I’m going to be blunt. People who attempt to claim that “torture” doesn’t work simply make themselves look like illogical fools. There may be arguments against it, but that’s an idiotic one. And the people who make it never explain what will work in its place against people like this.
[Sunday morning update]
Stephen Hayes has more.
I’ll be just as blunt. I guess you’re not familiar with people like Col. Steven Kleinman, Matthew Alexander, and Ali Soufan, then?
This article did not vindicate Cheney. You’re making the mistake, as most advocates of EIT do, of assuming correlation implies causation. KSM was feeding false information all throughout the application of EIT and telling his interrogators how unnecessary and stupid it was.
KSM wanted to show us how smart he was. The EIT was not necessary. Even General Hayden is now saying that intel from KSM did not stop any imminent plots, that he just gave them a high-level view of the organization. Not that such intel isn’t useful, but it kinda blows out of the water the “ticking time bomb” scenario justification and “this directly saved lives” argument.
Rand, I’m very uncomfortable with the government having the power to to torture enemies — foreign or domestic. My thoughts are that while in a reasonable persons hands it indeed is a tool to extract information from the likes of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. However, eventually we will elect less restrained leaders and we have to wonder what they might do with such power over prisoners. I hate slippery slope arguments, but I believe there is a strong case to be made against torture, or techniques that come very close to torture. Sure, today it may be terrorists getting such treatment, but history tells us it never ends there.
If we are to have “enhanced interrogation techniques” that blur the distinction between keeping a prisoner uncomfortable and torturing a prisoner, I think the best solution is complete transparency. If we are using such techniques, what is being done should be fully open and documented for examination and criticism. That way, if an informed populace becomes uncomfortable with the techniques being used a political solution can be utilized rather than the insane situation of the Justice Department looking to prosecute the CIA.
If we as a society can’t really find a clear cut line between enhanced interrogation and torture, then the safest bet is to say we shouldn’t do either. That is, err on the side of preserving liberty at a potentially great cost than providing tools a tyrant may someday use against us.
“And the people who make it never explain what will work in its place against people like this.”
They don’t care.
And I’m still waiting to hear about any actual torture (as opposed to frat-house hazing and making
peopleterrorists uncomfortable or scaring them).Apologies for the length of this comment. It ended up longer than expected. If Rand wants to purge it that’s fine. Mike, I think perhaps you are overly optimistic about the capacity of an informed populace to become uncomfortable with the techniques being used, and this then leading to changes in policy that limit, restrict or otherwise prohibit the continuation or expansion of “enhanced” techniques.
You need to keep in mind context and presentation. If the state is adopting these methods it will do so believing in their effectiveness and will, in the context of open discussion of the techniques emphasize that it is using them because they work, while at the same time no doubt highlighting their discomfort with the need to adopt such methods.
In due course, as the population is regularly provided with information about the use of these techniques they will become inured to them. It will cease to be something objectionable or shocking but instead part of the landscape. There will be growing acceptance of these methods, which are believed to be effective. At that point you are likely to be faced with the perfectly reasonable question of why, if I can use these “enhanced interrogation techniques” against a terrorist who may have information about plots to kill Americans then why shouldn’t we also use them to deal with pedophiles, rapists, kidnappers and serial killers. Ultimately I can’t see a coherent argument for why you should not expand the reach of these techniques, naturally in a controlled and regulated fashion.
Slippery slope arguments are all too frequently over-used, as are thin end of the wedge positions. But at the same time we should not deceive ourselves about the public will or the imperatives driving bureaucracies to expand the application of methods beyond their originally intended bounds.
Finally (I seem to have gone on rather to long) I was never comfortable with the torture opponents approach. As a rule the position adopted was along the lines of “don’t do it, it doesn’t work.” This was always a shallow and frankly rather silly position. After all, their objections are effectively eliminated by the simple expedient of demonstrating that torture actually does work in terms of producing useful information. The key point should always have been the fundamental point that torture is wrong, combined with the acknowledgement that sometimes you have to do things that are wrong for the good of the country.
By far the worst excesses in the area of torture come when it becomes systematic and is not driven by the desire to get good information, but instead simply by the effort to get someone who you believe to be a bad guy to fess up. Too bad if you have the bad-guy’s neighbor, he confessed didn’t he? Of course the other excess comes when it is used to make executions more horrible, but that really is a whole different bag.
Rand, I’m very uncomfortable with the government having the power to to torture enemies — foreign or domestic.
I didn’t say you shouldn’t be.
Rand, I’m very uncomfortable with the government having the power to to torture enemies
Oh give me break. They have the power right now to destroy your life through the justice system, bankrupt you, imprison you for decades, and even strap you a gurney and inject you with stuff to stop your heart. Even leaving that alone, even if you never cross the law — or more precisely, even if no enthusiastic prosecutor imagines you’ve done so (let’s hear from Conrad Black about that before passing judgment, too) — even as an average Joe Citizen they can rummage around in your finances all they want, if some IRS desk pilot thinks your return looks funny. They can hold up your driver’s license for offenses real and imaginary and decades old. And on and on.
The time to complain about the power of government to “torture” you — however you define it — was maybe about 100 years back, back when the Federal Government wasn’t the single largest power center in the nation. It’s far, far too late now. Our government has more power over each of us as individuals than ever did George III, or Napoleon over his.
I think the whole debate over torture is generally just so much bread ‘n’ circuses nonsense. It’s people who realize, dimly, that they have very little left that is truly secure against this monster in Washington, and lacking courage to attack the true dragon, mount a furious attack against some scaly ugly little lizard creeping around the monster’s feet. A little pathetic.
Carl,
So because the government has been given lots of powers that can be abused against its citizens, we should keep adding more and more dangerous powers? Just for funsies? I agree with you that our government has more power over us than many tyrants of the past…I see that as a bug that shouldn’t be added to if we can avoid it.
~Jon
Carl Pham said:
The time to complain about the power of government to “torture” you — however you define it — was maybe about 100 years back, back when the Federal Government wasn’t the single largest power center in the nation. It’s far, far too late now.
So, just because I wasn’t alive 100 years ago, I forfeit the right to complain about the gov’t potentially torturing citizens? I agree that we need to attack the root of the tree of excessive gov’t power, not an isolated branch, but we still have the right to prune the branch too – we don’t give it up because we were born too late.
My biggest qualm with torture and harsh interrogation techniques is that, ultimately, it is probably less efficacious than establishing a rapport with the prisoner – the false alarm rate for torture is much higher. It has not been established that KSM needed to be treated harshly due to the ticking bomb scenario, so maybe they should have gone slower and ultimately gotten more. But ultimately that call has to be made by the people on the scene, and I dislike being a Monday morning quarterback.
I strongly recommend that people read the original Washington Post article, and try to approach it with an open mind.
I won’t be around on Sunday to reply to comments, but I’m really surprised this article is being treated as any sort of outright vindication or as an opportunity for blunt certainty. Justin’s comment above explains why, to which I would only add “and there was no control in the experiment, and only one data point.”
The article made it sound like KSM would have started lecturing if the Americans had merely tortured him by endlessly asserting confident but wrong-headed claims about the world. Rand, if KSM had access to your blog, I bet you could have gotten him to talk in a week! 🙂
Jon, Dread One, your statements remind me of a certain woman I know who isn’t so good at setting priorities. Say the house is a pigsty and company’s due in two hours. In the process of looking for a mop she’ll open a storage closet in the garage and realize it’s a mess — then set to work straightening it out.
Two hours later, when she’s out of time, the house is still a pigsty, except for one spic ‘n’ span closet in the garage, which no one will ever see.
There’s a limited amount of time and energy the citizeny as a whole is able to spend on reforming its government. Siphon a sizeable chunk off to debate where, precisely the line between “persuasion” and “torture” is vis-a-vis the CIA and a handful of prisoners per decade, and you lose what opportunity you might have had to work on far bigger problems: the coming entitlement train wreck, how much of your wealth the Federal government ought to be able to siphon away, whether Federalism is dead or just moribund (and what might be done to revive it), and whether you want to keep control of your borders, and if so, how.
I strongly suspect the powers that be are very happy that the debate in the public eye is about “torture” and other such minutiae, for that very reason. I’m sure the Obama Administration is very happy to have y’all blowing your powder and shot over the issue.
I understand DoD and CIA counter-interrogation techniques, namely what to do when you get caught and are being questioned by someone willing to use torture, are based on the assumption that torture works. Instead of trying to tough out the torturer, I gather the prisoner attempts to confuse the issue by spounting numerous lies and disinformation from the start.
KSM was feeding false information all throughout the application of EIT and telling his interrogators how unnecessary and stupid it was.
Justin, I gather that’s an example of someone using this technique properly. It doesn’t mean that the interrogators didn’t get what they were after though.
KSM wanted to show us how smart he was. The EIT was not necessary. Even General Hayden is now saying that intel from KSM did not stop any imminent plots, that he just gave them a high-level view of the organization. Not that such intel isn’t useful, but it kinda blows out of the water the “ticking time bomb” scenario justification and “this directly saved lives” argument.
EIT not necessary? Why? You claim KSM wanted to show us how smart he was and he was lying a lot. Neither strikes me as an argument against the use of torture. Unless you think that somehow smug, lying prisoners are immune to the effects of torture.
It doesn’t negate the second argument since a high-level view of Al Qaeda would help save lives (the “directly” qualifier is a weasel word that has more than one meaning) simply by allowing us to disrupt the structure of the organization and reduce the frequency and effectiveness of terrorism attacks.
The counter-interrogation techniques are based on the assumption that torture is used to generate propaganda. The SERE methods absolutely are not the basis for sound interrogation practices intended to obtain actionable intelligence. The agency that administers the SERE program even said as much, though their objections were ignored.
While the torture was being applied, KSM was feeding us BS. I’ve said it before elsewhere, but it bears repeating here. The real world is not like an episode of 24. I’m saying the EIT was not necessary because I think KSM was going to talk anyways. Every professional interrogator who has written about the subject that I’ve read says that establishing a relationship with the target works every time, it’s just a matter of finding the right “in”.
KSM’s ego and his calculations of what we already knew were what drove him to talk, not waterboarding. EIT just gave him the excuse to be able to claim he was tortured into it.
I have to agree that keeping EIT invisible (but known) to the general public makes it easier to keep it rare and under tight controls.
Public hangings were once fairly common in this country, especially in the more rural areas. The book “True Grit” offers a literary example. Currently, the UFC (the closest thing we have to “Fight Club”) helps to coarsen our attitudes towards violence. Making EIT open would, too.
Carl, please show in my post where I’m “blowing my powder and shot” over the torture issue. You stated what I might call the Pham doctrine, which seemed to say that citizens don’t have a right to complain about “torture” (which I wasn’t doing) because it’s water under the bridge too long ago. I called BS on that. How about arguing with something I actually said, if you want to.
People who attempt to claim that “torture” doesn’t work simply make themselves look like illogical fools
I’d say the fools are the ones relying on the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” logical fallacy. KSM was waterboarded 183 times within a month of being captured. We will never know what he would have told us if we hadn’t used waterboarding.
And the people who make it never explain what will work in its place against people like this.
While KSM’s information was welcome, it did not save a single U.S. life, much less the hundreds of thousands claimed by Cheney. People who champion the use of waterboarding never explain with any specificity what horrible things would have happened if we hadn’t used it (hint: not much).
Jim,
We have no way of knowing. That neither supports nor condemns EIT. Rather, it acknowledges that we are all groping in the dark on this one.
There are two questions. Does torture work? Yes, it will work on an individual you know is a high value target.
When people say torture doesn’t work, they mean routine torture of random people swept up in a dragnet. Not knowing anything, such people will talk and make stuff up that they think the torturers want to hear in order to stop the torture. Even if among the people who know nothing you nab someone who does know something, what they spill gets lost in the noise of false confessions and accusations. That’s what doesn’t work–routine torture.
The second question is do we torture? I don’t see that even waterboarding is torture. But people disagree. The administration is free to decide we don’t waterboard. And then free to accept the responsibility for that action if it proves insufficient to get information.
But if waterboarding is torture, why aren’t those left-wing groups that go around staging waterboarding sessions as protests arrested? You couldn’t protest pulling fingernails out by pulling out the fingernails of your group’s members, after all.
I want EIT to be rare. But I want that option.
But if waterboarding is torture, why aren’t those left-wing groups that go around staging waterboarding sessions as protests arrested?
For the same reason that surgeons aren’t routinely arrested for assault with a deadly weapon — because those sessions are consensual.
Jim,
Thanks for the clarification. I didn’t know that waterboarding cured what ails you.
Doctor Kevorkian surely needed better legal advice than he got.