It’s interesting to look at torture as practiced by the Bush Administration from the perspective of Knowledge Management. In this case, from the perspective of the three-tier model. Let’s begin with the process of an interrogator trying to retrieve “knowledge” from another person. That’s a particular kind of knowledge integration called searching and retrieving (how unpleasantly antiseptic) in the Knowledge Life Cycle model (Level 2 of the three-tier model). Of course, it’s a very difficult retrieval process unless the person being interrogated is “cooperative.” So the problem is to secure that cooperation. One of the roles of Knowledge Management in this sort of context is to lay down the rules that will govern the search and retrieval process as implemented by an interrogator. The Bush Administration changed the rules governing permissible and even preferred strategy and tactics in certain interrogation situations. The resulting outcomes violated international law, treaties, and the US code. In addition, however, the more information we get about the results of using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on prisoners, the more it’s clear that these techniques were a failure, both from the point of view of eliciting significant information, and also from the point of view of doing it rapidly. Everything of importance supplied by Abu Zubaydah was given in standard interrogation sessions establishing relatively normal human relations with him. When waterboarding was used, even 83 times, only hostility and misleading information resulted. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times also produced only misleading information as far as we know up to this point. Torturing of other informants, after they had supplied useful information, has produced similar low quality results. In sum, torture took too long, and also failed to elicit high quality information. Government officials, contractors, and soldiers did things that were very wrong, broke the law by committing high crimes, and for those of you who are religious, sold their very souls for nothing. From the point of view of the Three-tier model: changing the rules was lousy Knowledge Management leading to very lousy knowledge processing (interpersonal searching and retrieving). It was another instance of terrible performance by the most incompetent American Administration in modern times.
There’s another way to look at this from a KM point of view. As we Americans work through our understanding of the context of torture in the Bush Administration, we’re beginning to see that sometimes torture was motivated by the drive to justify political rationalizations for the invasion of Iraq. Torture was ordered not simply to get information, but to provide evidence that Iraq really possessed WMDs, or alternatively, that Saddam’s regime was really collaborating with al Qaeda. That is, it was used, as the totalitarians used it, to try to prove that the Government or the Party’s view of the world was correct. It was used to try to cover up the mistakes of Bush, Cheney, the Neocons and the rest. From this point of view, torture wasn’t so much about retrieving knowledge from prisoners, as it was about doing everything they could to integrate (broadcast) these conjectures into the heads of as many Americans as they could so that they could implement their chosen course of action without opposition. Their efforts at broadcasting false knowledge were enormously successful. They got their war. They got re-elected; and the economic and social interests they favored, benefited from the Knowledge Management and knowledge processing they practiced.
However, this KM and this knowledge processing was not effective in the longer run, because it could not triumph over facts on the ground and the final intrusion of reality on the American public. And finally, whatever the success or failure of their KM and knowledge processing efforts; these efforts exemplified immoral KM and immoral knowledge processing. They were immoral because their purpose wasn’t to enhance the ability of Americans to figure things out for themselves and to decide on what they individually and collectively wanted to do, but rather to degrade that ability and to accept instead the Administration’s version of reality. They were immoral because they did not seek knowledge that was true; but only knowledge that fit the preconceptions of the Knowledge Managers. And, of course, and far from least, they were immoral because they involved torture, activities that de-humanized both human beings and the torturers themselves, and that also broke the law and created a stain on the honor of this great nation that we will never entirely wash away.