Kurt Andersen

Having been on the road book-touring, I missed several episodes of 24. So after a DVR catch-up marathon the other night (by the way: Separated At Birth: Powers Boothe, who plays the right-wing vice-president on 24, and Kevin McCarthy), I had counterterrorist-torture on my mind.

But I would’ve found last week’s New York Times story, “3 Suspects Talk After Iraqi Soldiers Do Dirty Work” deeply provocative in any case.

The conventional wisdom among U.S. military and intelligence experts, as it’s been reported since the beginning of the Iraq war, is that torture is ineffective – that seriously hurting and terrifying people doesn’t make them give up useful secrets, the M.O. of Jack Bauer and his colleagues on 24 notwithstanding. That was the gist of Jane Mayer’s piece about 24 in The New Yorker two months ago, which I wrote about here.

Yet this Times story shows unambiguously that at least among Iraqi insurgents (as opposed to hardened Al Qaeda fanatics, one imagines) torture can indeed do the trick, and probably save American lives.

An Iraqi army captain in Baghdad had his soldiers whip a suspected insurgent on the back with electrical cables. “I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” the officer told the Times reporter. “I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”

Handed over to the Iraqis’ U.S. Army partners — who apparently learned of the beating only afterward, from the Times reporter – the man led them to an insurgent safe house. There the Americans found bomb detonators, coils of blasting wire, explosives, two large antiaircraft guns, and an oxygen tank “partly cut in preparation for being turned into a huge bomb, probably similar to the one that killed four [American] soldiers in [the] regiment a month earlier.”

It was nice to think that torture is never an effective means to a desirable end. This conventional wisdom let us entirely off the hook – we didn’t need to face the end-justifying-the-means moral questions, we thought, because the means never achieved the desired end. But it turns out we were misinformed.

It’s telling that this story hasn’t become a big subject of national discussion during the last week. A few gung-ho pro-war ideologues have written about it, because it seems to justify the balls-out viciousness they want to believe could still win the war in Iraq. And a few reflexive antiwar left-wingers have written about it, because it seems to justify their morally simple view of the war. But for the rest of us it is a complicating, deeply unsettling new fact as we wonder how we should extract ourselves from this complicated, deeply unsettling war.