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Torture
TORTURE....Responding to Andrew Sullivan, Reuel Marc Gerecht defends his defense of torture:
I take it from your post that if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman? Okay, but I do believe that moral men can go the other way, and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans elected or appointed to high office would go the other way.....Would that the Clinton and the Bush administrations — especially the Bush administration — had started a public discussion of what we do with holy warriors who live to slaughter thousands....You might not like what America's legislature would have decided (Andrew, what was your position on this in 2001/2002?), but it would have carried the approval of more of the American people's representatives.
Sadly, I suspect that Gerecht is right: if torture had been put to a vote back in 2001, it would have passed. The language would have been prettied up, of course, but the intention would have been clear enough and the public would have approved. Even today, I'm pretty sure that a majority of Americans are basically OK with torture as long as it's mostly kept out of sight and they can go about their business.
But even for torture apologists like Gerecht, I wonder how far they're willing to go. He must know that over the past few years we've tortured a steady and sizeable stream of people who were either decidedly small fish or else just completely innocent. How many of those people is he willing to brutalize on the slim chance that once, someday, we'll just happen to have someone in our custody who knows about a terrorist plot scheduled for tomorrow and can be successfully tortured into giving it up in time? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Where exactly does he draw the line?
And how many Germans approved of the invasion of Poland. What's his point?
It's been said before, but here are simple rules that ought to work:
1) Torture is illegal. Period.
2) In a ticking-time-bomb scenario, the President has the right to order ONE person to torture ONE suspected fanatic, to protect the actual torturer (and those in the chain of command between the President and the torturer, but not the President him/herself) from criminal charges.
3) In order to exercise this right, the President must notify the ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who in turn pledge to notify the country within 60 days of the President's use of this power, naming the suspected fanatic in question, and pledge to institute impeachment proceedings against the President at that time unless the evidence that the President makes public in the meantime suffices to justify his decision.
4) If the evidence can't be revealed in 60 days, it wasn't a ticking-time-bomb scenario, now was it?
Someone needs to read "How to break a terrorist." And think about what it does for our national security to say to the world: "We are the US. We have no morals. We are no better than the terrorists."
As he must, Gerecht makes dubious assumptions.
How do we *know* that a terror attack is about to go down, and that KSM has the info on it?
Why do we think that torture, particularly torture designed to elicit false confessions, is the most effective way to find out what KSM knows?
The implicit assumption is always that torture works best and gets the job done. But the burden is on Gerecht to prove that, before advocating for illegal acts.
Ticking-time-bomb is a sham -- it assumes a Goldilocksian amount of intelligence information -- you know enough to be certain, absolutely certain, that something bad will happen, and you know, you are absolutely certain, that the person in your custody has the information that you need, and you know, you are absolutely certain, that torture is the one and only way of getting that information out of him...
And you don't know anything more than that.
I take it from your post that if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman?
The problem with these ticking time bomb scenarios is that it's always possible to construct an even more absurd and hysterical scenario to justify even more abhorrent behavior. For example, what if I said:
"I take it from your post that if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, and you knew that mutilating his infant children in front of him was the only way to get him to talk, you would not have used such physically coercive techniques against the gentleman's children?"
Similarly, the same sort of false-choice reasoning could be used to justify the use of torture in domestic law enforcement, as for example:
"I take it from your post that if you had been confronted with a captured gang-banger and you knew that a major, mass-casualty drive-by shooting was about to go down in Compton, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the city's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman?"
"But even for torture apologists like Gerecht, I wonder how far they're willing to go."
They probably aren't willing to go far enough to make their argument credible with me. Here's the problem: most of the people we torture will be innocent. Until people like Gerecht volunteer to be one of those innocent torture victims, I find their arguments unconvincing. They must be frisked away in the middle of the night, sent to Syria and waterboarded, then return and say how great it was that they could do their part to help national security. Only then will I believe they are sincere and willing to accept the consequences of their proposals.
I remember reading a quote from a US servicemember stationed in Iraq. The soldier said something like, "Every day we are confronted with ticking timebomb scenarios". Torture on a daily basis is the direction that Gerecht's morality would take us.
I think when you're a torture apologist, maybe everything starts looking cut and dried, with easy answers.
The reality is that 9/11 could have been prevented with locked and armored cockpit doors. Those doors were refused/lobbied against/whatever by the pilots and the airlines before 9/11. We have them today.
They don't. They don't have any lines because they are convinced that it will never happen to them, and they do not have enough empathy to understand what it does to others. Gerecht has looked into the abyss... and he likes what he sees.
In a liberal, democratic constitutional regime, the vote of the majority to deny rights to the minority is irrelevant.
Torture violates human rights which also happen to be rights guaranteed by the Constitution (I'm thinking, perhaps nostalgically of cruel & unusual punishment, unreasonable searches and seizures). Thus, the country could vote unanimously to permit torture and our vote would not simply by morally repugnant, it would also be constitutionally irrelevant.
While the constitution is not a suicide pact, it is an agreement to suffer collective risks in order to preserve individual liberties. We thought through this one some while ago. I think we should try the emulate the founders here and aspire to be a little bit braver about the threats posed by our enemies. Torture apologists can only thrive in populations defined by fear. Folks like Gerecht should have been mercilessly mocked as the bed-wetters they are from the beginning.
This really isn't about whether or not we would take a knife to Kahlid's balls if he didn't tell us whether to cut the red or green wire. Thats a given and Kahlid could describe the sharpness of my knife if he survived.
On one hand we have a scenario where effective methods unquestionably cannot be fully employed and the immediacy of the threat justifies the highest forms of violence or threat of violence to mitigate that threat.
On the other hand we have a blanket policy to torture prisoners issued from the highest levels of government.
We all have a right under use of force rules to use whatever force is necessary when faced with the an immediate threat of loss of life. But there is no immediacy addressed by this administration's policy. They had time to use effective means of intel gathering and they chose instead to use ineffective and illegal means.
Note that Gerecht wrote:... you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go downAnd not:You knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down involving hijacking commercial airlines and piloting them into buildings.Because in the latter instance, preventative measures can be implemented (also leading to capture), and torture (which doesn't work anyway) is not "needed". For Gerecht, the less you know, the more he can justify torture.
Here is what I hate about this false "argument" in all its recurring forms.
If you can somehow construct a credible scenario whereby civilzation as we know it is at risk, and if you can construct a credible scenario where torture is the only answer, I would personally do it myself. And let's also assume that there is a strict law against any form of torture with the death penalty required. Guess what. I would still do it. You know why? Because I am 100% certain, under those extreme conditions, that I would be pardoned.
I mean no one who actually saved planet Earth would so much as get a speeding ticket much less jail time.
Get real.
Others have already made the point, but it bears repeating: Torture doesn't work. Everywhere it has been used, it has been for the purpose of eliciting false confessions.
Even if we are willing to accept Gerecht's too-perfect scenario that "justifies" torturing KSM, it does not do so, unless Gerecht can furnish some evidence that torture would result in extracting the required (true) information, and that other techniques would not do so.
I think torture is popular with the public because the public assumes it is effective and they don't mind hurting bad people. I imagine that support for torture would drop considerably if people knew what a low-quality interrogation technique it is.
If Afghanis voted to determine if US occupying soldiers and their leaders should be tortured, Americans would not like the outcome.
Greuel Marc Reriech would answer Drum's question the same way the Taliban would: no limit can satisfy the righteous.
"if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security"
OK, as long as we'e dealing in hypotheticals that Gerecht can set up to advantage his position, try this:
We go to the dark side, KSM & AZ spill the details, & the plot is stopped. But then, KSM & AS say, "There's a second attack coming in 2 hours, we dont know where, but Reuel Marc Gerecht's wife & children do." Coercion worked the first time & got correct info, there's not much time, & how can we take the chance that RMG's family isn't in on it, despite their protests to the contrary?
Thanks to a presidential daily briefing, in August 2001, George knew a terrorist strike was imminent. Maybe we should have strapped him to the waterboard.
Gerecht asked: "... if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman?"
Throughout the summer of 2001, senior officials of the Bush administration were "confronted" with multiple, credible warnings that "a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States" -- including the August 6th presidential daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside US" that was personally delivered to George W. Bush, and other warnings that specifically mentioned plans to hijack aircraft and crash them into buildings.
And with their "plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security", they did ... NOTHING.
People like Gerecht don't "draw the line" against torture anywhere -- because they want to torture. They love to torture. They are looking for opportunities to torture, because it thrills and excites them. They are Sadists, plain and simple.
I generally dislike slippery slope arguments and I generally abhor absolutes but dammit - "no torture" is an absolute for me and I don't want to think about where some of my fellow citizens would draw their lines.
Why not just torture everyone? Why not make it your civic duty to be tortured? You'd be simply amazed at how many terrorist organizations you would uncover.
"For Gerecht, the less you know, the more he can justify torture."
Good point. Gercht doesn't explain how, in his hypothetical, we manage to "[know] that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down." It seems to me that in basicly any senario where we have enough verifiable detail on the attack that we are able to be sure it will occur, we would have enough information to stop the attack.
I preferred Reuel Marc Gerech's argument better in the original German. The fact is the kind of torture we employ was invented by the Germans and refined by the Soviets to illicit phony confessions from political prisoners. They will say anything to stop the pain. Modern torture was never intended to gather actionable intelligence. There are better tools.
I propose the label "Coward's Theorem" similar to Godwin's Law. Anyone debating torture who invokes the dried up old "ticking time bomb scenario" forfeits the argument. For the many and valid reasons posted by commenters above.
I would have to disagree with the idea that torture does not "work." It doesn't work the way apologists claim it does, absolutely - and they know it. Torture's purpose is not to obtain information. It is its own end, especially when used this widely. I abhor people who want to kill as many Americans as possible, but I don't think there's a way to punish that kind of thinking out of a person. And revenge - for the intent/desire to harm? But who cares if I have the comfort of the knowledge that some horrendous guy doesn't want to kill a bunch of people, including myself?
All peoples everywhere should be trained to answer "Reuel Marc Gerecht's wife & children know" while undergoing torutre.
Unless,
a) You are willing to concede that circumstances may exist in which others may torture you; and
b) These circumstances are as probable for you to be tortured as well as for others; then
you are entirely without standing to advocate torture.
Even today, I'm pretty sure that a majority of Americans are basically OK with torture as long as it's mostly kept out of sight and they can go about their business.
Hey Kevin. You're okay with all sorts of injustices, up to and including the ruining of lives and the separating of good parents from their children. You may not consider that torture, but I certainly do. Sexist, bigoted torture. Years and years of it. You don't want to know about it. You don't want to learn about it, and when it's pointed out to you, you invariably look at your blogroll and realize it wouldn't be politic of you to mention it.
So your smug attitude and moral superiority towards Americans that are okay with torture is noted.
"I don't want to think about where some of my fellow citizens would draw their lines."
You don't want to know, but I'll tell you anyway. I oppose torture, but I can accept that there might be some freak incident where it might be applicable. But if I were president in that case, I would insist that I do the torture. I would never ask anyone to break the law for me. If the law must be broken, I'll be the one breaking it and facing the consequences. But that situation is a billion to one against. It's not likely to happen. And it happens so rarely that the president should at least be present for it if it does. Obviously, we are talking about the damn near impossible scenario of the ticking time bomb. But with that scenario, modern technology has rendered that irrelevant. I mean come on, if you can rig a good bomb, you can rig a camera to watch the people trying to disarm it. And that camera can be rigged inside the bomb. You can watch it over the internet while they're trying to disarm it. When they get close, you just detonate it. This really isn't very hard, and terrorist groups can already work the internet better than they can make bombs. So even the one situation where I might allow it is totally moot against intelligent terrorists. It only works against really stupid terrorists. But there are a lot of them.
Here's where I stand on that situation.
Yes, the person tortures. Then he gets a medal.
Then he gets tried and convicted of torture and thrown in prison and NOT PARDONED. He has to pay his dues.
It seems crazy but it's not: the world is not about doing right to balance wrong. You have to pay the consequences for your actions no matter what.
One almost hates to ask, but what in the devil is jerry at 5:32 yammering about?
String Gerecht up!
"... over the past few years we've tortured a steady and sizeable stream of people ..."
Liar.
If you refuse to get even the basic facts correct, why are you participating in this discussion?
(1) People who say 'go down' and 'this gentleman' aren't really arguing. They're pretending that they're on TV. There isn't any point in talking to them because they can't hear you.
(2) Catfish - your point - that in a genuine ticking time bomb situation, you would go ahead and break the law against torture - is precisely the result that the Israeli Supreme Court reached. The Court held that torture was a crime and that the people who administered it could be prosecuted as criminals. If a person charged with torture wanted to raise a ticking time bomb situation as a defense - the defense of necessity - the court said that the defense would be considered. But the remote possibility of a ticking time bomb situation could not support a blanket permission to torture.
Unless,
a) You are willing to concede that circumstances may exist in which others may torture you; and
b) These circumstances are as probable for you to be tortured as well as for others; then
you are entirely without standing to advocate torture.
A variant on this would be a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance" approach -- if you didn't know your place in society, specifically your likelihood of being the torturer or the torturee, would you in advance consent to rules such as what Gerecht advocates? As others have stated, the reason Gerecht can make these arguments is his complete certainty that he would never be on the waterboard.
Gerecht's entire argument falls apart on that single two-letter word "if". The fact that "if" certain extreme conditions are met, people might come to different conclusions about what to do is completely irrelevent. The Bush administration did not have a shred of evidence of any ticking time bomb scenario. It's use of torture post-9/11 was a vast fishing expedition pure and simple.
Oh Christ, there goes Jerry pissing and moaning about his divorce again.
If physically coercive techniques (torture) are effective, where is the evidence? If there was such evidence would we not be 'justified' to use it with domestic criminals? Throughout history torture has been used and not found to be effective in uncovering the truth. More often it is revenge. Tempting as it sound in hindsight, these people are willing to die for their cause and accept they may be tortured, given 'truth serum' etc.
Torture advocates only have 2 arguments, which are always trotted out:
1: ticking time bomb (which has been assaulted pretty well; nothing more to say really)
2: Terrorists killed 3000 Americans and all you care about is that a couple were roughed up!! Gimme a break!! We need to get these guys.
1 never actually happens (even with soldiers in Iraq; there are no time bombs, just IEDs and land mines). 2 is just a projection of anger and fear. But in comment threads, it seems to be the more common reaction on the right. I guess they think torture of foreigners is the only thing the government can do 100% right. Also, when the decider decides you're a terrorist, that's it. The 2nd is the hardest to argue against, but only because the person making the argument is generally willfully ignorant and impervious to logic, and doesn't respect the Constitution.
How many terrorists were tortured in order to produce intelligence which lead the intel community to create a PDB that stated in plain easy to read words: BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN US? How many?
How many Iraq Exiles were tortured in order for the intel community to figure out there were WMD in Iraq? HOW MANY?
It's not a failure of technique; it's a colossal failure of leadership. Would President Al Gore ignore what was in the Aug 6 2001 PDB? I cannot think of another human being on earth who would ignore that warning. Bush is really unique.
These "what if" scenarios are so intellectually dishonest. WE KNEW something was about to happen, unfortunately for us, the Supreme Court appointed the wrong man for times we live in.
if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security
The person who had 'plenipotentiary authority'for the nation's security was given a plan for dealing with Khalid Shaykh Muhammed - or least with his boss - and ignored it. Then the same authority approved the torture of Zubaydah, who was demonstrably insane, producing little if any useful intelligence, and rendering Zubaydah unprosecutable even by the nitwits who insisted he was a high-ranking al Qaeda type. So Gerecht's whole premise is horseshit.
I agree with Ryan ,but let me take this a little further.
"1: ticking time bomb (which has been assaulted pretty well; nothing more to say really)'
I made this pretty obvious in my last post. But we can't really stop this. Anyone can link a trigger to somebody's keystrokes. If they type the correct thing, a bomb goes off. This is easy to do. Someone could link the word 'liberal' to Michelle Malkin's writings and trigger a bomb. Obviously they haven't, or bombs would go off many times a day. But they could trigger it to anything. How about the Dalai Lama saying the word 'Dharma'?. With bombs triggered by certain people saying certain things, anything is possible. And any of those triggers are possible. And all of those triggers can happen from anywhere in the world. And anyone can hire some dumbass to leave a package anywhere. Welcome to the Brave New World. The solution is not in tactics or strategy, it's in not fucking over people. When you fuck over people they come back to haunt you. And they can get all the bombs they want, we've made damn sure of that. When a decent meal cost more than an AK-47, you know damn well that everyone has an AK-47. They'd like to eat, and a AK-47 can make that happen more easily than money. And when you're money ain't worth shit, it's just that much easier. Right now, our money isn't worth a lot is it? But our guns are. Not as much as a nice AK-47, but an M-16 is close. But we are facing the situation of selling guns at a premium against much cheaper guns that the Chinese will sell. And the Chinese are the ones who will back it up with bringing economic prosperity to your town. Can we bring that as well? Obviously not. We're hurting people more than the Chinese. The Chinese will actually give money to local people fighting their local issues. We'll kill people on a mass scale and expect them to like us. Which side would you chose?
Ghandi and King both violated the law for matters of conscience and urgency. then, they went to jail--pretty unpleasant jails in these cases.
so, i'm with mnpundit. you do what you believe you have to do. then, when its over you go to jail. and if it works (although everyone here seems to think it will probably not), you get a medal.
but you did what you believed you had to do, accepting the risks, facing up to the likely penalty, with no legal protection. that's why the medal--you were courageous.
this is VERY different from re-writing laws to remove the penalty or risk for acts which should never, never be done except under the most excruciating exigencies.
after all, you'd steal if your kids were really (I mean really) starving, wouldn't you? does this mean stealing should be legal?
same for this horseshit ticking bomb scenario. it has nothing, and i mean nothing, to do with policy, with approved procedures for handling pow's or other prisoners or 'detainees,' of with the rules of engagement, or with law, even if you could see yourself doing it in some extraordinarily weird, scary, and unlikely circumstances.
this is indeed entirely a specious argument put forward by people who just really really want to torture--'just a little, i promise!' its disgusting. it's not why i have been proud to call myself an American (in the past, let's cross our fingers that those days are on their way back). yeesh.
Would he be willing to face trial in the Hague and life imprisonment?
Just wondering
I'm pretty sure that a majority of Americans are basically OK with torture
SO WHAT!!! Leadership is about taking the high ground, making the tough but sensible choices, and persuading others to follow. But now we we have the situation that NO-ONE is willing to follow the US any more, because the world knows that Capitol Hill no longer occupies the high ground, no longer cares about the ideals of the Constitution, and certainly is no leader. All because of this bogus logic that the leader must abandon what he knows to be right simply to follow the will of the focus group. Good luck with that.
The last graf of Kevin's post is completely off the mark. No one -- no one -- no one -- not Gerecht, not anyone -- imagines that torture gets information. It is not done for that purpose. It is purely and exclusively an expression of sadism. It is never anything else. None of the utilitarian arguments are valid.
Not to trivialize, but he lost me at "moral men." Anyone who insists that "men" (as opposed to "man," which is more debatable) is gender-neutral is de facto a rightwing ideologue.
Yeah, we saw where this kind of thinking led us.
Let's ignore the fact that Jr. told the guy who gave him the 6 August memo that he was "covering his ass", and that he took him seriously.
Most likely, if some idiot like Gerecht made the call, the guy they there torturing would lie, give deceptive information, and otherwise waste Gerecht's time. Which is exactly what people are trained to do if they are tortured. Which they expect to be in many places.
If you have good human intelligence that you get because you cultivate sources without torture over long periods of time, you may well find out with more than, well, a couple of days or hours to do something. If your idea of intelligence gathering is to depend on torture, you're going to waste precious time chasing mostly bogus information. Even if something the guy says turns out to be useful, how are you going to know what piece that was?
The only possible use for torture in US intelligence is on people like Gerecht, since if we cause folks like that enough pain, they will find something else to obsess about.
"...if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States...."
Since none of those conditions existed on 7 September 2001, what is the point of this little exercise?
The reason we tortured and jobbed out torture was because our leaders, who primped and puffed about their "principles," turned out to have none worth mentioning. At their first test, they panicked.
We were not the first generation of Americans to be afraid. But we were the first generation to lose our minds to wide-eyed hysteria.
I think this has been well covered in the comments above, but the simple point is: you can't assume you know with certainty who is guilty. The point of having a system of laws in this case is to precisely to ensure a fair forum for establishing guilt and innocence. Any system that starts from an assumption of guilt seems to me to extra-legal
Once again, Kevin Drum makes me fantasize about forcibly wresting his keyboard out of his hands and permanently disabling the question mark key with a hammer.