It's Not Torture, and it Does Work

There are two main issues in the debate over harsh interrogations, and my perception is that many on the left do not understand them. The first, which several of my recent posts have emphasized, is that the debate is not about whether or not to torture high-level al Qaeda detainees. Many otherwise very intelligent lefties miss this key point when they blithely assert that, in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government decided that torture was an acceptable interrogation method. In truth, the Bush administration always disallowed torture. What they did instead was to adopt harsher interrogation techniques than had been used in the past that fell short of torture. Most on the left believe that these methods crossed the line into torture (as if waterboarding and gouging out eyes are basically one and the same), but because it appears that way to them does not make it so. That's why it is wrong to say that the U.S. government decided to condone torture. In truth, the disagreement is about where to draw the line, not whether or not to torture. Everyone already agrees that we should not torture detainees. What we disagree about is what interrogation techniques amount to torture. Everyone agrees that gouging out eyes is torture. The disagreement comes in when we start talking about vastly gentler techniques, such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation. There is a real debate to be had about that, but many on the left will have none of it.

The second dimension of this debate is about whether harsh interrogation (or "torture," if you must call it that) works to elicit useful information. If you are inclined to label the harsh interrogation methods approved by the Bush administration as torture, then I don't even have to ask whether or not you believe that torture is effective. Instead, I can already say with a fairly high degree of certainty that you believe that torture is not effective (e.g., that it merely leads to false confessions, not the truth). My own semi-psychoanalytic interpretation of this state of affairs is that you willingly adopt that point of view (backed up by nothing more than a few choice quotes from John McCain and a couple of other former intelligence agents) because it simultaneously quiets your mind and allows you demonize your intellectual opponents. It quiets your mind because it allows you to believe that your point of view is the one that adheres to the principle of doing no harm to humans (something everyone aspires to). If harsh interrogation methods "worked," you'd suddenly be denied this comfortable mind set because, all of a sudden, your principled stance against waterboarding high-level terrorists could directly result in the gruesome deaths of thousands of innocent American lives. That's not a very comfortable way to think. Indeed, if harsh interrogation worked, one could not climb so very high up on that moral high horse. Instead, one would have to actually accept the possibility that this is a tough issue (and that reasonable people can disagree about it). But that would require a degree of mental flexibility that many on the left do not have, and it would also deny them the glorious opportunity to demonize their intellectual opponents. After all, who but a monster could favor "torturing" detainees if it doesn't work anyway? Frank Rich of the New York Times is the lefty "go to guy" when it comes to demonizing those with whom he disagrees:

The Banality of Bush White House Evil

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young.
...
Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Note both liberal tricks at work here. First, the interrogation techniques are labeled "torture" (and the recently released memos are called the "torture memos"), as if the debate about what constitutes torture simply does not exist. Second, Rich asserts that torture does not work, from which it naturally follows that the Bush White House is "evil" and Baybee's position is "perverted" and amounts to "pornographic amorality."

What is alarming to me is that otherwise very intelligent people can fall into this superficial way of thinking without even realizing that have applied none of their analytical abilities to the issue. If you ever find yourself demonizing your political opponent (e.g., if you think Barack Obama wants to ruin America in a left wing power grab), then it's a sure sign that you are taking the easy way out.

Finally, I must say that, if you are like many on the left, you simply cannot be convinced that harsh interrogations (what you call "torture") works. That is, your mind is closed, and you are impervious to evidence. The reason you can't be convinced is that you will almost certainly take an interesting escape route from having to grapple with the uncomfortable possibility that it does work (for semi-psychoanalytic reasons explained above). In this regard, the Washington Post has an unusually balanced report on the effectiveness of harsh interrogation. It is balanced in that it uses the phrase "harsh interrogation" instead of "torture" in the headline, which is itself a somewhat surprising acknowledgement that the real debate is over the question of how harsh interrogation techniques should be. It is also balanced in that it acknowledges that critical information was elicited from high-level al Qaeda detainees when they were exposed to harsh interrogation. However, it also basically argues (and this is the escape that any liberal can always take) that we can't really know for sure that we actually needed to use the harsh methods. Perhaps had we given the traditional methods a bit more time, they would have worked just as well. In other words, until we (in effect) conduct a randomized Phase III clinical trial in which half the high-level detains are assigned to the harsh interrogation group and the other half are exposed to the traditional interrogation group, we can't know with certainty that the harsh interrogation worked:

Effectiveness of harsh questioning is unclear

Top U.S. detainee likely to have faced few traditional tactics

During his first days in detention, senior al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed was stripped of his clothes, beaten, given a forced enema and shackled with his arms chained above his head, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It was then, a Red Cross report says, that his American captors told him to prepare for "a hard time."

Over the next 25 days, beginning on March 6, 2003, Mohammed was put through a routine in which he was deprived of sleep, doused with cold water and had his head repeatedly slammed into a plywood wall, according to the report. The interrogation also included days of extensive waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

Sometime during those early weeks, Mohammed started talking, providing information that supporters of harsh interrogations would later cite in defending the practices.
...
But whether harsh tactics were decisive in Mohammed's interrogation may never be conclusively known, in large part because the CIA appears not to have tried traditional tactics for much time, if at all.

And there you have it. You can continue to believe that torture does not work because you have placed an unattainable burden of proof on those who would claim that it has worked (as those reporters for the Washington Post essentially claim). It's a good trick, but it is not a serious attitude. In fact, it is as unserious as just labeling the CIA's harsh interrogation methods as amounting to torture without thinking through the issue at all. Unfortunately, we now have a superficial mob mentality characterizing the issue, and the mob is in charge. And I fear that the fevered mind of the mob will not be calmed until someone is prosecuted for crimes against humanity.