More Thoughts on Torture
My colleague Jim Ludes already flagged this story from the Washington Post (Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots). There are at least three significant issues I’d like to stress as well.
First, regardless of whether torture can ever work in the abstract, I think we need to be very skeptical about the utility of torture as practiced by the United States since 2001. Despite all the repeated public claims by people like former-Vice-President Dick Cheney about disrupting numerous plots, there is essentially no evidence to support this claim. At this point, there should certainly be at least a few details available that could be presented without divulging any critical sources or methods. Yet, in terms of specifics, all we have been given is vague statements that amount to the old cliche, “if you knew what I knew,” or worse muddled claims that contradict previous information provided publicly (such as the role of torture in breaking up the nascent “liquid explosives” plot). Andrew Sullivan’s somewhat melodramatic assessment is not far from the truth, “We sold our souls for lies.”
Second, our torture policies were simply not well conceived attempts to acquire intelligence. The proceeded from the assumption that we have high-value targets and that any lack of useful intelligence material extracted was a function of our methods, rather than a problem with our initial assumption. From the WaPo article:
The pressure from upper levels of the government was “tremendous,” driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered.
“They couldn’t stand the idea that there wasn’t anything new,” the official said. “They’d say, ‘You aren’t working hard enough.’ There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that ‘He’s going to talk, and if he doesn’t talk, we’ll do whatever.’ “
This, by the way, was the same process used to badger the intelligence community in cherry-picking WMD information about Iraq as well as turning loose speculation about Saddam Hussein’s communications with al Qaeda into some sort of operational relationship. The senior leadership’s interactions with the intelligence community demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of how the intelligence community (IC) works. The notion that it is the job of the IC to produce evidence that validates the assumptions and beliefs of senior decision makers is nothing short of disastrous. And yet, to this day, people like Cheney believe they did nothing wrong. They argue that asking hard questions and insisting on progress was just a way of ensuring that the IC stayed focused and motivated. But unfortunately, this constant pressure, that only lets up with the senior leader’s preconceptions are seemingly sustained is devastating institutionally.
Third, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need a thorough accounting of what precisely happened during the Bush Administration with regards to issues like renditions, torture, and surveillance — indeed the whole intelligence apparatus as it relates to the “war on terror.” The goal ought not necessarily be to punish former administration officials — though, certainly, if criminal acts are uncovered, they should be prosecuted. The goal needs to be to understand and reassess any and all policy choices we’ve made on the basis on what may be systematically flawed intelligence assessments. How many of our missile strikes in Pakistan, for instance, ultimately derive from organizational charts of al Qaeda that were built on torture-extracted fantasies? Which of our TSA policies are a result of this sort of information? In short, there is a cancer at the center of our counter-terrorism apparatus, and we may need to go back and rebuild our conception of the threat from the ground up.
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