I grew up in the South, where the favored punishment for a disobedient child is a spanking. I know that now, especially in America, “spanking” is a charged term that has even become political, so instead of spanking, I’m going to use the more appropriate term, butt-whopping. If you’ve ever heard stories of kids having to go to a tree to pick their own switch, those stories are true. I can testify. For probably my entire childhood, half the trees in my grandmother’s yard had no low-lying limbs, because she used all of them on me. She wasn’t afraid to grab me by the ear and haul me out of the church service if I was misbehaving. Not that she was abusive. Far from it. I am so incredibly grateful for everything that she did for me. After the butt-whopping was over, she made sure that I knew how much she loves me.
When I was a kid, nothing scared me more than the thought of getting into trouble. It wasn’t just the thought of having disappointed Granny, which was torture to somebody as sensitive as I am. It was the dread of knowing that a butt-whopping was coming as soon as she found out what I did. So, like many children, I constantly lied to try to get out of trouble. I would say that my brother found the axe and cut down the pear tree, or the window was left wide open and a strong gust of wind came in and that’s why the lamp is shattered, or that I was out picking blueberries when firecrackers were tied to the dog’s tail. I would even come in with a bucket full of blueberries to back up my alibi.
Here I want to compare the fear that I felt knowing that a punishment was coming, and how it compelled me to lie, to what the inmates at Guantanamo Bay are probably feeling. A 10-second butt-whopping is nothing compared to being sleep-deprived, water-boarded, and isolated, so how much more would the inmates lie to make the torture stop, if only momentarily?
At the end of the day, what always made me tell the truth to Granny wasn’t the butt-whopping. It was when I crawled into her bed after I was already supposed to be asleep, and her telling me how proud she is of me. Or her saying that if I tell the truth this time, neither me nor my brother would get into trouble. Or when we woke up and made blueberry pancakes together. Even though I could be a demon of a child, I was very sensitive and valued my relationships with other people, especially my family, more than anything else.
As odd as it may sound, the principle of relationship and trust is an incredibly effective way of getting terrorists to talk. When they are hooked up to a polygraph machine and told by the interrogator that if they speak their family will not be harmed but if they do not speak their family cannot be protected, they are much more inclined to talk. And what they say is much more trustworthy.
Army Staff Seargeant Eric Maddox led the team that found Saddam Hussein in 2003. Part of his strategy was protecting family members of those involved in the insurgency when he was able. It paid off when he found the man who took him to Saddam’s hideout in Tikrit.
I’m not trying to say that the interrogator should be emotional or sensitive towards the suspect, or that terrorists should not be held accountable for their actions. What I am trying to say is that there are alternatives to torture. While Granny’s butt-whoppings certainly kept me from misbehaving, it was our relationship that made me tell the truth. Water-boarding a suspected terrorist enough times might (or might not) keep them from assisting in future terrorist plots, but it won’t give the CIA the information that it needs to stop terrorist plots that are already in progress. Treating them with enough human dignity to warrant a measure of trust just might be what is needed to break open terrorist cells and stop terrorist plots.
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