The Absurdity of the Torture Debate
Two former military commanders wrote a blazing op-ed in The Washington Post recently laying out the dangers of engaging in torture. Here’s an excerpt:
As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real “ticking time bomb” situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of “flexibility” about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception fast becoming the rule.
…Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.
They’re right, of course. Israel attempted this policy a few years back, for instance, allowing for harsh interrogation techniques in “ticking bomb” scenarios. The practice quickly became widespread, however, and soon was being used on most Palestinian prisoners. It was only put to a halt (at least officially) when the courts stepped in and determined that such methods were illegal.
To be quite honest, I cringe to even discuss this question of torture. It somehow seems tantamount to wondering about the morality of, say, slavery. Indeed, the fact that there’s actually a serious debate in this country about whether torture is “okay” is beyond unthinkable. Nonetheless, as the Republican debate exemplified, a lot of important players don’t think that it’s quite so black-and-white. Indeed, Romney, Hunter, and Giuliani, in particular, were “jumping over themselves” to outdo each other as the biggest toughguy supporters of “high-pressure interrogation techniques,” as it was neatly labeled.
That’s the catch, of course. Publicly, supporters argue that it’s just “enhanced” interrogation strategies — extreme, perhaps, but far from torture. But how can anyone honestly argue that subjugating detainees to hours of freezing temperatures, extensive sleep deprivation, and water boarding is anything less than it really is?
And morals aside for a moment, it’s not even a smart policy. As Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar wrote in their piece in the WaPost, our widespread use of torture against detainees from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib has had “disastrous consequences.”
Revelations of abuse feed what the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, which was drafted under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, calls the “recuperative power” of the terrorist enemy.Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its “recuperative power.”
The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy.
UPDATE: As wjr kindly corrected me in the comments section, it was Romney, rather than McCain, who came out in support of “high pressure techniques.” Thanks for the catch.
24 Responses to “The Absurdity of the Torture Debate”
Actually, rather than jumping over Giuliani and Hunter to be the GOP’s biggest supporter of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, John McCain came out firmly and in no uncertain terms against torture. It was Romney, Giuliani, and Hunter jumping over themselves to be the king of torture, not as you say, John McCain. Incidentally, Ron Paul and (later) Jim Gilmore also stated their total opposition to torture and/or enhanced interrogation techniques.
Very good article. Especially this part:
“I cringe to even discuss this question of torture. It somehow seems tantamount to wondering about the morality of, say, slavery.”
It was the audiences’ applause that I found most frightening. America won the cold war by occupying the moral high ground and condemning successive USSR leaders for using pretty much the same tactics republican supporters now bay for.
Outside of this base, the American people are tired of this kind of talk and recognise that it only further imperils the nation.
Because of Bush and his administrations woeful conduct of the war, we are now a weaker country than we were were before 9/11, with less allies and more enemies who, while we continue down the path to a broken army, grow stronger and, according to the latest intelligence, richer.
Torture talk will rev up the 28% who still believe Bush is doing a good job, but bring it into the big arena after decision time and the republican party will slip further and further into irrelevancy. Its just not a smart way to fight our enemies.
I never get how the party that is supposed to stand for family values, the sanctity of human life and who vilifies moral relativism, can take a stand condoning torture. Its just baseless hypocrisy. The US still refuses to apologize for wrongly imprisoning and torturing that innocent Canadian citizen who got caught up in the feeding frenzy that followed 9/11. In the end our system of justice has to be the same for others as it is for ourselves, otherwise our democratic ideals have little meaning. McCain is 100% correct when he says that allowing torture is wrong because it dehumanizes US.
KR It’s white families with Anglo-Saxon surnames. What Malkin ignores is that this group thinks that abusing “other” people is OK. The Axix powers did that during WWII, the crimes in Korea and Fra East are ignored by history. We went from the high moral ground to justifying torture because it works on Fox’s “24″.
Pseudo intellectual garbage aside, not to mention the poke at white people, you seem to miss the point that was stated and seems clear. People understand and are willing to accept the use of force in “ticking clock” situations. You would be hard put to find someone who doesn’t see the appeal, acceptance, allure, call it what you will, the moral if not legal justification for the practice. The problem is the slippery slope type argument and it makes very good sense. If it is possible anytime then some people will want to use it every time and it goes from there. There is no real way to justify treatment past a certain point that would not end up poisoning the people, and our military, doing it. Of course the way many go about speaking out against it seem strange. Are people trying to stop it? Are they trying to solidify support for it so they will have a cause?
Bones – Here is another hypothetical, the abused prisoner gives up false info on an attack on another mall. The prisoner dies as the results of the extrordinary questioning. News leaks out that the attack will be in a Detroit mall. The resultant panic results in many deaths and injuries due to the panic. This scenario is just as likely as the Fox “24 Hours” savings of lives. Another post has a response from military leaders who denounce torture. Please find a few “military experts”, who served and maybe even fought in war, that condone torture. In Vietnam many VC found out they couldn’t fly from helicopters, but this wasn’t offical policy. People accepted women not voting, slavery and sgregation, so I guess torture is OK.
Here, I think, is the real problem with the ticking time-bomb scenario: the terrorist only has to hold out for a little while.
Maybe he’s tough enough to hold out for that little while despite whatever torture he’s subject to.
Maybe, under torture, he gives up something false. His torturers waste the remaining little while following up on his false information.
Or maybe he gives up the truth, but the truth is a little hard to believe. Too easy? Too outlandish?
At the last ditch, maybe there’s some appeal to the idea of torture.
But how can you be sure it’s gonna work?
I thought that torture is already permitted if there is a ticking bomb situation. The real problem is that the administration has broadened this scenario so that it now applies to anyone that they consider an enemy combatant. Anyone in our custody could potentially know details about an attack against us, or have information on someone else that might know. It can justify anything and everything.
Of course, the CIA has already been secretly training repressive regimes for years on how to torture rebels. We’ve done it in Guatemala, Chile, Argentina. Its not really that new, except that now our actions are out in the open for the entire world to judge.
Sorwell,
The biggest problem with the ticking time bomb scenario is that it’s based on the idea that you know with certainty that the person you are torturing:
a) is a terrorist
b) has the knowledge that will prevent the attack
c) that torturing this person will yield that information
Unfortunately, we will probably never know any of those things before an interrogation begins.
Great entry. I was disgusted by the entire scenario presented the candidates, then by their answers(except McCain), and by the audience. Those people clapping are utter cowards, and they probably all think they being really tough or decisive or some other rationalized BS.
WTF! Rudi in what way does your “question” have anything to do with my statement? I’m sure we can all come up with 50 convoluted hypothetical situations to show anything we want. So?
As I said most people would agree, understand, ect, the ticking clock reasoning. Pretending otherwise, acting like they are stupid, insulting them, is not the way to dissuade them from that opinion. Acknologing that justified feeling and being honest about it and also the problem and why using force ends up being a negative would work much better than the holier than thou routine.
The “ticking timebomb” scenario is just plain BS. Are we to brutalize a large number of prisoners. What happens when multiple “ticking timebomb” confesions are the results? If giving up the previously earned moral high ground for a fictious “24″ plot scenario worked, why did the military talk to Fox and 24′s producers about the excessive use of torture?
Concerning what has become known as the Dershowitz “ticking bomb” hypothesis, it is based on a set of assumptions and prejudices that do not bear examination. Whilst it is understandable many people will accept the idea that undertaking a morally repugnant act to protect the greater good is sometimes necessary, in this case the morally repugnant act of torture does not protect the greater good. The common prejudice is that torture will get good or reliable information and as such under certain circumstances might be justified if it saves lives. However, torture does not work so efficiently or effectively such that when allied with the other assumptions underlying the ticking bomb hypothesis it leads to a failure in intelligence gathering (amongst its other hazards).
The other principle assumption of the ticking bomb hypothesis is that a “device” has been planted and is due to go off within a short period (days) and therefore time is of the essence justifying extreme measures. Possibly under such circumstances there is some justification of suspending certain legal niceties (proper search warrants, court sanctioned wire taps etc.) in the name of expediency, though I am not convinced of that myself. When it comes to torture such a suspension of civil rights will fail because the information is of necessity time-sensitive and thus dependent upon the subject not being able to put up any resistance, which is unlikely given the nature of terrorists that pose the threat.
At the start of the troubles in Northern Ireland, British intelligence instituted a policy of “severe coercive interrogation” (for want of a better expression it could be described as torture light) which failed to obtain any useful intelligence, gaining more false confessions than anything else. Even those were not delivered in a timely fashion. Instead, the British government ended up before the European Court of Human Rights where it was subject to sanctions for the actions of its operatives. All that was accomplished was the handing of a moral victory to the IRA, which saw an increase in support both in Ulster and in the United States. The latter support enabled the organisation to raise substantial funding for the procurement of weapons, adding to problems the British government faced.
What was more interesting was the IRA’s response to the use of these interrogation techniques. The organisation instituted a program of “resistance” training amongst its personnel which included mock interrogations and the development of cover stories in order to provide false leads.
The IRA has not been the only terrorist or revolutionary organisation to undertake such a program. According to Omar Nasiri (Author of “Inside the Global Jihad”) a former operative of Al Qaeda and an informant, the practice of mock interrogations, including full physical brutality, and cover story preparation was common practice within the organisation. This he discovered in Afghanistan whilst with Sheikh Al Libi, who informed him that anyone being prepared for an operation was put through such preparation in case they were caught. What was interesting about Nasiri’s comments on the matter, was that it was Sheikh Al Libi who when captured and interrogated in Egypt provided the “intelligence” that Al Qaeda was attempting to get WMD from Saddam (who according to the confession had some to spare), and that Al Qaeda was supported by Saddam. We have seen to our cost that this intelligence was not exactly accurate. Nasiri is certain that Al Libi’s confessions were more than mere false confessions but were in fact pre-prepared.
So to use torture on operatives such as those in Al Qaeda, who will probably have been prepared for interrogation, in order to gain information on the location of a soon to explode device or an impending operation will not yield the time-sensitive information that is sought.
What makes the above even worse to contemplate is that it is based on the secondary assumption that one has arrested the correct people, which is not always the case. All too frequently in any arrest scenario, a number of people will be rounded up who either have no knowledge of the operation in question, or are not even involved in the terrorist or criminal organisation, resulting in a further stream of false confessions to add to the false confessions provided by those that have trained to be interrogated.
On this latter point, I have rather too much personal experience having had to endure both basic “coercive interrogation†and other more brutal methods of torture. In December 2000 a series of car bombings that killed and injured a number of westerners began to occur in Saudi Arabia. I and 7 other western expatriate workers were arrested and forced to confess to the said crimes in order to allow the Saudi’s to deny that they had a home grown terrorist problem. I was put through periods of sleep deprivation (forced to stand by being chained upright to the cell door) the longest periods of which were 11, 14 and 20 days, stress positioning during interrogation, beatings across the back, legs, hands, soles of the feet and scrotum, suspended off the ground in the chicken position (tied around a metal bar) and beaten in the aforementioned places, suspended off the ground in a position called the swing (hung upside down on a cable) and beaten in the aforementioned places. I first confessed (or told my interrogators what they wanted to hear) after 6 days, which brought a temporary respite, and then through subsequent periods of torture added refinements to the story they wanted me to tell. I was eventually released after 964 days in captivity, all of which were spent in solitary confinement.
One would be right to ask why I confessed if I was innocent? Simply to gain the brief respite that I received for my initial confession. There was only so much I could endure, even when by confessing I was essentially giving my captors the authority to execute me for capital crimes, so death had become preferable to the agony. Yet, even I, a middle aged man with no training or preparation, managed to hold out for 6 days before telling my captors what they wanted to hear. Admittedly, the Saudi’s were out to extract a confession that they knew not to be the truth, so whatever I told them as long as it was within their required framework was what they were after. The truth had nothing to do with it. My fellow detainees all suffered varying degrees of torture, and all began to provide false confessions within 4 to 9 days of having been arrested.
Even in situations where the arresting authority is chasing after the truth, the subject of the torture is likely at some point to start telling them what they want to hear (or what the subject thinks the interrogators want to hear). Referring to the case of the Tipton Three, British Muslims of Pakistani ethnic origin, Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul were arrested in Afghanistan and ended up in Guantanamo. False confessions produced via a rewards system allied with the other techniques of coercive interrogation, had these 3 men branded as hard core Al Qaeda members.
Eventually it was claimed that they were present in a video of a meeting in August 2000 between Usama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. However the men in the video looked nothing like them. Furthermore, in August 2000, when the video was shot, Rasul had been working in a branch of the electronics store Curry’s, and was enrolled at the University of Central England. Yet after the months of isolation and serial interrogation in stress positions Rasul gave up and confessed that it was him in the video. The other two made similar confessions.
In September 2003, MI5 arrived at the camp with the documentary evidence which showed they could not have been in Afghanistan at the relevant time, confirming their alibis and providing further proof that none of the three had any association with radical Islamists. Finally, they were released in March 2004. Still the three men had provided false confessions as psychologically they had reached a breaking point caused by the very nature of the interrogation techniques. Their interrogators were in no doubt after the truth, and the detainees were innocent of the charges, yet between the parties involved all that was gained were false confessions, bad intelligence and 3 men held for 26 months.
An older story, but one just as horrific, concerns the cases of the Guilford 4, the MacGuire 7 and the Birmingham 6 in Britain during the mid-1970’s when an IRA bombing campaign was in operation The details of these cases fill volumes, but it is essentially a situation in which coercive techniques and beatings were illegally used by police officers producing a series of false confessions that led to convictions (in at least one of the cases the added complication of now discredited forensic evidence that had the authorities unwilling to consider the true nature of the confessions). As a result the individuals concerned were given sentences ranging from 12 years to life imprisonment for being involved in the IRA bombing campaign on mainland Britain during 1974-1975. Eventually, the convictions were overturned, but not until some of the individuals had served out their sentences, whilst others had served up to sixteen years (one detainee Giuseppe Conlon died in prison). The real perpetrators remained at large, though it seems that some were arrested for other terrorist incidents, but never investigated for those relating to the above cases.
These miscarriages of justice were not only effectively crimes against the wrongly convicted, but also a disservice to the very government and judiciary that imposed the sentences. Both British security service officers and leading members of the IRA have stated in recent years that the convictions and the use of coercive interrogation techniques and brutality to gain the confessions assisted the IRA in gaining recruits and increased the support for the organisation both in Ulster and the Republic. The same effect is now being seen in the upsurge of anti-American sentiment and support of Al Qaeda in various Muslim nations derived from the torture that has occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (regardless of the fact that under the Taliban rule in Afghanistan and Saddam’s rule in Iraq even worse levels of torture were a regular means of subduing the population).
From my own research in the nearly 4 years since my release, I have come across extremely few situations where torture or coercive interrogation was shown to be an effective means of intelligence gathering even in the long term, and have found no cases where it is been effective at all in the short time frames posited in the ticking bomb hypothesis. However, within popular mythology, as espoused in much of entertainment media (e.g. 24, Nikita etc.), it bears instant results, fuelling our own need for a quick fix to the problems of terrorism that invoke in us real fears. In fact, the only result that torture seems provide is a propaganda victory for the other side, hardly something one wants hand to one’s enemy.
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