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.