I hate Dick Cheney. I cannot imagine a more disgusting combination of power and venality in American politics. We have more than our share of scum over the years, but whether by luck or by horse sense we have managed to keep the worst of them out of high office. Sarah Palin lost. Ronald Reagan blew up the budget, but at least he had the basic sense not to let the Beiruts of the world distract him. Nixon and Kissinger and Johnson had plenty of flaws, but amazingly managed rise above the shenenigans that got them to high office by doing some good when they got there. And Dubya…well, seems hard to blame anyone who was this unable to comprehend his job:
Dick Cheney was in his own league, a man who combined the corruption of Harding, the intellectual curiosity of Coolidge, and the sense of social justice of James Buchanan. It would be a cruel insult to Hoover to put them in the same category. Cheney managed to be wrong about virtually everything, which is difficult to do in a world where blind chance generally favors people with multiple opportunities. It was not a good idea to abdicate responsibility for capturing Osama bin Laden to the Northern Alliance, an ill-equipped group bereft of its leader and celebrating the improbable reconquest of their nation, especially while the Tenth Mountain Division stood idly by in the wrong country. It was not a good idea to invade Iraq when the intelligence in fact argued against their having weapons of mass destruction, and a downright horrible idea not to leave after killing Saddam. And how do you fail to capture Osama in eight years?
Not satisfied with global incompetence, it was not a good idea for his energy task force to allow the continued manipulation of the California electric market (unfortunately begun in the dying months of the Clinton Administration), it was not a good idea to spend eight years lampooning conservation as no basis for a government energy policy, and it was downright negligent to show no regard for government deficits. Which, I suppose, is better than the corruption that saw no-bid contract regularly awarded to Halliburton and friends and the rampant fleecing of the Pentagon. Or his treatment of his personal friend, who he managed to mistake for a bird:
I therefore find it more than a little uncomfortable to have to agree with Cheney on something: the torture investigations are a bad idea.
The torture investigations are tactically flawed. The government wants to avoid prosecuting Dubya and Cheney, for the obvious reasons that it does not want this to look like a political witch hunt and really doesn’t want to set precedent for the next guy. It doesn’t want to prosecute interrogators who played by the rules, even if the rules were flawed, because it doesn’t want to seem to pick on soldiers who were doing their best. So it is limited to cases of interrogators who overstepped the rules they were given, in a peculiar reversal of authority: only those without the power to define the rules will be deemed to have done something wrong, while those who put them in the situation from a comfortable distance will be allowed to wash their hands of the matter. It’s one thing to argue that “following orders” is not an affirmative defense, quite a different one to say that only “following orders” is a crime.
But that’s not my main objection. My main objection is deeper: I don’t want to prosecute people for torture because I accept that our armed forces will torture.
The laws of war – the nice rules drawn up for a more traditional case of state conflict, when the front line soldiers of the Kaiser and the patrie could hardly be said to have a personal grievance with each other – hardly envision the non-state conflict we face with Al Qaeda. Mohammed Atta and his fellow terrorists wore no uniform and represented no state. They flew civilian aircraft and killed non-belligerents in the Trade Centers. Their allies killed non-belligerents in the Tube and the Madrid railroad.
As irregular soldiers, they are liable for summary death by hanging. If they are useful in some other fashion, I’d just as soon hear about it before they meet the end of the rope.
It has often been stated that torture doesn’t work. It yields useless information, it provides too many false positives, it causes the tortured to forget the truth. Perhaps that’s right. In the Korean War, the Chinese achieved much better results using some force (principally starvation) and compliance techniques than the North Koreans who simply beat prisoners to the edge of death. Some tactics work well in limited circumstances; Allied air power was absurdly ineffective against German industry, but it did a reasonable job against Romanian oil production. Some people might hold up to torture, and some might not. Some people might not care if their family members are killed, and some might. Not every interrogation has to be the same.
But why, when faced with an ever-changing enemy, would we want to give up the possibility that we might get serious? As Richard Cohen puts it:
[The terrorist] knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line — that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.
That is absurd. The goal is to win. If it is possible to win elegantly, to win while respecting the decency of man, then by all means. If it is possible to win only by burning your way across the enemy’s home front, or by sinking his merchant shipping, or gassing him or using atomic bombs, then that’s what has to happen. Indeed, the very disgusting nature of war is what should make us draw back from the Grenadas and Kosovos, the wars of choice where we don’t feel scared enough to punch at full force. When something is worth fighting for – as our freedom from Al Qaeda surely is – it should be worth total war.
UPDATE
It seems the DNC agrees with me about the quality of Dick Cheney’s advice, and has the advantage of a considerably more talented production squad:
Money quote from this article:
“in a peculiar reversal of authority: only those without the power to define the rules will be deemed to have done something wrong, while those who put them in the situation from a comfortable distance will be allowed to wash their hands of the matter.”
However, I don’t agree with your main objection. In my mind, you (and GWB’s clan) are fighting the last war, so to speak. That is a war of might.
This war is a war of ideas, not guns/bombs/gassing.
Many of us believe that the “war” against the terrorists can only really be “won” via soft power. We cannot hunt down and arrest or kill *every* single terrorist. That strategy is not leveraged at all.
What we can do quite well is win at the war of ideas – if we try, that is.
It is my belief that torture, on our part, works against these soft power tactics. Economically, the return from torture might be less than the cost of torture in the context of winning the war of ideas.
My POV.
As always, very well written post.
That strikes me as a wonderful argument for not discussing torture in public, not for avoiding the practice. Abu Ghraib, for example, became a problem because the folks who were putting prisoners through the equivalent of fraternity rush couldn’t resist the temptation to take pictures of the events and then share them.
We do a lot of things in war that it does not make sense to discuss. In the Cold War, we managed to tap the undersea cables along the USSR’s coast that relayed military commands to the Soviet Far East. The event would have been useless if the submariners involved had promptly Twittered their buddies to discuss the technical coup. Yes, I see the irony that I am writing this on a blog.
My preferred “idea” in a battle of ideas is this: we will leave you alone, aggrieved party, as long as you leave us alone. We won’t show up in Iraq or Darfur or Rwanda or Kosovo or Zimbabwe or Haiti. If you want to run a backward state because of a thousand year-old book or modern-day corruption, we won’t bomb you into changing. If, however, you choose not to leave us alone, then understand that we will respect no limits whatsoever in our retaliatory action.
I am in full agreement with your preferred idea. Hopefully over the next two decades, as we realize we’re much poorer than we thought, we’ll reduce our nation building/democracy enforcing actions. And that will help.
I’m w/Wisco on this one.
Good people don’t torture. Period. It’s an clear moral code. Just because the other ‘side’ does it is not a good argument. One wins a war of ideas with better ideas. We should be the good guys here.
Make no mistake; we have the right and duty to hunt down and kill those who have tried (and succeeded) to murder us in our homes and workplaces. Torture is entirely different from seeing that monsters and criminals see justice.
I also disagree with the idea about prosecuting those of us who tortured and ordered torture. No one is above the law. If an investigation leads back to Cheney and Bush, so be it. Anything less than following the investigation to its logical conclusion condones lawbreaking if you’re high enough up the food chain. Yes, it will lead to the inevitable crying and complaining that someone is being ‘partisan’. Well, TS. The modern Republic Party is so far down the crazy hole, perhaps it will encourage more responsible behavior in the future.
Great post as usual.
That clear moral code doesn’t seem so clear to me. It should be clear that gentlemen do not read each others’ mail, yet we spend billions of dollars on signals intelligence whose sole purpose is to break into other peoples’ communications. It should be clear that non-belligerents were killed in the fire bombings of Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and indeed that there was no meaningful way to claim that we were “aiming” at anything other than the cities in those attacks. It should be clear that Mexico was only trying to enforce its own territorial autonomy when we landed at Veracruz and proceeded to impose a peace that split the country in two.
We do things in the name of war that we would not do in civil society. The moral solution is to try to avoid war, not to prosecute war by the standards of civil society.
I think you are conflating torture with mass murder. While both are reprehensible, I believe the nature of modern warfare is such that there will always be ancillary civilian casualties. A bomb does not discriminate.
Anyway, while mass murder is a sad byproduct of warfare, torture is not. It is not even effective. People being tortured, or even threatened with torture will say anything.
But Mark, we *choose* certain military tactics (bombing from planes for example) to lower the chance of casualties on our side even when we *know* the chances of ancillary civilian casualties will increase. We choose to kill civilians. We’ve done it many times.
Agreed on the results of torture. Too many false positives.
I don’t think the conflict with hostile islamic radicals can be accurately described as a ‘war’ and is therefore subject to a different set of rules as true state-on-state conflict.
There are many facets of the enemy in the “war” on terror, and rarely are all addressed at the same time or with equal weight. We have a responsibility to understand who are ideological and tactical opponents are in order to quickly and completely defeat them. Defeating another state typically involves occupation and the implementation of a friendly government composed of collaborators and former political outsiders. Defeating a decentralized terrorist group defined only by an opposition to “The West” in general and the United States more specifically cannot be undertaken by the same methods.
The definition of our enemy is remarkably fluid, depending on what geographic region and religious/political identity the residents belong to. Liberal semi-secular muslim in Egypt might define their association with Al Qaeda (or similar groups) in a fundamentally anti-imperialist way, while a conservative religious leader in Afghanistan might see it as a religious war.
Also, because we aren’t fighting a state, but rather a collection of people, we’re unable to hide behind the idea that we’re destroying our enemy’s ability to wage war. In state-on-state conflict, the logistics of warfare are the first targets–ammunition dumps, airfields, fuel depots, and enemy combat groups. In this war, without significant supply lines or materiel to destroy, we’re forced to kill the people who would kill us. A building can be rebuilt–especially if the occupying power helps rebuild it–but people can’t be replaced. In a culture rather more obsessed with revenge as a form of justice than ours, carrying out a war against people tends to create more enemies rather than less.
Finally, I agree with not pursuing torture trials against heads of state. Prosecuting outgoing members of the leadership would as a matter of precedent would rarely result in justice but would poison the presidency with the air of banana republic politics. It was for this reason that the best thing Gerald Ford could have done was pardon Nixon for any wrongdoing: there’s a big difference between “throw the bum out and fix the mess he made” and going for the pound of flesh.
Taunter: My preferred “idea” in a battle of ideas is this: we will leave you alone, aggrieved party, as long as you leave us alone. We won’t show up in Iraq or Darfur or Rwanda or Kosovo or Zimbabwe or Haiti. If you want to run a backward state because of a thousand year-old book or modern-day corruption, we won’t bomb you into changing. If, however, you choose not to leave us alone, then understand that we will respect no limits whatsoever in our retaliatory action.
——–
Outstanding, sir. Outstanding. I may not agree with you on health care, since you don’t want to have co-pays and deductibles structured to force consumders to haggle with docs and do some cost benefit analysis between spending money on booze vs prostate surgery. Or on cap and trade, since I’d only agree to a carbon tax, and thing cap and trade is a scam to help the bankers. Or on free trade, since I think all our current treaties are handouts to mercantilists negotiated by commie-haters who believed in unilaterally giving up protections of the livelihoods of the working class, without full compensation via permanent transfer payments from high income classes to working class people (in perpetuity for generations to come).
However, war knows no limits. It is brutal, and is won by the most committed.
For what it’s worth, I would also prefer a straight carbon tax to cap and trade. It’s folks with a phobia of the word tax who object.
There are many problems attached to the belief that no tactic can be withheld in the name of winning wars, which is that it is never clear that any tactic is the “best” or the “only” tactic that can succeed. Optimists would suggest that it is always possible to win a war without committing atrocities, and it is only our ignorance which prevents us from avoiding such behavior.
When we say “these rights are sacred and inviolable, except…,” we reduce ourselves to cowards in the eyes of such enemies as, it is claimed, justify the use of such tactics as torture. They are willing to die for their beliefs (it is this which makes them terrifying to many), and we are not. By discarding our moral code in war, we abandon this tactic.
The stated “alternative,” an avoidance of war, can easily co-exist with “rules of war.” Yet, the avoidance of war would be ill-served by the adoption of a “total war” idea. The “best” tactic is easily superseded by the “most obvious” tactic, which is overwhelming, wasteful force, used freely to attack (preemptively!) and defend (justly!).
Too easily, the argument that no tactic can be forbidden lest it be the best tactic becomes an argument for an expansive military machine and a militarized government. Those who endorse the argument do not often intend such things, but the world is not so ideal as they often assume.
They are often surprised when the absolute power they had intended to be used by wise, just leaders is instead put into the hands of the evil and corrupt. The idea of “total war” will always remain at the top of the list of most naive ideas ever conceived, and not least because….
isn’t it a little bit obvious that Cheney did what he did because he believed in this very idea?
I doubt that torture contributes to winning.
The information needed from prisoners, we are told, most often comes from skillful conversation and the creation of a positive relationship – it is volunteered. It requires interrogators with social skills, great patience and a high level of self-respect. It takes an interrogator who can “win over” a prisoner, engaging him rather than diminishing him. It takes an interrogator who believes in what he is doing and in the war he is fighting.
Prisoners are tortured because we are afraid of them (even if we cannot admit this to ourselves). The goal is to make them afraid of us – to reverse the balance of fear. Intimidation, seen as equivialent to winning, is the goal. Dictators use the same tactics: torture has to do with keeping people in line. It is the last resort of those who are able stay in power only by inspiring fear. The flaw in the need to “win” at all costs is this paradox: we will “win” every battle – and yet lose the war, just as we did in Viet Nam.
Little is ever said about the cost to those who torture, but part of the painful aftermath of combat is the knowledge that one has committed atrocities, acts which mutilate forever one’s sense of identity as a “good” person. In the same way, it is likely that torture empties out the soul of the individual who tortures, and just as likely that it empties out the soul of a nation which condones it.
We need to rethink the desirability of winning at all costs.
I don’t know why people assume torture is ineffective. If you catch someone who knows nothing, clearly no amount of torture will make him give you useful information; you cannot get bloof from a stone. But the argument that someone who knows something will never break under abuse doesn’t make a lot of sense – is there nothing that could be done to you that would make you yield?
Many people who have been waterboarded say that it breaks you – and they knew that they were being waterboarded in controlled circumstances. John McCain admitted that the name/rank/serial number stuff went out the window after they hurt him badly enough. The Israelis have a long history torturing prisoners; the French did the same in Algeria. The collateral stuff – talk or we will kill your family – works with groups as disparate as Mexican drug cartels and suicide bombers. Just because you are willing to go down with the ship in an instant does not mean you are immune to pain or cares.
Some people might not yield under pressure. Jean Moulin famously took everything the Gestapo could throw at him. But those men are celebrated in large part because they are so vanishingly rare.
In the case of a large army, such as the US Army in Korea, it is probably more effective to do what the Chinese did – try to use social pressure and slow pain (starvation) to break down a group’s morale. In a cellular structure, such as a terrorist organization, there is no similar broad loyalty; maybe you need different tactics. In either case, the goal is to go after what is most valuable to the detainee. I just don’t see the reason to take anything off the table.
The issue with your position is in your second sentence: “If you catch someone who knows nothing, clearly no amount of torture will make him give you useful information; you cannot get bloo[d] from a stone.”
There’s no way of measuring how much a person actually knows and it’s difficult to predict the same when dealing with a decentralized organization like the one our military faces today. From all the accounts I’ve read of people being waterboarded–and it does apparently break anyone who goes through it–they are willing to lie to great extents to avoid repeating the experience. Because we have no reliable meta information to define the extents of the subject’s knowledge, what they say (even if totally accurate) will always be suspect. The process by which that information is extracted is liable to produce false information, which poisons any accurate information with a lack of credibility. False information is worse than no information at all.
Isn’t that the challenge in any interrogation? No point wasting hundreds of hours building trust with some groundskeeper’s second cousin twice removed who once saw an Al Qaeda guy on TV and was captured in a sweep of the wrong mountain…
While it is true that Al Qaeda does not wear uniforms or carry rank, so you cannot make the assumption that the colonel knows more than the major, the guys are not completely anonymous either. We knew who KSM was – otherwise we would not have been able to catch him. Furthermore, in the case of an Al Qaeda guy, time is of the essence in interrogation, because we need to get actionable intelligence and act on it before his cellmates know he is missing (they will go to ground as soon as they know).
Anything a terrorist says is going to be suspect. But that doesn’t mean some of it isn’t true. It’s the interrogator’s job to separate the wheat from the chaff.
simply because the people who are trained in the black art of torture says it does not work.
for someone trained to resist torture, the results aren’t worth it because it leads to false information.
would it work on you or i? probably. but chances are we would comply with other techniques as well.
needless to say, a war crime is a war crime.
I am not quite sure what “a war crime is a war crime” means. We commit war crimes with some regularity, in the sense of breaching international treaties and conventions governing behavior in war.
We maintain a chemical and biological weapons stockpile, and refuse international inspection of these weapons. Our counterterrorist teams use exploding ammunition. We regularly bomb civilian infrastructure.
In previous conflicts, mobile units have killed all residents of villages to avoid reports of their movements, we have kidnapped civilians from non-belligerent countries to trade with nations holding our civilians, and we built an entire submarine fleet in contravention of the same rules that convicted Donitz at Nuremberg.
There seems to be plenty of debate on the efficacy of various methods, and if the point is to find the most effective, I certainly agree. But I certainly would not make complying with any particular rule – especially when the adversary is not remotely in compliance with any rules – a priority over success.
Mr Taunter,
If you want to persuade doubters of the effectiveness of torture, do a post on the military’s SERE training. The guys I know who have been through it say that the enhanced interrogation phase breaks almost everyone.
The effectiveness of torture is, and always will be, completely beside the point when it comes to whether it is an acceptable tactic.
This, in itself, is beside the point when it comes to the idea of Total War, which contains within it not just torture, but the accumulated atrocities of mankind. Virtually all of the worst acts ever committed by humans were justified by the premise of Total War, that nothing can be withheld in the name of “victory.”
Genghis Khan had his men stack gigantic piles of heads to destroy his enemy’s will to fight. Saddam used chemical weapons on the Kurds. Dictators and totalitarians massacred millions of innocents throughout history in the name of victory.
We condemn warlords who use child soldiers, or who hide their armies behind civilian shields. Our hatred is focused on those leaders who lie and deceive their own people to achieve victory. Yet, all of these tactics would be permissible in a society which believed in Total War.
It’s not just about torture. To give up one’s moral code in war is to not have one in the first place.
Mr. T.
Report to Room 101 immediately.
The purpose of torture is to terrorize potential torturees,
and is not useful to extract information, as experts in the field seem to agree [1].
It is also not hidden, and could not be easily hidden,even if the Abu Ghraib photos wouldn’t have come out.
But it apparently helps enourmously in the recruitment of terrorists.(Even McCain said so).
Being deeply immoral and illegal, (as well as useless), how can you defend it?
Would you also have the U.S. not obey the Geneva Conventions?
While 9/11 was a shock, to seriously think that the U.S. as such is menaced by Al Queda, Afghanistan, or Iraq more than by the Soviet Union in its time is, how can I say it politely, [deranged?] and an indication of having fallen for the fear-mongering now poisoning the American political discourse.
[1] http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/11/exnavy_instructor_promises_to.php
Useless is a valid criticism. But there, the record is mixed; for every interrogator who surfaces in this political environment to say that torture is ineffective, there is another story – Abdul Hakim Murad – where it seems to work. The Israelis have claimed, rightly or wrongly, that retaliating against the families of suicide attackers reduces suicide attacks. I look with great skepticism upon the claim that torture never works; while some people may have the capacity to retreat into the corners of their mind, it seems hard to imagine that every terrorist has an infinite capacity to withstand pain.
The Geneva Convention is a less convincing criticism. Al Qaeda is not, after all, a signatory to the convention, and indeed every aspect of their behavior – fighting out of uniform, using unmarked craft, targeting civilians, executing prisoners – would constitute a violation of the laws of war. It seems ridiculous to insist on some notion of chivalry when dealing with them. Furthermore, the rules are merely a convention among belligerents; we have freely broken them in the past where we saw advantage in doing so.
The Soviet Union was a far greater threat, for it held within its control the capacity to destroy our nation. We, of course, held a similar power over them, and spent billions of dollars maintaining that defense posture. As a developed society with other objectives than simply imposing themselves on us, the USSR was receptive to a manner of negotiation and ultimately saw little upside in killing Americans for the sake of killing Americans.
Al Qaeda has not yet mellowed to a form where there is anything to discuss or negotiate. Our goal is simply to track and kill every last member, and failing this, to kill their knowledge leaders more quickly than they can create new ones. So long as we are faced with an opponent whose continued existence we cannot tolerate, there is no point discussing a convention that presupposes the equal rights of the belligerent parties.
“I look with great skepticism upon the claim that torture never works; while some people may have the capacity to retreat into the corners of their mind, it seems hard to imagine that every terrorist has an infinite capacity to withstand pain.”
I don’t think that the opponents of torture as a means of acquiring intelligence would take the position that torture never works to that end, but rather it doesn’t work often enough to offset the cost of adopting torture as a matter of policy.
The second part of your statement assumes a prevalence of information in a decentralized organization, a property that I’m still very uncertain about. As I commented before, it’s difficult to acquire meta information about what a captured leader of a decentralized terrorist network actually should know, which undermines the credibility of information derived from methods known to produce false intelligence. Is it worth inflicting grievous physical or psychological harm on a person for potential of receiving information might not just be useless, but also misleading for the possibility that such intelligence might be accurate and actionable? I believe that it’s from this question that disagreements about torture arise.
(I am aware that I’ve clearly framed the above question with a dim view of torture. I have such a view, and am aware of my bias.)
Finally, it seems that nobody above the rank of sergeant suffered any consequence for being involved in torture; it seems the Yoos, Bybees and Addingtons successfully invoked the ‘reverse Nuremberg’ defense (‘I only justified torture [by completely lying about the applicable laws], I didn’t torture myself’). (Well, Eichmann just ran trains, never shot anybody.)
Once torture becomes legal, it becomes the standard.
And anyway, we saw it applied for political purposes, to show links between Al Queda and Iraq, not for saving anybody’s life from the information (possibly) gleaned.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/18/732869/-Guantanamo-Investigator-Confirms-Torture-Iraq-Connection
America would be better served if the Torture investigation would be pursued wherever it leads (up).
Actually, the pardons of Nixon, the contributors to the Contra-Iran scandal,… set the stage for later abuses. And the next time, the person tortured (and imprisoned without legal review) may not be an Afghan goat herder, but you (or one of your children). Better stop it here, by a comprehensive investigation.
See also: Glenn Greenwalds many posts on that:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/03/accountability/
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