torture, because if those who advocate it can’t prove that it works, then they have already lost the debate.

The strongest argument in favour of torture is the so called ‘ticking bomb’ scenaro. Alan Dershowitz gave a good summary of it in the San Francisco Chronicle back in 2001:

“Everybody says they’re opposed to torture. But everyone would do it personally if they knew it could save the life of a kidnapped child who had only two hours of oxygen left before death. And it would be the right thing to do.”

It’s a compelling argument, until you start to look at the assumptions that you have to make to accept it. This argument assumes that you have the right person in custody, it assumes that this person actually has the information you need, it assumes that there isn’t a better way of getting hold of the evidence, and above all it assumes that torture is an effective way of getting that information.

One of the interesting features of this debate is that many in the military and intelligence communities seem decidedly unconviced about the effectiveness of torture. Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent with considerable experience interrogating al-Qaeda operatives, pointed out in Time that:

“When they are in pain, people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they will lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them,” he says. “That means the information you’re getting is useless.”

He isn’t alone in this assessment – a number of former intelligence people have expressed similar views, and his words are echoed by the US Army Training Manual’s section on interrogation, which suggests that:

“…the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

The situation is further clouded by the fact that members of the Bush administration have made claims for the effectiveness of torture that have later been proven to be untrue. One such claim was that the water-boarding (simulated drowning) of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed produced vital information that allowed them to break up a plot to attack the Liberty Tower in Los Angeles in 2002.

It’s a claim that falls apart when you realise that during 2002 Shaikh Mohammed was living in Pakistan, evading capture until he was eventually found by the ISI in the Spring of 2003.

But enough anecdotes, let’s look at the science. Why wouldn’t torture be effective? Actually there are many reasons. Let’s assume that we have the right guy, and that he does in fact know the information that we need. All we need to do is beat it out of him, right?

Well, no. Suppose I start beating you around the head, demanding that you tell me that Britney Spears is in fact a supremely talented artist. Eventually, although it may take days of torture to get there, you’ll tell me what I want to hear, but that doesn’t make it true.

The second major problem is that human memory just isn’t reliable. Take a bunch of witnesses from any major news event: a bombing, 9/11, a car crash, wherever. The more people you interview, the more different stories you’ll get, because our recall of past events isn’t always very accurate. On top of that, there is a vast body of scientific literature telling us that one way to make a person’s memory even less reliable is to deprive them of sleep, or put them under great stress, or otherwise confuse them. You know, like you do with torture.

The Intelligence Science Board are entrusted with the task of providing scientific advice to the United States intelligence community. In 2006 they produced their study on ‘Educing Information‘, a collection of 11 papers studying various aspects of the science and art of interrogation. The authors of this document make the same point that I opened this article with:

Listening to the post-9/11 debate over guidelines for the interrogation of terrorist suspects, one could easily conclude that coercive methods are not only effective, but also substantially more effective than non-coercive methods in obtaining actionable intelligence from resistant sources. Even those opposed to the use of coercive methods fail to challenge this premise, exclusively focusing their arguments instead on the legal and moral issues at stake. (p130)

And this is surprising, because it’s such a weak premise. For the sake of completeness and balance it would be nice at this point to be able to show and discuss some evidence that favours the use of torture. I can’t, because in reality, as the report notes, and as I found myself as I trawled the archives searching for material for this piece:

The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information.(p130)

There just isn’t any scientific evidence, beyond a few dubious anecdotes, to show that torture works. Obviously more research is needed on the subject to know for sure, but here’s the killer point. Torture is an extreme method, and before we even reach the ethical and moral debate over its use, the effectiveness of it must be demonstrated to some reasonable degree. The burden of proof lies with the people who seek to torture. And it’s not like they don’t have plenty of past experience to draw data from.

If future governments seeking to use torture cannot meet the most basic requirement of showing that it works, then they have lost the debate.