Against Waterboarding
I do not believe that the United States should have a policy of using waterboarding to extract information from captured combatants in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Let me explain why.
Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish.
Restraints on war-fighting behavior can be justified by strategic considerations, ethical considerations, or some mixture of the two. In practice, actual decisions are always motivated by a mixture.
I assume that only a true ideologue would dispute that there is at least some possibility of obtaining at least some militarily-useful information if we applied this technique to many captured combatants. The fact that it keeps being reinvented or rediscovered in various wars, and used repeatedly over time in these conflicts by troops that want to win, is excellent circumstantial evidence that it provides at least some tactical benefits. It is very hard to assess rationally how much incremental tactical benefit it has provided, and by extension, could realistically be expected to provide in the future, since it is generally conducted in secret, is part of a broader intelligence and action program and many of its successes would presumably be calamities that were avoided.
Are there strategic benefits from such restraint that could more than offset any tactical benefits created by waterboarding? As I’ve tried to highlight in a previous post, this is a hard question to answer. Society is complex, so tactical efficacy does not necessarily imply strategic efficacy. What happens to military morale if we apply this technique? Will global support for U.S. objectives be lessened? The list of such realistic, if difficult to answer, questions is endless.
Are there compelling ethical reasons not to do this? As I’ve tried to highlight in a previous post, this is also a hard question to answer. More precisely, it is a question that: (i) is hard for me to answer categorically for all realistic wartime situations through the use of abstract moral principles, and (ii) seems like a question with an obvious answer to many people, but unfortunately, lots of those people think the obvious answer is “yes’, and lots of others think the obvious answer is “no”.
The simplified case that waterboarding is categorically evil goes something like this.
“Applying extreme coercion to a human being when he is entirely in your power is inherently evil. This is why, like most universally-recognized evils, torture is done in dark, hidden places. Those who skillfully do interrogations on our behalf – doing difficult work in the worst conditions – have refused to waterboard. You sit in safety, unwilling to actually pour water down the throat of a human while he gags, struggles and thrashes in agony strapped to a table 36 inches from you; instead you write words that egg on the worst among us. If you can not see that torture is wrong, you live in a different moral universe than I. You’re a monster.”
The simplified case that waterboarding is not inherently evil goes something like this.
“We live in a violent world. While there must be limits to what we do to defend ourselves, simply describing the unpleasantness of waterboarding doesn’t cut it. We must do lots of terrible things to other human beings during war in order to prevent yet-worse things from happening. Inducing fear in a manner carefully calculated not to produce physical harm is not torture, and is very, very much less severe than most things done in war. Your supposedly refined moral sentiments are vanities; failure to consider bad versus worse consequences of our actions is the real abdication of moral reasoning in an environment of extreme violence. You live in a bubble that must be protected by methods that you find distasteful, without confronting the fact that if we were to follow your scruples, evil men would rule and do far worse things. You’re a child.”
This deep moral disagreement of course creates the practical political problem of how to reconcile these conflicting views. Beyond this problem, however, I think that any thoughtful person who aggressively advocates for one position or the other surely asks himself in quiet moments: “Am I certain I’m right?” The waterboarding critic asks himself “Am I being naive?”; the waterboarding defender, “Am I losing my soul?”. Nobody’s experience of life is comprehensive. Many, many people hold each position. These facts are presumably enough to give any thoughtful person pause, even if they will not voice these doubts publicly.
So, if the deeply-entangled questions of strategic effectiveness and ethics both have non-obvious answers – and if we need to decide, not just wring our hands endlessly – how should we answer them? As I’ve also said in the prior posts, I think the starting point for our thinking should be experience and tradition.
Here are the modern conflicts in which, to my knowledge, waterboarding is believed to have been used as a widespread technique to gain intelligence from captured combatants over a sustained period and area of operations by non-US powers:
WWII-Era Japan
The German Gestapo
Various Latin American regimes (~1960 – ~1980)
Cambodian Khmer Rouge (1975-1979)
The French in the Algerian War (1954 – 1962)
The British in the Cyprus emergency (1950s)
Do you notice a pattern? These are either dictatorial regimes, or actions of basically democratic governments in arenas of imperial border occupation. For a democracy, waterboarding is a corruption of empire.
Here’s another pattern: Britain, France, Germany and Japan have long, proud histories full of enormous accomplishment. The episodes listed here are, for all of these countries, far from their proudest moments. As I said in a prior post, while correlation is not causality, there does not seem to be a clear relationship that indicates the tactical benefits of waterboarding are associated with the conditions of strategic victory.
To my knowledge, there are two such periods of extensive use of waterboarding as a widespread technique to gain intelligence from captured combatants over a sustained period and area of operations by the United States prior to the GWOT:
The occupation of the Philippines
The Vietnam War
For all of the individual heroism, honor and ingenuity displayed in both of these conflicts, I don’t believe that either is thought of as a moment of triumph for the United States.
The idea that tactical efficacy doesn’t necessarily produce strategic efficacy can seem very abstract. But these examples point to an illustrative example of one way this could work. Restraining ourselves from using this technique and others like it can make it more obviously difficult to conduct limited wars in third-world countries. This may lead to behavior at the national level that reduces empire-building, and therefore enables the society to compete more successfully on the world stage in the long-run. I’m not asserting that I’ve proved this; merely that this is a plausible illustration of one of many ways that denying ourselves a tactical advantage might serve to create strategic advantages that may or may not be perceived rationally at the time.
But doesn’t this historical record show that we – for good or ill – actually have a tradition of deploying waterboarding as an instrument of state power in such situations that seem more analogous to the GWOT than does Patton’s army rolling through Europe? Not exactly.
Waterboarding was carried out in the field in the Philippines, but here is an extract from a cable sent by Elihu Root, Secretary of War, to a field general that was made public in the New York Times on April 15, 1902:
Yesterday before the Senate Committee on Philippine Affairs Sergt. Charles R. Riley and Private William Lewis Smith of the Twenty-sixth Volunteer Infantry testified that that form of torture known as the water cure was administered to the Presidente of the town of Igbarras, Iloilo Province, Island of Panay, by a detachment of the Eighteenth United States Infantry; commanded by Lieut. Arthur L. Conger, under orders of Major Edwin F. Glenn, then Captain Twenty-fifth Infantry, and that Capt. and Assistant Surgeon Palmer Lyon, at that time a contract Surgeon, was present to assist them. The officers named or such of them as are found to be responsible for the act will be tried therefor by court-martial.
…
It is believed that the violations of law and humanity, of which these cases, if true, are examples [note: this refers to two cases, only one of which is the Glenn “water cure” case], will prove to be few and occasional and not to characterize the conduct of the army generally in the Philippines; but the fact that any such acts of cruelty and barbarity appear to have been done indicates the necessity of a most thorough, searching, and exhaustive investigation under the general charges preferred by Gov. Gardener, and you will spare no effort in the investigation already ordered under these charges to uncover every such case which may have occurred and bring the offenders to justice.
Major Glenn was found guilty and punished.
On January 21, 1968 The Washington Post had a picture on the front page of a U.S. soldier supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were covered by a cloth. This soldier was court-martialed within one month and drummed out of the army. Waterboarding was declared to be illegal for American troops in Vietnam.
The record is clear. Formal military and civilian authorities have refused to countenance this practice in both conflicts, and prosecuted those suspected of doing it.
Of course, this story is a little too neat. Major Glenn was given a fine and one-month suspension. More importantly, the practice was believed to be widespread in both conflicts, but there were apparently only a fairly small number of convictions for it. In private correspondence, President Roosevelt clearly indicated while he considered the water cure to be unacceptable, he thought of it as far less severe than other infractions. In neither conflict were the authorities willing to make rooting out waterboarding the overriding objective of operations. But the prosecutions, policies and condemnation do not appear to have been merely public relations by political actors, followed by a nod and a wink to an organized torture apparatus. The American tradition has been to condemn and prosecute waterboarding, even in the most savage conflicts, and attempt to stamp it out, accepting the practical limits of control of soldiers in distant combat.
I stand with Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and the United States military, and with a 100-year tradition of our nation, against the specific practice of waterboarding captured combatants as strategically ineffective and morally repugnant. It is beneath us; beneath our dignity, and beneath our enlightened self-interest.
As per our history, this doesn’t mean that this should be the number one priority of the U.S. government, and it doesn’t mean that such a stance is without contingency. If terrorist forces were successfully detonating a large thermonuclear warhead somewhere within the continental United States every 12 – 18 months, and waterboarding captured combatants offered a realistic possibility of stopping this, I would reluctantly, though immediately, support its use. I strongly suspect that about 99% of Americans would agree, as would Roosevelt and Root, if we could ask them.
This also doesn’t mean that I think waterboarding is always wrong. What should a U.S. citizen, military or civilian, do if faced with a situation in which he or she is confident that a disaster will occur that can only be avoided by waterboarding a captured combatant? Do it, and then surrender to the authorities and plead guilty to the offense. It is then the duty of the society to punish the offender in accordance with the law. We would rightly respect the perpetrator while we punish him. Does this seem like an inhuman standard? Maybe, but then again, I don’t want anybody unprepared for enormous personal sacrifice waterboarding people in my name.
But consider, not a theoretical scenario of repeated nuclear strikes on the United States, or a tactical “ticking time bomb” scenario, but the real situation we face as a nation. We have suffered several thousand casualties from 9/11 through today. Suppose we had a 9/11-level attack with 3,000 casualties per year every year. Each person reading this would face a probability of death from this source of about 0.001% each year. A Republic demands courage – not foolhardy and unsustainable “principle at all costs”, but reasoned courage – from its citizens. The American response should be to find some other solution to this problem if the casualty rate is unacceptable. To demand that the government “keep us safe” by doing things out of our sight that we have refused to do in much more serious situations so that we can avoid such a risk is weak and pathetic. It is the demand of spoiled children, or the cosseted residents of the imperial city. In the actual situation we face, to demand that our government waterboard detainees in dark cells is cowardice.
(Cross-posted to The Corner)
Nice, Jim. It seems to me that the description of your approach as taking experience and tradition as a “starting point” is crucial – for you are, of course, moving on from that beginning to do some weighty theorizing, and that is just as it should be. In any case, a very nice illustration of the Manzi Paradigm in action.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 06:05 AM · #
A well-reasoned post.
Still, I’m taken aback at both the need to go back through all of this (and decide that torture is indeed bad) and the late date at which it’s happening.
— Steve C · Apr 29, 07:43 AM · #
Jim,
I wonder if you have seen this paper — “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in US Courts”, by Evan Wallach:
http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/wallach_drop_by_drop_draft_20061016.pdf
— vimothy · Apr 29, 09:31 AM · #
And Jim,
I think you are missing one of the key points in the torture debate. It is not simply a case of tactical benefits vs. strategic costs, but tactical benefits vs. tactical costs. The idea that the proponents of torture are hard headed pragmatists, whereas the proponents of human rights and the law are woolly-minded idealists, is simply not true. Of course, it is a line that the pro-torture side cling to with increasing desperation, because if it turns out that waterboarding really was little help, then its advocates are merely grinning, clapping idiots, inflicting terrible suffering for no material gain. I mean, remember when all claims said that KSM broke after 25-30 seconds of waterboarding? “It was like flipping a switch”. Sounded almost acceptable at that point. At every point on the curve since then, the revelations are worse, the lies become more hollow, the ostensibly efficacy of waterboarding becomes less and less believable. 183 times in one month?
You also need to consider the political process. Given waterboarding’s stated (assumed) tactical efficiency, isn’t strange that the decision making was top-down, not bottom up? Isn’t it strange that the people who developed it were CIA contractors with no experience in intelligence gathering or interrogation (and no scientific proof of the efficacy of the techniques they pioneered)? Isn’t it strange that expert interrogators like Ali Soufan wanted nothing to do with it? Isn’t it strange that this was developed by an agency with no experience in running prisons or interrogating prisoners?
So allow me to recommend something else to read: “Torture and Democracy”, by Prof Darius Rejali, a patient, academic historical and sociological study of the use of torture. What Rejali finds is not that torture has no benefits on a tactical level, but that the costs far outweigh them: the false positives, the institutional degradation, the impossibility of regulation… I won’t spoil the ending, but my friend, “tactical benefits vs. strategic costs” is a cheap trick of the N*O crowd, meant to provide stealth justification for torture, whilst half acknowledging its dubious moral and legal basis.
— vimothy · Apr 29, 10:12 AM · #
Your historical examples are all wrong. I don’t have time to go into them with any depth (read Rejali!), but to take the example of France in Algeria (and to quote my response from another thread, “The Battle of Algiers turned only after the officer responsible for the torture of prisoners, Paul Aussaresses, was replaced by Col. Yves Godard, who actually understood intelligence work – his network of informants gave France the edge it needed.”
Even the WWII-era Japanese fascists explicitly recognised the uselessness of torture for the purposes of intelligence gathering. We know this from captured field manuals.
— vimothy · Apr 29, 10:43 AM · #
Peter was right. The not-inherently-evil argument sounds a lot like the Jessep argument.
— Xelgaex · Apr 29, 11:48 AM · #
John /Steve C:
Thanks.
vimothny:
I have read Rejali’s book (it’s the source for the identification of the British in Cyprus as users of waterboarding, for one thing).
I don’t consider myself woolly-headed, and I am attacking the use of waterboarding in this post.
The decision-makign process to use this technique was not, to my knowledge top-down in the Philippines or Vietnam (among other places). It required direct contravention of established rules in the GWOT.
Dude, take yes for an answer :)
Xelgaex:
Yes, it does (though it is not identical). There’s a reason that this scene is so powerful. I’ll note that I made (or, I guess, tried to make) clear in the post that I think both this and the contrary argument about the inherent and obvious status of waterboarding to be not arguments that I support.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 29, 12:40 PM · #
Jim,
I realise that you are “against waterboarding”. I know that we share the conviction that torture is wrong, and I have a lot of respect for you as a writer (I wouldn’t even be commenting otherwise). The problem is the unnecessary dichotomy between tactical vs strategic utility, a formulation that adopts the framework of the debate that the torture apologists put forward. The operational dichotomy (really, di-polarity) is tactical benefit vs. tactical cost, one which I take to be addressed very powerfully by Rejali. What are the total consequences of torture for the purposes of intelligence gathering on the tactical level? I’m impressed that you have read Rejali, but am puzzled as to why you continue to write as though the tactical benefits of torture are so clear cut when it is obvious from his research that they are not.
On the policy drivers of torture, I consider it case closed that the orders came from the very top (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, et al) in the GWOT. Efficacy was never the issue (indeed, the creators of the torture programme, two psychologists contracted to the CIA, have no empirical proof of its efficacy, no substantive theoretical framework that explains its mechanisms, and have no experience in intelligence gathering or interrogation), rather it was ideology and pressure. If efficacy was the desired characteristic, why was the CIA involved? Why were Mitchell and Jessen involved?
— vimothy · Apr 29, 01:09 PM · #
vimothy:
Thanks for the compliment.
I don’t think I came close to asserting that tactical efficacy is “clear cut”. I said that it was very hard to assess, but that there is ““at least some possibility of osme useful information”. As informative as Rejali’s book is, I don’t consider him to be ablke to offer a definitive take on its effectiveness.
I don’t know what anybody’s motivation for action, so I try to avoid commenting on it. I’ll do that in the case of the GWB administration on this subject. I don’t think “using the CIA to do it” is good evidence that the motivation was other than effectiveness, as I can think of many reasons for using the CIA for this purpose if my motivation were effectiveness.
bq.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 29, 01:16 PM · #
But of course it would need to do more than that; at the very least, it would have to be able to produce more useful information than could have been obtained otherwise. I know that you see this, Jim, but the prevailing conviction among the pro-torture crowd – cf. the reaction to those remarks of Dennis Blair – seems to be that we can set the bar much lower. As Poulos put it, a million monkeys with a million waterboards will give us some useful information … the tactical question centers on whether they give us the most of it, and then (of course) whether the downside of whatever extra junk they give us doesn’t outweigh the upside of that extra useful stuff.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 01:52 PM · #
P.S. Any reason I don’t see this over at NRO, Jim?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 01:53 PM · #
John — Exactly!
— vimothy · Apr 29, 02:00 PM · #
Bravo.
Well done.
The simplest for me to think about this is……if we should torture in service of Machiavellian pragmatism and jackbauer scenarios why shouldn’t we rape in service to those same memes?
What is the Aristotelian/Thomist difference between rape and torture deployed as institutionlized methods of extracting “high value intell”?
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 02:01 PM · #
I don’t see it at NRO either.
>:(
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 02:29 PM · #
VOILA!
it magically appears.
:)
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 02:51 PM · #
Very nicely done, Jim. That’s a keeper.
One thing I found interesting. Not only do you start with tradition, after your long abstract forays into the woods of moral reasoning you’ve returned to tradition — in your language: “a moment of triumph,” “corruption of empire,” “not their proudest moments” — these are borderline. But dignity, courage, cowardice, spoiled children, weak and pathetic — wielding these terms in moral argument is as old as the hills. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Playing devil’s advocate, one is not necessarily a weak and pathetic coward to think the military should use these techniques in deep dark cells. Who else is in a position to do this kind of thing? Johnny Mainstreet isn’t likely to capture a terrorist mastermind, and he hasn’t the institutional reach to give effect to any intelligence gleaned from interrogation. And yet Johnny Mainstreet is who the terrorists want to kill.
How would you address an “I am Spartacus” moment among Johnny Mainstreets who think we should use waterboarding on captured terrorist masterminds? If each Johnny pledges to be willing to see it done himself, not gladly, but resignedly? Would that be cowardice, or would it be courageous?
Of course, this is all hypothetical. If there’s one thing this debate has taught us, it’s to be wary of the looking glass — and its bottomless depths.
— Sargent · Apr 29, 02:58 PM · #
“lots of those people think the obvious answer is ‘yes’, and lots of others think the obvious answer is ‘no’.”
Perhaps some anti-torture advocates think that the arguments employed to justify the actually existing torture program are obviously flawed. In practice I find that those who argue for waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” simply assert that we are at war, and perhaps note that the enemy does not wear a uniform, etc. This is probably because they believe, as Kristol said on Fox News, that “this is not a time for reflection.” Your attempt to fill in their position with moral reflection is therefore artificial.
Focusing on the case actually presented for torture and near-torture, as opposed to the best possible case, can admittedly make the argument too easy for an anti-torture absolutist. Yet a dismissal of moral reasoning was at the center for the case, as it actually existed, for the torture program that actually existed, and the secrecy surrounding it.
That said, Jim, I hope this post does something to discourage the recent decision in some circles to treat you as the love-child of Ann Coulter and John Yoo.
— Aaron · Apr 29, 02:59 PM · #
The lesson is that all our moral terms – with the possible exception of “rights”, maybe – are like this; cf. Anscombe on ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 03:12 PM · #
I was being coy. ;)
— Sargent · Apr 29, 03:53 PM · #
Being the resident anti-anti-waterboarding gadfly, I just wanted to say that this is a really good argument, Jim, and clarifies a lot of what you were trying to say in earlier posts. Contrary to those who are appalled that we “still need to make the case against torture,” the beauty of this post is that unlike every other anti-waterboarding argument I have seen lately, it doesn’t beg the question. Relying on a priori assertions that waterboarding is torture is not an argument, but you manage to make an anti-waterboarding without such non-arguments, which is refreshing.
Am I convinced? Somewhat. I think you conflate the water cure and waterboarding a little much. And correlation is not cause, as you observe, not to mention that for now, contra your previous examples, I think we’re winning the war. Still, it’s a pretty damning correlation.
— Blar · Apr 29, 04:30 PM · #
And what about, say, explaining that it’s torture?
“If I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned.”
— John Schwenkler · Apr 29, 04:34 PM · #
You seem to be arguing that the appropriateness of waterboarding is frequently context-dependent. Does that mean you’d oppose the prosecution of complicit officials who approved the technique in a highly-charged, post-9/11 security environment?
— Will · Apr 29, 05:13 PM · #
“The fact that it keeps being reinvented or rediscovered in various wars, and used repeatedly over time in these conflicts by troops that want to win, is excellent circumstantial evidence that it provides at least some tactical benefits.”
Or maybe some people just think torture is cool. It’s the ultimate expression of power over another, and there is a whole branch of sexual deviance based upon it (although the main thing that separates fantasy torture from real torture is consent). I’m not arguing that torturers are sadists (which is almost a tautology), but that there is a brutal sadistic component in each of us. Arguments for torture are rationales for thoughts and behaviors the pro-torture faction really don’t want to admit to even themselves.
I’ve been reading some of Orwell’s essays of late. Of particular interest to anyone following the torture scandal is his essay, “On Nationalism”. And of course, if one has the time, it is well worth re-reading 1984, particularly the torture scenes with O’Brien. A nice quote: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
— Marcos El Malo · Apr 29, 05:35 PM · #
Jim, sorry if it appeared that I was portraying that view as the view that you actually hold. Your post succeeded in making clear what your position is. Some times my being succinct leaves too much up to interpretation.
— Xelgaex · Apr 29, 05:49 PM · #
It is not really a question of knowing the motivation of the Administration (the weakest of all arguments deployed by the torture apologists), but of tracing the trajectory of the policy. If we imagine that the desire to use the most efficient method of interrogation drove the policy, and not some nebulous meeting of ideology and the id, what would we expect to see? We would expect to see some kind of process whereby a conclusion could be reached that torture really is the most efficacious method of intelligence gathering. We would see the results of this process in the post hoc rationalisations and justifications of torture made by those responsible for the policy. We would read about it in magazine articles on CIA black sites and GITMO. We would find empirical work by the CIA’s psychologist contractors. We would find evidence that the policy was driven, or at least advocated, before the fact, by practitioners. But we do not. Moreover, the agency given responsibility for the torture of detainees is relatively inexperienced in interrogation and detention.
You can say that there are plausible reasons why the CIA might be given the task of torturing prisoners that are not incompatible with the efficacy hypothesis, but I’m struggling to think of what they might be. In fact, most of the reasons I can think of for handing the interrogation of AQ detainees to the CIA have more to do with the already established desire of the Administration to subject them to torture, and the obvious (to the Administration) illegality and immorality of that course of action. Why the CIA? Because they can do it in the dark.
— vimothy · Apr 29, 06:34 PM · #
Haven’t read all the comments, but just wanted to say great work Jim. I disagree with the basic conclusion, but you’ve made your case with class.
I agree that a “keep us safe no matter what” stance(or according to a calculus oblvious to proportionate risk-taking)is cowardly, but I deny that’s really what our policy has been, even if it has been defended by some in this way. (And do note that at some point the Presidential cultivation of “non-cowardly” and “not beneath us” defense is going to come up against the Presidential oath to protect the nation “to the best of my ability.” That tension is there.)
I agree we should never let troops do waterboarding, but your highlighting the historical instances of our trying our own guys for this doesn’t directly address the highly unusual and highly defined instances for suspected Al-Q operatives. In an otherwise commendably careful peice, your gliding over this flagrant conflation of two quite different things gives one pause.
BTW, I’m perfectly open to the “we NOW know the left here and abroad will so demagogue the slightest use of coercive interrogation that it is better to forswear it in all but the most extreme (i.e., nuke-like) situations,” or even to the argument that Bush should have known this prior. Your argument, of course, is that it was bad policy to begin with, and not only for those reasons of political blow-back. Your next task, I think, will be to lay out whether Bush administration officials should be tried in U.S. courts for the policy they adopted and implemented. At least you understand that the judgment of the policy is distinct from judging whether a bad policy was also criminal(i.e., what does the law say), and further disctint from the question of whether it is good policy for the Obama administration to pursue prosecutions when the present evidence is not strong. Since you don’t seem like one given to indulging dangerous incoherence of the international law route, I omit that from the possibilities.
I do think part of the rhetorical success of your argument here, as opposed to other posts, is that the focus is not on proving that waterboading is or isn’t Torture. I wasn’t offended by, but was not a big fan of, your earlier posts about torture 1 and 2, for instance. Far better to say that waterboarding is on the disputed borderline between torture and interrogation. The relative absence of the T word in this piece makes your argument a better one, one I can respect and wrestle with.
Finally, with your metaphorical sense of “call” in mind, I strenuously deny that the defenders of the Bush interrogation policy call its critics “child” as often or as venomously as those critics call, and demand that everyone else call, its defenders “monster.” Not even close, and you surely know, Mr. Manzi, that in the eyes of certain virtual mobs the badge of “but he came out against waterboarding” will only momentarily befuddle them.
But still, your piece gives one hope for the future of this debate.
— Carl Scott · Apr 29, 08:04 PM · #
It seems like we have such a long list of arguments against torture that if this isn’t obvious I don’t see how anything could be.
You’re right that torture correlates with either strategic failure or tyranny, may be harmful to morale, doesn’t seem merited by the situation, and should not be practiced by anyone unwilling to make personal sacrifice.
vimothy and Schweknler are right that the tactical value is dubious
And I think there are other arguments—that human beings will always be biased towards solutions that seem to put them in “control”, or that any institution that allows itself to torture can easily fool itself into thinking that torture is a useful tool.
So we’ve got like five or six independent arguments against torture, and we still haven’t even touched the fundamental immorality of it. Can we call it obvious yet? I mean, if you went back to the early 19th century slavery would still be controversial. If you go to Japan the Rape of Nanking is still controversial. There are probably a lot of Americans who think prison rape is good because it deters crime.
You’re right that we shouldn’t just say “it’s obvious” and leave it at that. We should go on to explain exactly why torturing and/or raping prisoners is obviously wrong, completely different in kind from ordinary coercion and violence by the state, by the overwhelming evidence of ethical logic, historical evidence, tactics and strategy. This is controversial not because of intellectual difficulty, but because evil is extremely tempting.
— Consumatopia · Apr 29, 08:21 PM · #
Exactly how big a ticking bomb has to be before we should violate prohibitions against waterboarding, torture, and rape of detainees is not obvious. In quieter moments I consider the possibility of my own naivete.
That waterboarding is an instance of torture and that torture is in the same class of illegitimate force as rape is quite obvious. There’s nothing to consider here.
— Consumatopia · Apr 29, 09:02 PM · #
/giggles
I find it fascinating that at least three of us believed NRO was going to censor Dr. Manzi’s post.
:)
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 10:11 PM · #
And…Consumatopia is right.
I have, actually, been called a naive child on the torture issue.
I did, actually, argue Alyosha’s answer in Russian Lit.
Torture is so grievous an insult to the human condition, so immoral and so deeply and profoundly wrong , that I marvel that the perps that designed and implemented this horrorshow, this slur on the name of a Great Republic, don’t either just curl up and die from shame or fall on their dishonored swords.
— matoko_chan · Apr 29, 10:21 PM · #
“But consider, not a theoretical scenario of repeated nuclear strikes on the United States, or a tactical “ticking time bomb” scenario, but the real situation we face as a nation. We have suffered several thousand casualties from 9/11 through today. Suppose we had a 9/11-level attack with 3,000 casualties per year every year. Each person reading this would face a probability of death from this source of about 0.001% each year. A Republic demands courage – not foolhardy and unsustainable “principle at all costs”, but reasoned courage – from its citizens. The American response should be to find some other solution to this problem if the casualty rate is unacceptable. To demand that the government “keep us safe” by doing things out of our sight that we have refused to do in much more serious situations so that we can avoid such a risk is weak and pathetic. It is the demand of spoiled children, or the cosseted residents of the imperial city. In the actual situation we face, to demand that our government waterboard detainees in dark cells is cowardice.”
Your math-is not a good analogy for the governance of people.
Math is black and white-throw in the variable of people and you lose these tidy categories.
In other words your conclusion is….
Well somehow you are of the “belief” that the electorate of America would just sit there and accept an attack a year with oh about a 3,000 dead and that we could just wait it out like Attila’s time of the year.
The Republic would survive those kinds of assaults.
What rarified sheltered world do you live in-because it sounds very much like projection is going on in your conclusion.
Your historic examples are well- at best selective the proof amounts not to much.
The world has changed much from the examples you “selected”. The Information Age has changed warfare and aids the asymmetric nature of terrorists, your examples seem to illustrate that you fail to see that.
— Roanoke · Apr 30, 12:16 AM · #
I have a question, Dr. Manzi.
Why was it classified?
Isn’t part of the whole NRO schitck that this is a deterrent? That we had the nads to do them like they wanted to do us?
Weren’t the baddies supposed to see our sterling resolve?
I think it was classified because they were ashamed and didn’t want anyone to find out that America, that sanctimonious self-righteous prig and ceaseless holier-than-thou meddler was torturing.
— matoko_chan · Apr 30, 01:07 AM · #
Of course not. We would fight like hell. One 9/11 a year would be a sufficient level of violence that we could not simply sit there and accept it. We would restart the draft, overwhelm AfPak with troops and robot drones, absolutely boycott all Mid East oil, secure our vulnerabilities (cockpit doors), bulk up our first responders, train millions in Central Asian languages to better monitor and infiltrate the enemy, close borders, form alliances, provide assistance to any legitimate government confronted with disorder or poverty, and prepare to invade any nation that refuses to crush terror or open nuke/chem/bio sites up for inspection.
As the home of the world’s most powerful military, one of the world’s largest economies, with an intelligent and determined population, there would be quite a few things on the list of things to do before we got around to shredding the Constitution, forgetting the rule of law, disregarding ethics, and abandoning our humanity.
Hopefully we wouldn’t have to do all that, as it would bring us about as close to being a command economy as World War II. Admittedly, none of this would be fun. It would be much easier to just build a naked pyramid out of some dudes, chomp a cigar, snap some photos, and call it a day. That might give you a sense of satisfaction that you had “shown” them who was boss, but all it would really show is our weakness.
— Consumatopia · Apr 30, 01:43 AM · #
I hadn’t realized it before, but as you rightly describe it, the anti- and pro-torture arguments neatly fall into the deontological/consequentialist categories of reasoning I learned about in my ethics and public policy class (so long ago!). Your argument is a nice way out of the problem. Excellent post.
— Ed Baird · Apr 30, 11:51 AM · #
“Admittedly, none of this would be fun. It would be much easier to just build a naked pyramid out of some dudes, chomp a cigar, snap some photos, and call it a day. That might give you a sense of satisfaction that you had “shown” them who was boss, but all it would really show is our weakness.”
Yeah…what about Abu Ghraib? One of those scapegoated soldiers is still in prison. GW got up and said “we dont torture, these guyz are rogues and bad soldiers”. Wonder what they think of their CinC now?
That’s why we need a truth commission.
Cheney, fall on your sword while you still can.
/spit
— matoko_chan · Apr 30, 12:24 PM · #
Unless you’re the sort of person who likes to imagine our former vice-president committing suicide, but who nonetheless probably loudly insists on being regarded as a Lover of Peace and as a Patriotic American, you might want to read Clifford May on the topic: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGIzZTEzMDcxZmNkMmQyMGE3OWEyZDIwY2YwNTBhYjE=
— Carl Scott · Apr 30, 12:44 PM · #
“Unless you’re the sort of person who likes to imagine our former vice-president committing suicide”
I am the sort of person that voted for Bush in 2004 and foolishly imagined our elected leadership subscribed to some modicum of honor, truth, and electoral responsibility.
A naive child in other words.
— matoko_chan · Apr 30, 01:22 PM · #
And strategically , torture apologia is going to hurt you badly with my cohort, the naive child cohort.
— matoko_chan · Apr 30, 02:11 PM · #
I’m not, but if the vice-president had any decency, he would be one of those people.
I hadn’t seen the May/Stewart interview. I read that first. Then I watched the unedited video. I didn’t notice any point May made in that fantasy that he didn’t also make in real time—in fact, I think he did a better job (albeit somewhat less polite) arguing for it in real time. And by the end of the video May seemed kind of pleased with his performance.
I can see why he’d prefer a version of the interview where Stewart didn’t get to talk, though.
— Consumatopia · Apr 30, 02:23 PM · #
What can you say about that interview? It has the definite air of demented genius. My favourite part is this:
JS: C’mon, Cliff. You’re trying to tell me waterboarding is not torture?
CM: It can be — it certainly was when the Japanese did it.
— vimothy · Apr 30, 04:22 PM · #
More nauseating pseudo-intellectual sophistry from these right-wingers, who used to pride themselves on moral clarity—-as in “lying about having an extramarital affair with a consenting adult is WRONG.”
Now they have to make lists and tote up points on their abacus to decide whether it is OK to use torture as official policy.
It reminds me of the endless blah-blah dicussions of left wing factions I heard in the early 1970s at university, about whom to eliminate, come the Revolution.
Look guys: that list of countries at the start of this thread, the ones who started relying on torture to keep outlying bits of their empires under their heels—you know, Britain, France, Germany, Japan? Where are those empires now, huh? GONE. Do the old countries have much remaining influence in the former colonies? It varies, from sort of to none.
And in three of them, the establishment of torture as official policy was followed by utter governmental collapse. Japan and Germany were occupied, France abandoned Algeria, torture-prone elements of the French military attempted a coup d’etat and tried to assasinate DeGaulle (the day of the jackal), and the Fourth Republic fell.
Britain managed to avoid the worst of that, but emerged from its Cyprus and Suez misadventures as a wheezing has-been on the world stage.
And when you look at everyday life in the halls of the torturers, in each case you come face to face with the banality of evil administered by bureaucracy: records of who was interrogated by whom, how, and for how long, entries dated and signed, and sometimes taped or filmed.
Please get your minds around some simple historical facts. The recent 14 yr domination by right wing ideologues of Congress, plus the 8 year reign of Cheney/Bush and their henchmen, plus the continuing control of the Supreme Court by conservative activist judges, has broken both the bankbook and the reputation of the US. The fallback on torture as policy, and the mind boggling attempts to defend it by Cheney and the right wing hacks are a sign of weakness, not strength. They KNEW what they were doing was illegal, so they had their bought and paid for lawyers gin up “research” with pre determined “findings.” They KNEW what they had done was repulsive and wrong, which is why they had the videotapes of the water boarding sessions destroyed, and why they refuse to answer questions about the 100+ detainees who died in custody. They KNEW the US public would be revolted by Abu Ghraib, which is why they pinned all the blame on small fish, sending the dim bulb Lynndie England and grinning goofball Graner to prison, and demoting, reassigning, or force retiring anyone else who knew the truth and might blab believably.
The inside the beltway journalist crowd don’t want anything too disturbing to happen, so they are against commissions or prosecution. Once upon a time, you know, back during Watergate, reporters and their editors thought it was their job to sniff out wrongdoing. Now, they are afraid they won’t be invited to exclusive dinners and might lose the access they need to run up their bloated salaries.
The Obama administration is juggling 8 crises at once, and is worried about the political backwash of exposing high officials of the previous administration to prosecution or even investigation and public shame.
I personally think this stink bomb is going to blow one way or another. The discovery that KSM was waterboarded 183 times in the month before the Iraq invasion exposes the lie we were told “oh it was only once, twice, he caved and gave us crucial information.” And there is more coming, drip by drip. There might be a truth commission, much the easiest approach. But it involves straight admissions of wrongdoing. There could be prosecutions, but those are really scary, ooo, Cheney might end up in jail, oo thr shame. But the alternative may be to face extradition and prosecution by another country, which is proably worst of all (but at least those Euros won’t impose the death penalty.)
So have your roll in the mud, and get good and covered with a nice layer of rationalization. But the longer this goes on, the harder it will be to wash out the stain.
— jhh · May 1, 02:08 AM · #
They KNEW what they were doing was illegal, so they had their bought and paid for lawyers gin up “research” with pre determined “findings.”
I am really interested to see any Bush Admin era government research into the efficacy of torture, or any comparative studies of different interrogation techniques. To the best of my knowledge, they didn’t carry any out (see, e.g., Zelikow, “Legal Policy for a Twighlight War”). Can you provide a link to the studies to which you refer, or to any documents that reference them? Cheers.
— vimothy · May 1, 09:32 AM · #