Sunday, May 17, 2009
Unclouding the torture debate
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- Project Vote Smart tries to educate Virginia voters
- America should listen to this Cassandra
- Endorsements are just one part of the equation
- A conversation more raucous than harmonious
From the RoundTable blog
Comment on The RT blog: "A lot of countries don't use torture, they just slice off your head. Which would you prefer?"
My reply: "I would prefer that my nation not measure its standards against the behavior of barbarians."
In listening to the many arguments about torture and the multitude of issues surrounding it, I keep coming back to that reply as the essence of my thoughts on this issue.
A couple of issues tend to cloud this debate.
One is what to call the techniques we're arguing about. Some reject calling these interrogation methods torture, believing that the legal memos produced by the Bush Justice Department somehow found a bright line between the kind of behavior we consider torture when it is used against our soldiers and the kind of behavior we consider "enhanced interrogation" when we use it against suspected terrorists.
There is no such bright line. When you set out to terrify someone, cause them extreme pain, make them believe they are drowning, deprive them of sleep for days or weeks at a time, shackle them to a ceiling so their feet barely touch the ground, you are engaging in torture -- and all the good intentions in the world cannot obscure that fact.
The other is the debate about whether torture works. Most interrogation experts will tell you it does not. Former Vice President Dick Cheney (who appears to have lost the key to his undisclosed location, alas) and other top officials of the Bush administration have been insisting that the actions they authorized produced information that saved thousands -- even "hundreds of thousands" of lives, according to Cheney.
The FBI disagrees. When asked whether any attacks had been disrupted by the use of coercive interrogation methods, FBI Director Robert Mueller said, "I don't believe that has been the case."
In addition, the timeline doesn't quite work in one case often cited by torture defenders. In a Washington Post commentary, Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for President Bush, wrote that the "interrogation with enhanced techniques" of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed helped foil a plot to fly an airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. Cheney has also alluded to this plot, implying that the waterboarding of KSM foiled it.
There's one major problem with that: The plot was discovered (and presumably foiled) in 2002 with the February arrest of the cell leader allegedly plotting the attack. KSM, on the other hand, wasn't captured until 2003.
The best reason, however, to believe that these methods don't produce credible information is simple: The interrogation methods are based on methods used against our soldiers in Korea and Vietnam -- methods that were designed to elicit false confessions.
As detailed in an April 21 New York Times article, the enhanced interrogation program was based on Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, known as SERE training, used to prepare American soldiers at high risk of capture for some of the worst they might face at the hands of the enemy.
Those developing the program knew that. They figured the methods couldn't be torture if they were used to train American soldiers. What they didn't know, and didn't bother to find out, according to The Times, is that SERE training was based on torture methods used against our soldiers in Korea and Vietnam to get them to sign false confessions.
False confessions.
Sen. John McCain, who has more than passing familiarity with the issue, had this to say about waterboarding and its value: "Waterboarding is torture, period. I can assure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear."
In the end, though, it doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't even matter if it works. If torture worked, it would still be wrong.
A common tactic of torture defenders is to ask, "What if your wife and child were strapped next to a ticking time bomb, and you had the terrorist with the code to stop the bomb. Wouldn't you torture him to get that information and save your family?"
First of all, "ticking time bomb" scenarios are fiction. They never occur outside the confines of television shows such as "24." Second, the rule of law that governs this nation should never be based on what one man might do to save his family.
Which brings us back to the top: that rule of law should also not be based on comparing what we have condoned to what our most barbaric enemies have done.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
