Daily Archives: June 20, 2009

See parts I and II of this series before reading this post.

Does Waterboarding et al Produce Reliable Information?

Yesterday I ended by noting that, not only does making a government policy for torture get us on a slippery slope, but some argue that not only is the “ticking time bomb” scenario is fantastical, but also enhanced interrogation, waterboarding specifically, doesn’t work. It yields unreliable information and sends U.S agents on wild goose chases. Vanity Fair’s David Rose writes,

The unreliability of intelligence acquired by torture was taken as a given in the early years of the C.I.A., whose 1963 kubark interrogation manual stated: “Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.”

One of the most striking testimonies to that effect is from FBI agent Ali Soufan. Talking about the famous memos, he states:

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Soufan is a reliable witness, and no weak kneed pushover. His testimony should be considered. It should be acknowledged, though, that most of the testimonies regarding the success of waterboarding is in reference to KSM, not Zubaydah, who Soufan was involved with. Both were different men in different circumstances, and perhaps they required different approaches.

There are some doubts about Soufan’s testimony (more here).

Time Magazine, referencing Soufan’s questioning of another AQ operative, argues that waterboarding doesn’t work. The magazine notes it took a plate of “sugar free cookies” to turn him.

I’d be laughing at that if I hadn’t made that note earlier about being serious…so I’ll just take this at face value.

Ok, so a plate of sugar free cookies and “doing nice things” (not kidding…direct quote from the article) helped with Abu Jandal…but does that mean that coercive interrogation techniques should be off limits in every circumstance? To paraphrase Patterico, I think most people thinking with common sense would acknowledge that it would take more than a few snicker doodles to get a hardened terrorist to talk.

Testimony is Split

In addition to that, despite the testimonies and arguments layed out above, I’m not so sure the TTB thought experiment is just a thought experiment. There are plenty of reasons to think it happens in real life and that, in the controversial cases with the CIA, waterboarding and other less harsh enhanced techniques (sleep deprivation, playing loud music, etc) helped save American lives. Krauthammer, in a follow up column to his original piece, counters the popular meme that the TTB scenario doesn’t apply to reality:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel’s existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered, as we now say, this enhanced interrogation explained without apology: “If we’d been so careful to follow the (’87) Landau Commission (guidelines), we would never have found out where Waxman was being held.”

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. (The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin’s moral calculus.)

That moral calculus is important. Even John McCain says that in ticking time bomb scenarios you “do what you have to do.” The no-torture principle is not inviolable. One therefore has to think about what kind of transgressive interrogation might be permissible in the less pristine circumstance of the high-value terrorist who knows about less imminent attacks.

Mark Thiessen at the Washington Post (HT: Patterico) also notes that the thought experiment doesn’t stop at being mere thought. Waterboarding of KSM yielded actionable intelligence that foiled another terrorist plot: the “Second Wave,” the bombing of the Library Tower in LA:

Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that “the CIA believes ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.’ . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques.” The memo continues: “Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ‘Soon you will find out.’ ” Once the techniques were applied, “interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates.”

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast.

Thiessen explains that the foiling of that plot was just the start. He claims we gained lots of useful information from waterboarding KSM.

Go here to see the relevant part of the memo. Some have claimed this is bogus because the timing is odd. Patterico, in the link, gives a plausible timeline that resolves the discrepancies.

There are other voices as well that unequivocably say that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques yield reliable information.

One of those voices comes from Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair (HT: Ed Morrissey):

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.

“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture. Among other things, the Bush administration memos revealed that two captured Qaeda operatives were subjected to a form of near-drowning known as waterboarding a total of 266 times.

The thing is that Blair’s admission was deleted from the version originally released to the media:

Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

He did say that the information gained was not essential to our national security, and that there’s no way of knowing if the intel could have been had by other means, but the above admission is striking.

The CIA continues to stand by its actions.

John Kiriakou, now a retired CIA agent, says waterboarding worked (HT: Hotair, again. They’ve done some stellar digging on this issue). His testimony is important to read for both sides of the debate. He says right now, waterboarding is unnecessary, but back then it was. He also says that waterboarding compromised our principles, but it saved American lives:

“What happens if we don’t waterboard a person, and we don’t get that nugget of information, and there’s an attack,” Kiriakou said. “I would have trouble forgiving myself.”

From a recent briefing on Capitol Hill:

GOP members on the Intelligence Committee on Thursday told The Hill in on-the-record interviews that they were informed that the controversial methods have led to information that prevented terrorist attacks.

When told of the GOP claims, Democrats strongly criticized the members who revealed information that was provided at the closed House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing. Democrats on the panel said they could not respond substantively, pointing out that the hearing was closed.

In the bowels of the Capitol Visitor Center, members of the panel gathered behind locked doors on Thursday morning to begin a series of hearings on the interrogation of terrorism suspects…

But Republicans on the panel said that not only did the use of interrogation techniques come up Thursday, but that the data shared about those techniques proved they had led to valuable information that in some instances prevented terrorist attacks…

“Democrats weren’t sure what they were going to get,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.), ranking Republican on the Intelligence panel, referring to information on the merits of enhanced interrogation techniques. “Now that they know what they’ve got, they don’t want to talk about it…”

“The hearing did address the enhanced interrogation techniques that have been much in the news lately,” [GOP Rep. Jon] Kline said, noting that he was intentionally choosing his words carefully in observance of the committee rules and the nature of the information presented.

“Based on what I heard and the documents I have seen, I came away with a very clear impression that we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots,” Kline said.

Allahpundit at Hotair comments:

Watch the goalposts move. First the left insisted that America doesn’t torture as a matter of simple morality, whether or not that means another round of crashing airplanes forcing office-dwellers to swan-dive off of skyscrapers. That one didn’t fly, so they shifted to the cagier argument that enhanced interrogation never, ever, ever, ever, evah works — ever — except that Cheney and Obama’s own DNI claim that it does, and now a majority of the public believes them. In fact, according to Gallup, Pelosi’s slo-mo meltdown over what she knew about waterboarding has left her credibility so thoroughly shot that she’s almost exactly as popular as Darth Cheney himself.

Note that no Democrat interviewed for the Hill’s piece disagrees with Kline’s conclusion, just that they’re pissed that he chose to say anything. Like Tom Maguire says, given that The One already published the details of our interrogation techniques by releasing the torture memos, what damage is done to national security by the GOP insisting that EIT works? There’s plenty of political damage done to the left, but surely angry Democrats’ only concern with leaks is how it complicates protecting America, no? Exit question: How exactly did the GOP congressmen who talked to the Hill reveal any more or less than Carl Levin did last week when he denied that those two memos Cheney wants declassified confirm that EIT is effective? Neither he nor the Republicans revealed any information beyond asserting whether it works or whether it doesn’t. Double standard, anyone?

In the debate on torture and waterboarding specifically, all the testimonies need to be weighed. As of now, I think the balance of evidence points to the techniques being useful, but not in all cases. It is unwise to say that because waterboarding didn’t work in a few cases, that it therefore never works, and we should just toss it.

All this is just prudential reasoning, though. I still haven’t analyzed whether waterboarding is torture, and if so, whether that means it is always impermissable.  That will be for the next post in the series.  You can access the next posts by clicking on the proper trackback links in the comments section.

This post continues the series I began previously on torture.

What is torture?

The United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) gives a definition in Article 1.1:

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

This is a start, but still it is pretty vague. What constitutes “severe pain or suffering”? Some people would label sleep deprivation as “severe pain and suffering,” while others scoff at such a notion. The point is that definition leaves much to be desired. Perhaps, at the end of the day, it boils down to the stereotypical definition of pornography–”I know it when I see it.”

I myself might not know exactly where the line is, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make key distinctions at all. As Albert Mohler points out, sleep deprivation and a slap in the face belong in another category entirely than being tied to a rack or having jumper cables attached to one’s nipples.

Mohler goes on:

Under certain circumstances, most morally sensitive persons would surely allow interrogators to yell at prisoners and to use psychological intimidation, sleep deprivation, and the removal of creature comforts for purposes of obtaining vital information. In increasingly serious cases, most would likely allow some use of pharmaceuticals and more intensive and manipulative psychological techniques. In the most extreme of conceivable cases, most would also allow the use of far more serious mechanisms of coercion – even what we would all agree should be labeled as torture.

A “Ticking Time Bomb”

I agree. Krauthammer supplies one of these cases, the famous “ticking time bomb” scenario. It has been mulled over time and time again, but just in case you haven’t heard, the thought experiment supposes that agents of the state hold a terrorist who knows about a hidden device that, if it goes off, will kill and harm countless individuals. Krauthammer argues that in this scenario, the use of extreme coercive measures would be justified not as a matter of punishment but only for the purpose of obtaining life saving information.

In this case, Krauthammer says, saving lives trumps government restraint, for the former is the greater good.

One critique that has been brought against this is “how realistic is the thought experiment?” Sounds fine for a “24″ season arc, but what about real life? In real life, it isn’t that clear cut. Do we have the right guy? How sure are we that he has the needed information? Is allowing extreme coercion in this instance, especially if sanctioned and codified by the state, put us on a greasy slope towards more heinous practices? As Christopher Hitchens notes,

Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Though I think he overstates things, his point is well taken: once fallen human beings get on a horse, it’s hard to get off. Our propensity for self-justification and breathtaking blindness looms large.

I am sympathetic to the slippery slope point made by Hitchens, and I agree that often things are not clear cut (how sure are we that this guy has useful intel?).

In the next post, I will continue to examine the issue of torture.  You can see that post by clicking on the proper trackback link in the comments section.

I’m hopelessly behind the news ticker. It usually takes me quite a while to think about and write a post on some issues. I try not to be too knee-jerk reactionary, and that, most often, means I don’t post on something until it has come and gone from the current events scene. Thus, I offer this series on torture, which was a hot topic a few months ago.

Then again, it is bound to come up again some time or later, so perhaps I’m in front of the news ticker. Actually, it was in the news a day or two ago. (Read the whole thing.  It is important.)

I should have posted on this long ago. I just wanted to do a lot of reading up to make sure I’m thinking carefully.

I’ve done a huge amount of reading on the matter, in fact. Justin Taylor, for instance, convened a symposium of key Catholic and Evangelical thinkers to make a response on the issue. The essays were very helpful in shaping my thoughts. Chris Tollefsen at The Public Discourse and Charles Krauthammer also wrote foundational pieces on torture. Though I think Krauthammer’s piece is better reasoned than Tollefsen’s, and even though Krauthammer wrote in 2005, both are good essays to consult.

The points: A) any conservative Christian thinker (heck, any liberal Christian thinker) needs to consult those resources, and b) no one can claim there is not morally serious, rigorous, appropriately nuanced thought from a conservative and Christian perspective on the subject of torture.

For a summary of the relevant “memos” (plus links), go here.

Tyranny?

First, I gotta get one thing off my chest from the get go. I sense that one side of this debate refuses to make crucial moral distinctions, preferring instead to sanctimoniously spout moral equivalencies like they are self-evidently true. For example, one of my friends said on Twitter, “We should prosecute those responsible torturing in Gitmo showing we are against tyranny.”

At first, I was a little intimidated by that statement, simply because I hadn’t thought much about the matter. But now, I have little patience for such words. Tyranny? Are you kidding me? You wanna see tyranny, go to Tehran right now and see what they do to people who protest the government. THAT’S tyranny.

Al Quaida tortures the bejeezus out of our guys, then beheads them. That strikes me as tyranny. Waterboarding a known terrorist five times in a controlled environment–tyranny? To suggest that these two are even remotely in the same boat by using the same word for them (Even if not the intent, the message is one of moral equivalence. If you don’t think the two are equivalent you need to be more precise and careful…even on Twitter.) is tomfoolery.

We waterboarded KSM and Zubaydah, two terrorists (Terrorists are not soldiers in uniform, since they attack citizens and make a mockery of wartime conventions. This doesn’t give our government carte blanche to do whatever–far from it–but it does bear mentioning. Also, I know some say AZ was only a minor AQ operative, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a terrorist.), a few times (not 183 times, which is an urban legend born out of a misunderstanding of the facts), in order to get information out of them. With both men, there were protocols in place in regards to the interrogation methods to which they were subjected. It was done in a controlled environment, and not by sadistic hearts bent on causing pain. Many who were involved in the interrogations had reservations about what was being done. Most were motivated by a desire to save American lives. This is not tyranny, not even close. Did the CIA cross the line? Perhaps. Should waterboarding be outlawed? Perhaps. Is it torture? Perhaps–more on all that later. But lets not twit about calling this “tyranny,” as if we’re in the same boat as dictators and terrorists themselves.

Even if you throw in the abuses at Abu Grhaib, which were heartbreaking and obviously gross deeds, it still isn’t tyranny. That was an aberration, not a sanctioned practice, and the soldiers responsible were prosecuted thoroughly.

Another example is here. These folks browbeat him just for posing the questions. Something makes me think they wouldn’t waste near as much ink denouncing human rights violations in Iran or China. We just gotta get past the rhetoric Patterico unveils.

The Other Side Needs to Quit Pretending Too

Second, some on the other side of the debate are guilty of knee-jerk reactionaryism (is that a word? Seven syllables…ma-y-an.) as well. As soon as somebody bucks the party line and questions the ethics of our interrogation methods of terrorists, they shout, “liberal ninny! You obviously don’t care about losting American lives!” These folk typically put too much priority on the effectiveness of the method. What is clear is that with AZ and KSM, our government produced a “fist of firsts,” and that alone means the utmost sober reflection is called for. We cannot blithely proceed simply because we’re in a “war on terror.” I am very uncomfortable with the “do whatever it takes to get the information we need” approach.

Both sides have a propensity to resort to emotional rhetorical flourishes, which is exactly what should be avoided. Both sides need to step back a pace or two, separate themselves from the politics of it, and really think, as much as possible, with disspassionate logic and cooler heads. Might be hard to do, but it needs to be done given the fact that this is so important.

Brushing Over Careful Distinctions

Third, many commentators go off the rails right from the start: they never actually define what torture is. They give no definition, then they simply call a certain act “torture,” implying that it is wrong. They let a word with heavy negative connotations do the bulk of the arguing. You can get away with that when talking about things like being shocked or having your fingernails pulled off, but in our case, this is a very sly, but underhanded way to go. One can take a particularist way of defining the term–starting with a clear-case, obvious example of torture, then gleaning a definition from that, followed by applying the definition to less-obvious cases–but one must formulate a definition before addressing the controversial cases that were the subject of so much talk a few months ago.

Here’s an example: most people just call waterboarding “torture,” therefore implying that it is morally impermissable or at least morally suspect. This begs a number of questions: is it torture? If so, why? Where do we draw the line and can that line be reasonably maintained?

Another example: many Christians cite Paul’s injunction to “let us not do evil that good may result,” implying that X act of coercion or torture (waterboarding, say) is evil. This is fair enough, but that presupposes that the act in question is, in fact, evil. It also leaves what is evil entirely undefined.

Darrell Cole, assistant professor of Religion at Drew University uses this kind of wording in his essay:

At first glance, the new threat that is the war on terror seems to offer the moral realists good reasons to begin the systematic use of torture on terrorists, though, again, the reasons are not as persuasive as they were during the Second World War or the cold war. In the former two wars we were fighting for the survival of Western Civilization. In the current war we simply want to spare ourselves the loss of a lot of lives—a noble cause, but not as noble as saving a civilization. The problem with this tactic for Christians, whether it be for the cause of Western Civilization or our own lives, is that Christians have always followed the apostle Paul and resisted attempts to justify doing evil for a good cause. For Christians, there are no “emergencies” that would justify moral acts displeasing to God. The refusal to do evil that good may come is a moral staple of classical Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic morality. (emphasis mine)

And again:

Christians have good reasons to distance themselves from the moral realism evidenced in Krauthammer’s essay. Nevertheless, the temptation to use a little evil on an evildoer can be overwhelming when a great deal is at stake. We may be tempted to count the cost on our conscience and try to figure out how much evil we can live with—how much evil we are willing to avert our eyes from—in order to save a society that we hold so dear. When we are tempted to count the moral costs, we often like to convince ourselves that we are only going to allow this particular evil to be done only once in this case of emergency. When our own lives are at stake, we do not fear the slippery slope. We tell ourselves that we will not become people who regularly do evil simply because we allow it in special cases, nor will we become barbarians simply because we practice a little barbarism for a good cause.

While he makes some decent points about the possibility of a slippery slope, notice that he simply lumps all coercion into one category called “torture,” never defines the word, and simply calls torture evil without argument. It is sloppy thinking to object to nebulous torture without getting specific.

Krauthammer uses the same language, therefore opening the way for Cole to brush over careful distinctions. He states that torture may sometimes be a moral duty, but in elsewhere he says, “there is no denying the monstrous evil that is any form of torture.” This is confusing. Daniel Heimbach, commenting on Krauthammer’s use of language, points this out, but gives a more charitable interpretation of Krauthammer in the end: “Coherence requires that we either say that torture is always a ‘monstrous evil’ with no exceptions, or that torture, while evil in most circumstances, is not evil all the time—that there are situations when torture is not truly evil. This later position is what I think Krauthammer actually means.”

Moreover, isn’t refusing to protect innocent lives evil? If “torture” can yield information which leads to significantly saving innocent lives, how, then, can Cole call undefined torture “evil,” and say that is a reason against its practice, but leave the the evil of refusal to protect totally unexamined? Perhaps, in the end, waterboarding is torture, and perhaps it is still morally impermissable, even if it can protect innocent lives, but Cole leaves this wholly unanswered.

In the next post, I will continue to discuss a definition of torture, before making some other points.