blogAlas, torture sometimes works
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.
The really sad thing about torture is that is does work most of the time. I would agree that extremely rough and barbarous methods, such as the rack, obliges one to talk or suffer. So you run a high risk of getting gibberish. But the methods we (the US) use are best described as “torture lite.” These are forceful methods of coercion such as water-boarding and sensory deprivation. There are some, such as Senator McCain, who say water-boarding and sensory deprivation are methods of torture and so should be banned. This is foolish nonsense!
Remember, according to the press, the captured al Qaeda lieutenant, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the World Trade Center attacks, was subjected to the tactic of “waterboarding” during his interrogation. No physical harm is actually done to the prisoner during waterboarding. The tactic makes the prisoner believe he is drowning, though he actually is not. Sheik Mohammed, reportedly, broke and provided good information to interrogators after two and a half minutes of waterboarding. Most people, according to experts, break and talk within 30 seconds after waterboarding begins. So Sheik Mohammed was not easy to crack. But he did crack and we did make some very good arrests and interventions from the information he provided. Translation: we saved lives.
I wonder what the anti-coercion, anti-torture, anti-anything-that-save-lives-if-you-have-to-dirty-your-hands group would do with a hardened terrorist like Sheik Mohammed? They would just wait and wait and hope being nice to them would eventually get them to talk. Maybe that would work with the average terrorist after, say, a couple of years; but never with the hardened terrorist.
But this you can be sure of: we pay for their silence in blood.
Comment by Gaius — May 21, 2007 @ 6:41 pm