Even the strategic case for torture is weak
That is what I argue at The Daily Beast. I’d go on but I am blogging by smart phone. Big Bear Lake is beautiful, though inflatable canoes are murder on the back.
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I actually sort of liked Jim’s argument, but somehow the way Conor frames it makes it seem all wrong. However odious waterboarding or walling may be, do we really imagine them to be as bad as the excesses of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union?
— Blar · Sep 2, 12:54 PM · #
Isn’t the vital issue not whether waterboarding is “odious,” but whether it’s legal?
Shouldn’t it, first and foremost, be a question about where we draw legal lines regarding treatment, not the effectiveness of torture?
It may look like destiny, now, but I don’t think the annihilation of Nazi Germany was an inevitable consequence of its crimes. The duration of a nation’s ascendancy seems like a dubious barometer of its humane treatment. Don’t certain nations, past and present, make this apparent?
— turnbuckle · Sep 2, 02:45 PM · #
The point isn’t that we’re as bad as the Soviets or the Nazis, although NOT being that bad is a morally offensive defense of our own behavior. The point is that we didn’t need to follow the Cheney credo to beat those guys and that, over the long run, we greatly benefited by NOT trying to “out evil” them.
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 2, 03:17 PM · #
Where we draw those lines should be a function of both the effectiveness and “odiousness” of the treatment. The WaPo story was important because it blew concerns about “EITs’” immediate effectiveness out of the water, such that critics must rely on “strategic” arguments, or make absurd “Lisa’s rock” style arguments. The strategic argument Conor offers relies on the supposition that Nazi torture is at all like waterboarding or sleep deprivation in terms of its “odiousness” (I need a better word), which I think is unsupportable.
Good point. Communist China comes to mind.
A side point that just occurred to me. Conor writes
I notice you don’t actually try to discredit the Post’s report, so what is the point of this? Are you implying that conservative writers are being insincere when they say they find the Post persuasive in this case? Even if that is so, what does that have to do with their actual argument?
This level of bad faith does not become you, Conor.
— Blar · Sep 2, 03:21 PM · #
@Mike
I don’t thinking Cheney ever claimed we need to “out-evil” our enemies, but that we need to do what it takes. I could be wrong, of course.
But if waterboarding is all about “out-eviling” terrorists and their supporters, it’s not a very good attempt!
— Blar · Sep 2, 03:29 PM · #
I agree that nothing Bush did is as bad as Stalin. In fact, I think that should be the next Republican slogan: “Hey, at least we aren’t as bad as Stalin!”
— tgb1000 · Sep 2, 04:10 PM · #
@tgb: Clever! But you do realize that your sardonic concession defenestrates Conor’s and Manzi’s argument, since Stalin et al are their examples of “torturing nations” that “we keep beating.”
— Blar · Sep 2, 04:18 PM · #
Blar,
Evidently, we disagree about the value of torture’s perceived effectiveness. The CIA’s own review of its actions reflect significant ambiguity about the importance of torture— EIT’s, as some prefer— in prompting information. Notwithstanding the WaPo story, I think arguments against effectiveness have hardly been “blown out of the water.”
However, whatever effectiveness can be proved or disproved, it remains a dicey measure of torture’s place in interrogation.
For many Americans, perhaps treatment like severe sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, threats against the lives of one’s children and waterboarding don’t quite rise to the level of torture. If that’s the case, maybe a debate is in order, reevaluating our current laws and treaties.
But that’s another matter.
What’s at stake right now in the case of KSM and others like him, is what existing legal framework addressed his treatment? To me, it seems the Geneva Conventions, to which our Constitution binds us as supreme law, make it clear that KSM was indeed tortured, and that indeed Cheney and his legal advisers broke the law by ordering, even standardizing, the treatment.
It doesn’t matter that much if now some would like to argue that waterboarding is merely odious but not criminal. When KSM was interrogated, it was torture by a legal standard that most Americans, were it not for politics, would recognize.
In saying this, it’s quite possible, in fact probable, that I am succumbing to politics and not recognizing legal nuances that complicate the case against the last administration. However, hasn’t enough information about CIA interrogation been brought to light that some variety of investigation is warranted? Surely, at this point there is grounds to believe legal boundaries were severely tried when not outright crossed.
— turnbuckle · Sep 2, 04:28 PM · #
How did we get to the place where we think waterboarding is the worst act the CIA committed? We beat people to death, Blar, at least a hundred of them – most only on the suspicion of terror or just “terror-related activities.” Basically, because an angry neighbor dropped a dime on someone he didn’t like, we hauled people in and beat them to death to elicit confessions to acts against the United States.
Let’s talk about the dishonesty of torture advocates, where they’re able to say “gosh, a little waterboarding can’t be that bad, right?” I don’t know if it is or not, but that’s not what we’re talking about; we’re talking about lots of waterboarding, or water torture as we used to call it, plus Palestinian hangings, exposure to cold, fatal beatings by fists and clubs, electro-shock torture, mock executions, “walling”, and other activities that we never, ever think of as anything but reprehensible torture when it’s applied to Americans (like John McCain) but somehow become OK when the victim is “suspected” of being a terrorist (for reasons that he most assuredly is about to tell us. We have ways of making him talk, after all.)
— Chet · Sep 2, 04:41 PM · #
A terrorist has a nuclear weapon hidden in an American city and will detonate it in one hour unless Blar and his immediate family are gang-raped on national television. Should we “do what it takes” to save millions of lives? I wonder what Dick Cheney would say?
Mike
— MBunge · Sep 2, 05:30 PM · #
THIS is the best you can do, Conor? And the very simplistic assumptions you make about your opponents in this debate are not accurate and unfair.
— Carl Scott · Sep 2, 07:19 PM · #
“The strategic argument Conor offers relies on the supposition that Nazi torture is at all like waterboarding or sleep deprivation in terms of its “odiousness” (I need a better word), which I think is unsupportable.”
This isn’t accurate. The strategic argument relies on the supposition that there are many costs to waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation techniques — “among them eliciting false intelligence that squanders man hours; the fact that a torture policy causes some upstanding intelligence professionals to resign, and others to remove themselves from interrogations, hurting our capacity to gather good intelligence; that torture pushes more Muslims into the radical camp, increases anti-American sentiments, aids terrorist recruiting efforts, and undermines support for the war on terror even among significant numbers of Americans; that it causes allied countries to cooperate less with our counterterrorism efforts; that it reduces the morale of soldiers and intelligence professionals; and that “enhanced interrogation techniques” have demonstrably bled into military prisons, undermining our mission in a critical theater and leading to the rightful imprisonment of American soldiers, who were denounced even by the Bush administration.”
Now look at the Andy McCarthy quote I excerpt in the column. His argument is that merely because KSM gave valuable information after being water boarded, the strategic case for that tactic is made, and ONLY principled objections remain.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 2, 07:27 PM · #
Conor, that piece is worth reading, bookmarking, saving and printing for that paragraph you just quoted alone. Outstanding.
— Consumatopia · Sep 3, 02:23 PM · #
About the only thing I’d add is that there’s another dimension to the utilitarian case. If torture is established as an acceptable tool for counter-terrorism investigations, that’s inevitably going to apply to domestic terrorism suspects as well. And just as techniques bled into military prisons, they’ll probably bleed into domestic prisons and law enforcement generally, as seemed to have happened in Chicago post-Vietnam.
— Consumatopia · Sep 3, 02:41 PM · #
Chet’s comment above bears repeating: WATERBOARDING WAS NOT NEARLY THE WORST. A number (not quite known) of detaines died in custody (translation: were tortured to death).
Also, wtf is it with people assuming the detainees were all terrorists? We know at this point that many of them were almost certainly innocent. Still fine with the beatings, sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia, waterboarding, treats to rape their wives, etc? Still liking that?
Did the people of this country lose their minds… or is it they never had them to begin with? Are we animals?
— Rob in CT · Sep 3, 03:05 PM · #
Bad proofreading by me above. Threats, not treats. Ack.
Consumatopia raises another very good point (made centuries ago by Thomas Paine) about torture creep. The slippery slope. Trickle down, if you prefer. Point being, once the ulitily of these tactics is accepted, why not torture murder suspects? Why not torture Mobsters (think of the lives you could save, eh!). And so on and so forth.
What I think of the utility of torture (I find the argument advanced by some seasoned interrogators – that torture is counter-productive – persuasive), is (to me), NOT THE POINT. It’s bigger than that.
— Rob in CT · Sep 3, 03:11 PM · #