If You Want to Defend Torture, Start By Admitting That It's Torture

Going back a few weeks, George Will wrote an editorial with a number of similarities to Richard Cohen's piece on the morality of torture, particularly in the manner in which Will substitutes his experience in a movie theater for fact-based argument. Will opens with the sympathetic quotation of Col. Nathan Jessep, Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men,

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

That diatribe was, of course, the lead-in to the film's Perry Mason moment, when Jessup confesses to ordering the abuse of an enlisted man who ended up dead. Will seems particularly taken with the quote, "You [expletive] people... you have no idea how to defend a nation", never mind that Jessup is addressing a military court martial. Sure, it's a movie and Jessup's speech is directed at the movie audience, but his on screen attack is directed at other military officers. Jessup's honor falls short of helping the two enlisted men who carried out his directive avoid being prosecuted for murder. If Will's argument is that there should be no checks on men who believe themselves to be acting in the best interest of the nation, Jessup by this point having rejected the opinions of every other officer who suggested an alternative to the Code Red, having excused himself from the confines of the Marine Corps' regulations and Uniform Code of Military Justice, having happily allowed two enlisted men to be looking at lengthy prison terms for carrying out his orders, and having repeatedly perjured himself on the stand and repeatedly disparaged the other military officers involved in the legal proceeding, he has every right to attempt that argument. But were Will to explore some of our nation's history, including how we came to have a civilian in the role of Commander in Chief, he might come to realize that in fact a Colonel, even one who is extraordinarily self-assured, even one who is doing important work, is and should be answerable to higher authorities.

Switching over to Zero Dark Thirty, Will informs us,

Viewers will know going in how the movie ends. They will not know how they will feel when seeing an American tell a detainee, “When you lie to me I hurt you,” and proceed to do so.

Frankly, "When you lie to me I hurt you," makes for better film than "When I think you have information you're not sharing, I'll keep you awake for 180 hours," but... call it poetic license. But contrary to Will's suggestion, most viewers will have seen plenty of dramatizations that involve torture, including torture committed by Americans. Kiefer Sutherland (whose character disagreed with Jessup's approach in A Few Good Men) made something of a career of it in his series, "24". Another season, another ticking time bomb. The difference is that this is supposed to be "based on a true story", and that unlike other films based upon true stories this one is... I don't know... more graphic? Easier to confuse with a documentary?

As is his wont, Will likes to overstate the benefits of torture, blithely reciting the claims of various Bush Administration officials about how tidbits of relevant information were gleaned from the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, including "the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden". Will implies a straight line from the disclosure of that nickname in 2003 to the killing of Bin Laden some eight years later. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the "ticking timebomb" defense. We cannot know at this juncture whether the nickname of Bin Laden's courier would have been obtained from Mohammed without the use of torture, but we can reasonably conclude that either the name was not of much help to the investigation or that Mohammed poured out so much information under torture that the key to finding Bin Laden was buried in a mountain of irrelevant disclosures, with wild goose chases taking priority over the identification of the courier.

The question of whether torture "works" depends both on the tactics the torturer is willing to use, and also upon the torturer's goal. For example, let's say I want to know what the enemy is up to, and I have 100 enemy operatives in custody. If I am willing to torture all of them, I can start looking for commonalities among their disclosures. Sure, there's a chance that they will have been fed misinformation and not have the information I'm looking for, but odds are I'll learn something useful. Or I'll be able to test their stories and, if my information is good, use torture to punish what I believe to be errors or inaccuracies in the hope that the subject will become terrified of being caught in a lie. It's similar to the manner in which police divide suspects and interrogate them separately, then lie about what the other suspects have said or disclosed in order to try to trick the others. Except with torture. Sure, I may end up torturing people to try to get them to disclose something that they know nothing about, and if I'm not careful I can inadvertently feed them the answers to the questions that will stop the torture and mistake their new answers for actionable intelligence, but if I torture enough people in enough circumstances I will get names, locations, and other information that turn out to be valid. And if I break down the wrong door, shoot the wrong person, pick up and torture an innocent person based upon a bad tip, well, "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it."

Similarly, I may not care if the person I'm torturing tells the truth. I may want that person to lie. To pose for propaganda pictures or a film, to make or sign a confession to crimes, or to simply be too frightened to ever stand against me or my regime in the future lest he again be picked up and tortured.

Will lectures us,

Viewers of “Zero Dark Thirty” can decide whether or which “enhanced interrogation” measures depicted — slaps, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding — constitute, in plain English, torture. And they can ponder whether any or all of them would be wrong even if effective.

Sorry, but that's a cop-out. We would not see the situation as ambiguous if a police agency used those techniques to elicit confessions from a criminal suspect, particularly if it were an American citizen being tortured by a police agency in the developing world. We would not see the situation as ambiguous if those techniques were being applied to a U.S. solider in enemy custody. Let's not forget how few seconds it took for Christopher Hitchens to change his position from "waterboarding can't be that bad," to "it's torture." (For the record, sixteen.) If somebody were to put a bag over Will's head, strip him naked, transport him to a remote location, and apply the techniques he describes, I'm somehow not thinking that his subsequent column would be so deferential, "my readers can decide for themselves if the 'enhanced interrogation' measures I describe constitute, in plain English, torture". He would have an opinion.

Will shouldn't be so afraid to take a stand. After all, if these techniques were simply another form of acceptable interrogation, we wouldn't need the euphemisms and we wouldn't be talking about "tough choices" or quoting Colonel Jessup for the principle that "anything goes in the name of freedom". No small part of the reason we're still having this discussion is that men like Michael Mukasey and Bush Administration lickspittles like Marc Theissen refuse to acknowledge the truth of what we were doing, while prominent commentators like George Will provide them with cover. How can he talk about "facing up to what we did" if he's not even willing to hang a name on it?

Law Enforcement and Dead Suspects

Glenn Greenwald makes a valid point here, but I believe he nonetheless draws the wrong conclusion:

Beyond that, the formal position of the Democratic Party for years -- since John Kerry enunciated it when running against Bush -- has been that Terrorism should be primarily dealt with within a law enforcement rather than war paradigm, and that Terrorists should be viewed as criminals, not warriors; and yet many of the same people who once rejected the war paradigm now turn around and cite war theories to justify bin Laden's killing as a "proper military target" (that isn't necessarily contradictory -- it's possible to argue against a war paradigm while still recognizing that that's the paradigm created by our law -- but the comfort in citing war theories among those who long argued against them is quite striking). Obviously, in a law enforcement setting, one is barred from shooting an unarmed, non-resisting suspect; that can be justified only by resort to war and military theories.

I'm reminded of a law enforcement officer's statement about a fugitive, who had killed several police officers, to the effect of, "If he wants to survive his arrest, he had best be naked and unarmed when the police arrive." There are two sides to that comment: First, the police take it very seriously when somebody has killed their fellow officers. But second, and very importantly, once you cross the line and kill a police officer, that's a line you can be expected to cross again. The implication may well be that, absent something close to a guarantee that the suspect is harmless, the suspect will be shot - but it's also stated that despite his past actions the police would take him into custody if they could be certain that he posed no harm. You can argue that, at least as stated by that officer, their threshold of certainty was too high, but you can also understand why they would err on the side of self-protection.

If the police were to raid the compound of a suspect, perhaps John Yoo's wet dream would come true and they would use a very large number of officers to... I'm not sure what... intimidate him into surrendering without the necessity of close quarters combat, we might have ended up with a long stand-off. (Why am I thinking, though, that long-standoffs with people like bin Laden, holed up in armed, fortified compounds, tend not to end well.) But it seems very likely that had a similar raid occurred inside the U.S. against a known, violent terrorist who had years to prepare his compound against intruders, had armed bodyguards posted in his home, and who was known to be armed as a matter of habit, even if he turned out after-the-fact to have been unarmed, the suspect would have been shot. We would have been told about the guns in the room, and that he appeared to be reaching for one of them, the officers in the incident would have been cleared of wrongdoing, and the amount of controversy would be minimal.

If it turned out that the suspect was successfully captured and later killed, sure, that would change the complexion of the case in the minds of many, but the case for that is presently speculative. (I find this type of parsing of the word "after" to be a bit silly.) I see no reason to be upset because some people, when asked of such a theoretical possibility, respond that they wouldn't care - first because opinions presented in isolation cannot be automatically extrapolated to the public at large, and second because even if the public does hold that position it's human nature. If you were to ask a random person, "Do you support the death penalty," a coin toss would be a reasonable predictor of his answer. If you were to make the question specific, "Do you support the death penalty for people like [John Gacy / Jeff Dahmer / Ted Bundy / Osama bin Laden]", you would have an 80-90% chance of getting a "yes". For erstwhile death penalty opponents I'm not going to argue that it's unreasonable to point out, "But you just said..." or to try to encourage them to think about and reconcile the inconsistency in their opinions, but an off-the-cuff reaction of, "This guy is different," should not come as a surprise.

Greenwald acknowledges this side of human nature, and goes so far as to state that he "understand[s] and respect[s] it", particularly when it is expressed with honesty. He proposes a slippery slope, to the effect of "If this guy is different, why won't the next guy also be different such that we can once again ignore our professed values." I would respond that acting on the exception makes it easier to make the same rationalization in future cases, but that is something you simply have to accept. We're human - even for the most logical of persons, emotions will at times overwhelm reason. Compare and contrast the reactions to a "gotcha" question to the effect of, "What would you do if your wife were raped and murdered" from Michael Dukakis and Mario Cuomo. The acceptable answer was, "I would want the offender dead, but I would want other people to stop me from killing him," not an explanation of how you would rationally stick with your principled opposition to the death penalty.

When Your Actions Are Defensible, You Don't Have to Lie

I'm sure that there are any number of online reactions to John Yoo's recent prevarications in the Washington Post but, even if so, I'll add one more. One of the most incredible aspects of the successful raid on Osama bin Laden's compound is how various incompetents from the Bush Administration have attempted to use the raid to justify torture. Long gone are the days when those same incompetents argued that we didn't actually torture people, and long gone is the "ticking time bomb" excuse for torture. Now the case appears to be that if you obtain through torture any information that with the application of hindsight might somehow connect to a law enforcement success at some point in the future, no matter how many years pass, torture is wonderful, necessary and successful.

The argument belies itself. If the fruits of torture are so accurate and useful, and if the mite of information allegedly gleaned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in fact led inexorably to the raid on bin Laden, that raid should have occurred six or so years ago - when the information was fresh. Instead what did we see? Yoo's former lord and master, G.W. Bush, declaring that bin Laden was no longer among his priorities - even as far back as 2002:

"The idea of focusing on one person, is, um, really indicates to me that people really don't understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. And, uh, he's just, he's a person who'se now been marginalized.... So, I don't know where he is, nor, you know, I just don't spend that much time on it, Kelly, to be honest with you."

So when G.W. announced that bin Laden was irrelevant, failing to capture or kill him was no big deal, and that he had other things to worry about it, his lap dogs had not one word of criticism. Now, almost a decade later, they're yipping at President Obama because he succeeded where Bush failed, and suddenly bin Laden is the most important fugitive in the world.

If we step back in time, the story of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's torture seems to be something along the lines of this: He was captured and detained for interrogation, and was proving to be a source of valuable intelligence. Then somebody with a Dick Cheney mindset apparently said, "Hey - we'll get even more information if we torture him," and John Yoo happily signed on to write a memo to immunize the torturers from prosecution. Torture proceeded, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shared countless plots, many of which were never more than pipe dreams, and some of which appear to have been made up on the spot (because, as you know, that's how you stop torture - by telling the torturer what he wants to hear.) And despite the continued protestation of people like Yoo and Marc Thiessen, the torture program was declared a failure and was cancelled.

If, in fact, the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced a valuable bit of information that led so easily to bin Laden, as Yoo suggests - facts be damned - why wasn't that lead followed in a timely manner?

The United States located al Qaeda's leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.

Armed with the courier's nom de guerre, American intelligence agencies later found him thanks to his phone call to a contact already under electronic surveillance. Last August, the courier traveled to bin Laden's compound, but it took another eight months before the CIA became certain that the al Qaeda leader was hiding inside.

Surely Yoo isn't going to try to argue to us that the courier did not visit bin Laden so much as once between the torture of KSM and last August. If Yoo is correct about the value of that information, then he should be honest about how torture impacted the ability of U.S. intelligence to winnow useful information out of the avalanche of garbage KSM produced under torture.

Yoo offers a childish caricature of how the U.S. might have treated captured war criminals had President Obama been in charge after 9/11:

Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things immediately following 9/11. After their "arrest," we would have read KSM and al-Libi their Miranda rights, provided them legal counsel, sent them to the U.S. for detention, and granted them all the rights provided a U.S. citizen in criminal proceedings.

Because, you know, it's either that or rendition, black sites and torture - no possible middle ground. Not only is Yoo offering a false dichotomy, it's not even consistent with his argument - he's suggesting that Bush would have tried to gently capture bin Laden, take him into custody and interrogate him, while President Obama was too much of a cowboy. A little consistency, please?

And let's also remember that the Bush Administration did arrest suspected terrorists after 9/11 and, while it did play fast and loose with the Constitution with no small amount of help from people like Yoo, some notable terrorists were Mirandized and were tried in federal court. I don't recall that, at the time, people like Yoo were decrying how the Bush Administration's successful prosecution of terrorists was undermining the war on terror. You didn't hear Yoo scold President Bush for announcing that he wanted to capture bin Laden "dead or alive." You didn't hear so much of a whimper of criticism when Bush ordered a raid that resulted in the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, both of whom could have provided valuable intelligence had they been captured alive.

Yoo also acts as if President Obama was in the room when bin Laden was killed, rather than being the person who signed off on a carefully constructed military operation:

As Sunday's operation put so vividly on display, Mr. Obama would rather kill al Qaeda leaders—whether by drones or special ops teams—than wade through the difficult questions raised by their detention. This may have dissuaded Mr. Obama from sending a more robust force to attempt a capture.

Were Yoo an honest man he would admit that, had President Obama turned the mission into a larger operation intended to capture bin Laden, he and his ilk would be the first to point their fingers and screech about his "meddling in a military operation" had the mission failed, or had any soldiers died or been taken prisoner. Had President Obama instructed military leaders to change their plan to prioritize capture, and had that resulted in a similar failure, Yoo would similarly be screeching about the President's incompetence. Bin Laden is reported to have always had a weapon within reach, and he could easily have had his compound rigged with explosives - Yoo's fantasies of, "Maybe if we had sent more helicopters and more soldiers" really aren't reflective of the reality of what happens when soldiers enter a small room to engage in close quarters combat. (In fairness, perhaps Yoo learned military strategy by playing Doom.)

As it stands, the mission was a success, but success isn't good enough for Yoo. Perhaps it's too good, because people like Yoo sometimes seem to be programmed to root for the President to fail. But it's abundantly clear that, even if he thought otherwise, Yoo would have either lavished praise upon G.W. for a similar raid or, at most, kept his mouth shut. Just as he wouldn't be praising the current President for successfully capturing bin Laden, had the man been taken alive.

Yoo insists that capturing bin Laden "alive would have required the administration to hold and interrogate bin Laden at Guantanamo Bay". Why? Does Yoo believe that the U.S. never held an international criminal, terrorist, or war criminal before we built that prison in Cuba? Has he failed to review the Supreme Court rulings that have resulted from the Bush Administration's treatment of prisoners that have dramatically reduced what were intended as the benefits of the Guantanamo prison - the notion of people like Yoo that the U.S. could sequester prisoners in its custody from any constitutional protections? Perhaps he's imagining that it would become politically necessary, thanks to the hypocritical squawkings of prominent Republicans who, up to Obama's election, favored closing the Guantanamo prison.

As for Yoo's quaint notion that the President should "restart the interrogation program that helped lead us to bin Laden", I again remind him that it was not the Obama administration that abandoned the Bush era torture program as a failure. That was President Bush.

Sara Palin, (Still) Dangerously Ignorant

Sara Palin is throwing another "You show me yours, I won't show you mine"¹ tantrum, this time about the White House's refusal to distribute war porn: "Palin claims the pictures should be released "as warning to others seeking America's destruction"...."

Were Palin interested, she would quickly learn that the sight of people - including children and civilians - killed by U.S. (and Israeli) forces are widely distributed in the Arab world, and that the reaction is generally not favorable to us. It also might have occurred to her, were she a bit more thoughtful, that suicide terrorists aren't particularly intimidated by the notion that if they survive they might be hunted down and killed.

Perhaps she's turning into Ann Coulter - say something outrageous, even if it makes you look like an ignorant simpleton, as long as it gets you into the press? On the other hand, perhaps she's a personification of "Act Naturally."
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1. Is there a record of significance from Palin's entire life, including her partial term as governor, that she has not at least tried to conceal from the public?

Osama Bin Forgotten

Even back in Bush's day, based upon the de-emphasis of the world's most wanted (but neither captured nor killed) fugitive, I heard Bin Laden referenced as "Bin forgotten". So it's no surprise that a lot of people, particularly young people, have no idea who he is.

Cognitive Dissonance

These headlines describe the same meeting, right?

• In Meeting With Musharraf, Bush Praises Pakistani Troops
• Musharraf: Bin Laden's Location Is Unknown

From the Post:

Noting two failed assassination attempts on Musharraf, Bush added "there is nobody more dedicated" to tracking down bin Laden or other extremists.

Nobody is more dedicated? Then, I guess, we're doomed - here's Musharraf's take on the hunt for bin Laden:

"He is alive but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess . . . " Musharraf said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. Pressed on whether the trail had gone cold, he said, "Yes, if you mean we don't know, from that point of view, we don't know where he is."

(No wonder some wags have taken to referencing the world's #1 most wanted fugitive as "Osama bin Forgotten".)

"Threat" or "No Threat"

The Bush Administration helpfully explained yesterday that the Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Osama bin Laden Determined to Attack the U.S." was not a threat because "There was not a time and place of an attack".

Let's see how the Bush Administration tackles real threats....

* December, 2002: A Bellbrook, Ohio High School student is interrogated by the Secret Service because he wore a t-shirt which had a picture of Bush with a target on his forehead which read, "Not My President".

* March, 2003: A student at Eastern Washington University whose family had immigrated from Iran is interrogated by the Secret Service after advocating against the invasion of Iraq during class, apparently after somebody called the Secret Service with the allegation that he had a picture of Bush on a dartboard in his dorm room.

* May, 2003: Two sixteen-year-old students at Oakland High School are interrogated and threatened with deportation after one commented in class that "Bush is whacked" and the other joked about getting a sniper to "take care" of Bush.

You see, the Bin Laden information suggested a manner of attack, but did not have specifics as to time and place, and thus was not a threat. While the comments and actions by the various students were... um... well... er... Well, they were threats. Let's leave it at that.

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As if we didn't know....

As I have previously mentioned, I recall watching a political program shortly before 9/11 during which the Republicans were attempting to make their case for a "missile shield", and brushed off a response from Senator Joe Biden that the biggest threat was not of a rogue state firing a missle at us, and that a nuclear attack was far more likely to come in the form of a bomb welded into the bow of a freighter that was sailed directly into a U.S. port. Before 9/11, there was no public sign that the Bush Administration viewed terrorism as a significant issue. After 9/11, there were numerous accounts, including a quote from President Bush in Bob Woodward's book, suggesting that the Bush Administration had underestimated the significance of al Qaeda and terrorism:

Until September 11, however, Bush had not put that thinking [that Clinton's response to al Qaeda emboldened bin Laden] into practice, nor had he pressed the issue of bin Laden. Though Rice and others were developing a plan to eliminate al Qaeda, no formal recommendations had ever been presented to the president.

"I know there was a plan in the works. . . . I don't know how mature the plan was," Bush recalled. . . . He acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team. There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point [before that date], but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem."

And today, courtesy of the Washington Post, we get insight into the Administration's thinking on 9/11.

On Sept. 11, 2001, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to outline a Bush administration policy that would address "the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday" -- but the focus was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.

The speech provides telling insight into the administration's thinking on the very day that the United States suffered the most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. The address was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of a new national security strategy, and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups, according to former U.S. officials who have seen the text.

The speech was postponed in the chaos of the day, part of which Rice spent in a bunker. It mentioned terrorism, but did so in the context used in other Bush administration speeches in early 2001: as one of the dangers from rogue nations, such as Iraq, that might use weapons of terror, rather than from the cells of extremists now considered the main security threat to the United States.

David Broder got it right today, writing:

For nine days the White House and its allies did everything in their power to discredit Clarke, while trying to shield his old boss, Rice, from the commission's unanimous request that she give sworn public testimony in response to Clarke's stunning indictment.

When the effort to shoot the messenger failed to halt the political erosion, Bush did what he never should have done: He threw Rice to the commission. And, worse, he failed to do what he could have done long before: Offer the American people and the world a clear, coherent and detailed account of his own activities and state of mind in the months leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Instead of acting as the man in charge and saying to the commission, "No, you may not put my national security adviser on the mat, but I will answer to the public for what happened," he did just the opposite. He gave up Rice and then turned on his heel and walked out of the briefing room even as reporters were trying to ask him questions.

The most obvious reason for the years of Bush Administration stonewalling since 9/11 is that Bush fears being embarrassed, and perhaps having his reelection bid mortally wounded, by the truth. It's within his power to provide a different reason for his refusal to candidly speak to the facts, but I don't expect to hear one.

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Osama Captured?

Well, not yet. But, "as a service to readers and nascent conspiracy theorists", the Guardian has published a notice of his capture "several months ahead of schedule".


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