How Personal Income and CIA Interrogation Techniques are Alike

The debate over waterboarding never ceases to amaze me. A sensible debate would ask this question:

What is the harshest method of interrogation that can be used against high-level al Qaeda detainees in a time of crisis?

That's an excellent question, and phrasing it that way helps to avoid the moral exhibitionism that generally accompanies any discussion about this issue. However, to almost everyone (especially in the mainstream media), the real question is this:

Does waterboarding amount to torture?

This is a silly question that elicits copious amounts of holier-than-thou finger pointing.

Let's change the subject for a moment and talk about a friend of mine. He graduated from college not too long ago and makes $76,000 a year. He lives alone, drives a decent car, lives in a decent apartment in a fine part of town, owns a flat screen TV, pays for cable, eats out a lot, has an I-POD and a laptop, and on and on. And my friend is a poor person.

What, you don't think so? Well, if he's not poor then he must be rich. OK, if you say so. But do you really think that someone who makes $76,000 a year is rich? No? Then I rest my case: he's poor.

This little example illustrates the problem with the "torture" debate. When discussing income, people instinctively realize that the verbal labels we sometimes use (rich or poor) are applied to a variable (income) that is continuous, not categorical. That is, income ranges from low to high and does not come in two flavors. Attaching verbal labels to the endpoints of a continuum facilitates spoken communication. If I refer to a "poor" person, you know I'm not talking about someone who makes $76,000 a year. Instead, I'm talking about someone who makes a lot less (like $12,000 a year). If I refer to a "rich" person, you also know that I'm not talking about someone who makes $76,000 a year (instead, I'm talking about someone who makes a lot more than that). As you approach the middle range of income, the otherwise useful verbal labels "rich" and "poor" become much less useful.

If you are categorical liberal thinker whose mind is unable to grapple with nuance, then you have no choice but to think of everyone as being either rich or poor and to think of every interrogation technique as amounting to torture or not. That is, in your limited mind, everything is a categorical variable (i.e., everything falls into one category or the other, like gender). The problem is that the harshness of an interrogation technique falls on a continuum. In that respect, it's like income (not gender).

Let's develop this point by attaching hypothetical numbers on a 1-to-100 scale to quantify the harshness of an interrogation technique. On this scale, a 1 would be polite questioning by a culturally acceptable interrogator for a short period of time in a very comfortable room with a cozy chair and a glass of water for the detainee. A 100 would be the sorts of things that al Qaeda likes to do, like pounding a nail through the detainee's hand, poking one of the detainee's eyes out with a hot iron, or setting the detainee on fire:

Purported Al Qaeda Video Shows Prisoners Burned Alive

Al Qaeda's latest display of terror has made its way onto the Internet, showing horrifying images of what appear to be prisoners in Iraq being doused with an inflammatory liquid and then burned alive.

OK? That sort of thing defines the high end of the scale (i.e., 100).

Now that we have the endpoints of the scale established, let's pick a number to characterize waterboarding. If you are stuck with a liberal brain that is constitutionally unable to appreciate nuance and that is highly prone to engaging in moral exhibitionism ("I am holier than thou, and Bush favors torture!"), then you'll assign 100 to waterboarding. After all, in the liberal mind, 30 seconds of waterboarding is "torture," as is setting someone on fire, so both must get rating of 100.

In reality, even if you hail from the far left, you instinctively know that equating waterboarding with setting someone on fire is preposterous, so even you would have to assign a lower number for waterboarding. Once you do that, we can make some progress discussing this issue.

Let me pick a number, like 70, to quantify the harshness of waterboarding. You can pick 60 or 80, if you wish. It doesn't really matter. Just pick a number. For this example, I choose 70.

If you are single and make $76,000, you don't get a rebate check this spring. That's because the cutoff for getting a check for a single person with no kids is $75,000. It doesn't mean you are "rich." Instead, they just picked a value above which you make too much to get a rebate. Similarly, reasonable people on the left and right (i.e., those who are not prone to moral grandstanding) might say that interrogation techniques that fall at 70 or above on the harshness scale are too harsh for CIA interrogators to use. Fine. But just as we could spend all day arguing over whether or not to attach the verbal label "rich" to someone who makes $76,000 a year, we could spend all day arguing over whether or not a technique rated 70 on this scale amounts to "torture." And what a colossal waste of time that would be. Yet it's what almost everyone does. The question is not "is waterboarding torture or not?" Instead, the question is this: "what is the harshest technique that CIA interrogators should be allowed to use?"

You might say that waterboarding gets a 70 and that you draw the line at 50, so waterboading is definitely out. That's a reasonable position. I disagree, but there is no "right" answer. There's just a line, and we have to draw it somewhere (just as an income line was drawn for rebate checks).

Let's say you draw the line at 50. Is someone who draws the line at 55 an evil torturer? If that's what you think, then you are slipping back into nuance-free black-and-white mental world of the moral exhibitionist. Don't go there because I have a more interesting issue for you to think about. Specifically, if you pick 50 as the limit, would you please give me an example of an interrogation technique that would receive a 49? That technique would be the harshest technique that you would find to be acceptable. And knowing what that is would be very, very instructive. If you are a moral exhibitionist (and you know you are), you will resist this with all of your might because you instinctively sense the danger of being reasonable about this issue.

Take note of the fact that every single moral exhibitionist on the left simply refuses to think along these lines. They actually think that the question is all about torture, and the only thinking that is required involves whether or not to declare waterboarding as amounting to torture or not. Once they and their colleagues browbeat everyone into agreeing to characterize waterboarding as torture, they think the debate is over. But whether or not to attach a verbal label to a particular technique is a side issue. Waterboarding is only one of an infinite number of techniques that could be used, and these various techniques all fall somewhere on the 1-to-100 scale. That's why you really have to do the hard work of drawing the line, not engage in the ridiculous game of declaring waterboarding to be "torture" (thereby immediately characterizing yourself as a noble humanitarian on the cutting edge of an evolving standard of moral decency).

Draw the line. If you are a moral exhibitionist and you pick 49 as being OK (and if 49 would be something like turning the temperature down to 59 degrees and questioning the detainee for 4 hours), another moral exhibitionist will declare you to be an evil torturer (because he draws the line at 40). Instinctively realizing this, moral exhibitionists are forced to go all the way to 1. And that's fine. If they do that, they reveal themselves for what they are. And that's why they want the debate to instead be all about labeling waterboarding as "torture." That's much more fun.

The torture hysterics are not serious, and Jonah Goldberg just nails that point in his most recent column:

For several years, human rights groups, the media and partisan opponents of the Bush administration and the war on terror have tried to portray the U.S. as a "torture state" that has completely abdicated its decency, its principles and even its soul under the leadership of a president who believes in an ominous-sounding "unitary executive" branch. We've been barreling down a "slippery slope," making America indistinguishable from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.

Yet none of these interrogations were the result of a "rogue" CIA or the mad whims of a "torture presidency." The relevant Democratic congressional leadership for intelligence - including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Jay Rockefeller and former Sen. Bob Graham - were briefed on CIA operations more than once. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," Porter Goss, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2004 before becoming CIA director, told The Washington Post. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

As for the slippery-slope caterwauling, the opposite is true. The slope toward more torture and abuse has gone up, not down, and it is today more difficult to climb than ever. According to existing law and Justice Department rulings, the practice has been proscribed for several years now - except, that is, for the thousands of U.S. servicemen who've been subjected to it by the U.S. military as part of their training.

The current debate over legislation to ban waterboarding in all circumstances stinks of political opportunism. Democrats want to claim that Republicans are "pro-torture" if they vote against the legislation. Others are hoping to advance criminal prosecutions of CIA operatives who used the techniques sparingly and with approval from both the White House and Congress, and from both parties.

And no one who wants to do that is serious. Instead, they are moral exhibitionists.