Does torture work?

Alan Dershowitz is known for arguing in favor of torture. But, he says, "If torture is going to be administered as a last resort ... to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice." (Did Dershowitz really mean to say that just one justice's approval should be required?) Once torture has been committed, John Quiggin argued in his blog last year, the person should turn himself in "and plead guilty to the relevant criminal charges. ...If the situation is grave enough to warrant resort[ing] to torture, it's certainly grave enough to justify losing your job and going to jail."

Does Torture Work?

One of the biggest points of contention in the torture debate is this:

Does torture work?

Opponents say it doesn't; proponents insist that it does. The truth probably lies somewhere in between: It would yield key information in a few cases, but would prove ineffective -- and decidedly harmful -- in a vast many others. An informative Slate piece on torture includes this line: "Assuming that harsher interrogations can produce valuable intelligence -- an open question -- Congress and the president must weigh that benefit against the enormous strategic cost of operating a facility like Guantanamo."

So let's stipulate for the purposes of this post that the reliability argument is a wash -- that is, neither side is going to win it. Torture might or might not work as intended. Working under that assumption, the most logical question to ask is, what is the best method to extract key information from terrorism suspects? And do Americans -- should Americans -- consider that method morally acceptable?

Building trust is the best method, says Anthony Christino III in the book Guantanamo, as related in the Slate piece. But what if there isn't enough time to build trust? What, for example, do the Israelis do when faced with the so-called "ticking-bomb" scenario?

In the comments, Steve notes that Israel's High Court of Justice has ruled that torture is illegal in all circumstances, in spite of being under the constant, immediate threat of terrorist attacks. It speaks well of the Israeli supreme court that the justices were willing to take that stand (though they did leave some loopholes.) So how do the Israelis extract information from terrorism suspects?


Post reporter Glenn Frankel wrote this excellent piece last year on Israeli interrogation techniques, and it doesn't exactly suggest Israeli treatment of prisoners is torture-free. However, it does say that the techniques have moved away from the physical and toward the psychological. Arguably, that's still torture. According to the Convention Against Torture (1984):
For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

In the Dean's World blog a couple years ago, Dean wrote about his qualms with physical torture, then added, "On the other hand, who could object to the use of, say, sleep deprivation techniques, annoying music, severe boredom, drugs, or other less-than-inhuman means to break someone's will?"

Along those lines is this fundamental question, raised in Frankel's article: "Where is the line in a democracy between coercion and torture?" Take sleep deprivation, for example. Is it torture? Is it cruel? Inhuman? None of the above? How about shackling? Exposure to extreme temperatures?

Alan Dershowitz is known for arguing in favor of torture. But, he says, "If torture is going to be administered as a last resort ... to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice." (Did Dershowitz really mean to say that just one justice's approval should be required?) Once torture has been committed, John Quiggin argued in his blog last year, the person should turn himself in "and plead guilty to the relevant criminal charges. ...If the situation is grave enough to warrant resort[ing] to torture, it's certainly grave enough to justify losing your job and going to jail."

Regarding Abu Ghraib, Frankel reports on one Palestinian detainee's view that there is "a significant difference" between the abuse there and the methods used by Israeli interrogators. "The Israelis have rules, he said, and their techniques for breaking down prisoners are far more sophisticated. 'What the Israelis do is much more effective than beatings,' he said. 'Three days without food and without sleep and you're eager to tell them anything. It just shows us the Americans are amateurs. They should have taken lessons from the Israelis'."

Some human rights groups, however, have said that torture is being used in Israel. Frankel writes of one report from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel that determined based on 80 affadavits and court cases that "torture in Israel has once more become routine, carried out in an orderly and institutional fashion."

What's the Israeli side of the story? Frankel writes:
A government lawyer designated to discuss the questions raised by this article insisted that internal safeguards protect Palestinian detainees from random abuse, and he characterized Israel's treatment of suspected terrorists as a matter of self-defense. "The first priority of the government is keeping people safe," said the lawyer, who insisted on anonymity. "That's the basic social contract between a government and its people."

That would fit one definition of the social contract: that the individual surrenders liberty in exchange for protection. But here in the United States, we don't believe in surrendering our liberty to the government. Therefore, the more common -- and more apt -- definition of the social contract applies: an agreement between the people and the government that defines the rights and responsibilities of each. Have the American people given their government the right to torture? Is there a better way?

By Emily Messner | November 15, 2005; 4:29 PM ET | Category: Misc.
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The 'ticking time bomb' scenario of torture gets mentioned a lot. Does anybody out there know an actual, real life occurence where there was a ticking time bomb (or similar situation) AND somebody was tortured AND that torture lead to an avoidance of the time bomb going off? Otherwise, it seems that such a scenario is mainly a hypothetical one, and it should not be so prominent and common within the torture debate.
As for Emily's question whether the American people have given the government the right to torture, I would have to say no. For the answer to be 'yes', I feel that there would have to have been some sort of election or campaign wherein the candidates discussed torture, and then the pro-torture candidate won. I don't recall torture being much of an issue in the 2004 election.
On a side note, I commend President Bush for emphatically stating 'we do not torture'. I think that statement is also an acknowledgement by him that torture is not on his agenda and not something mandated to him by the American people. Quite the opposite. I just hope Bush is being honest with us.

Posted by: ErrinF | November 15, 2005 06:20 PM


Emily and all,

I received my latest issue of The New Yorker today and like most issues, this one is a very interesting read. It is disturbing, too. In the Reporter at Large feature, writer Jane Mayer details the evidence of an Iraqi man, Manadel al-Jamadi, who died suddenly in custody and who was wrapped in ice to hide the time of death.

If we Americans allow our government to torture people in the name of 'national security' or 'protecting the homeland,' it shreds our national soul. America used to be the light of the world. Not any more. Are we going to allow George W. Bush and his ghoul Vice President Dick Cheney to drag our country into the mud of historical barbarism?

They're doing it right now all over the globe, and they're doing it in your name.

Here's the link to Ms. Mayer's story:

http://www.newyorker.com/search/results?query=A+Deadly+Interrogation&page=1

Posted by: Roger Dier | November 15, 2005 07:44 PM


Errin - Does anybody out there know an actual, real life occurence where there was a ticking time bomb (or similar situation) AND somebody was tortured AND that torture lead to an avoidance of the time bomb going off?

In the fall of 1994, the Filipino authorities arrested an Ara in Manila after a fire started in his bomb factory. His boss, a man named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, barely got away. Police found enough chemicals to construct 25-30 powerful bombs and maps of Pope John PaulII's motorocade route for his Jan 15th visit.

Over the next 2 months, Abdul Hakim Murad stayed true to Allah and mostly resisted - taunting the infidels he would kill thousands of them or his brothers would. He went through beatings that broke all his ribs, rubber hoses, cigarettes stubbed out in his ears. He finally broke when he was kept up for several days and continually slapped to keep him awake. He was also threatened to be given to the Jews. It was Jan 6th, 1995. Murad then freely talked over a day or so -and revealed his boss, KSM, his computer diskettes on bombmaking and airline security weak points still hidden in another safehouse, his Muslim confederates in Manila and in 3 other airports - and revealed links to the 1993 WTC bombers and the assassins of Meir Kahane in NYC. Until that point, NYC thought the WTC bombing was home-grown, but Ramzi Yousef was also involved in the Manila activities.

The main goal of the Bojinka Project was the mid-air bombing and destruction of 11 large body airliners over the mid-Pacific, hopefully killing 4,200-5,000 infidels, using bombs Murad was supposed to make and timers KSM would procure. That was supposed to happen on Jan 11, 12th 1995. The Pope was supposed to be killed on Jan 15th by one of three massive car bombs laid on his route.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Bojinka#Manhunt

When Khalid Sheik Mohammed was caught, we got the man responsible for thinking up and implementing the Bojinka Project, the embassy bombings, Jew bombings in Tunisia, the assassination of US diplomats in Jordan and Pakistan, the beheading of the Jew, Daniel Pearle....and his "Masterpiece" achievement, the concept, planning, and operational control of the 9/11 Project. We also tried the carrot approach with KSM for months and got nowhere until the CIA was authorized to go hardass - thus we stopped his Singapore Project (simultaneous bombings of US naval vessels, Singaporean port facilities, and 3 crowded Singapore shopping malls), a plot involving 6 airline planes crashing on the US West Coast, and his Heathrow airport plan that involved both native Pakis and Brit-born ones. The Singapore Project was about a month away from implementation when the CIA's techniques finally got KSM singing, according to the Singapore state security ministry, which arrested 21 and beat their roles and assignments out of them, and got them to finger their financiers in the UAE.

KSM and Binalshibh, Atta's roommate, have been induced to sing well, and we know their coerced info in truthful and not lies because it cross-checks with what each other said and with the people they snitched out, helping roll up almost 100 additional Al Qaeda, who are also being "convinced" to ID more in the network.

BTW, the intel provided by the duressed, poor KSM and Binalshibh has been credible enough to Senate Intelligence Committee 9/11 investigators and the 9/11 Commission in establishing what happened and how the plot progressed to success, and who did what on the Jihadi side that what the two said runs through both reports.

What I would really like to see is the Vietnamese Gov't authorize publication on how effective their torture of POWs was. And the US to say how well they did in getting NVA and VC to squeal. Vietnam was the last war in which both sides did a lot of dark stuff.

Going forward, I hope DARPA and DOD contracts are going out to projects to improve on the 50 year old lie detection technology. We are learning that lying causes involuntary minor eye movements all or part of the time. That the brain uses more energy to tell a lie than to tell the truth, and this shows up on prototype scanners. But I suspect that anything past the 5th will cause "toooooortuuuure!!!' claims regardless of what we do, because the Left wants Bush to go down more than they want the radical Islamists to fall.

Posted by: Chris Ford | November 15, 2005 10:21 PM


Thanks for posing the interesting question, Ms. Messner.

I have to say, I think Dershowitz's position is seriously flawed.

First, although perhaps, as you say, we don't know how effective torture might be in extracting information, we _do_ know pretty well how destructive it is to our national moral standing in the world. And the thing is, no matter how limited it was, legalized torture would still be 'US Legalizes Torture' on the front page of newspapers around the globe. It wouldn't matter, as far as our national image was concerned, how much approval was required in order to engage in torture, or how urgent the case had to be. If we had a law on the books explicitly authorizing torture by our government, the damage, from a public diplomacy point of view, would be incalculable.

By 'damage', I don't just mean US tourists pretending to be Canadian in order not to get yelled at or something. What I mean is that on several levels, economic, military, security, intelligence, cultural, etc. we would receive less cooperation from other countries. Since we count on such cooperation to detect and preempt terrorist plots in the first place, we would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Second, just as law reflects society's principles, so it also in turn has an effect on them. When something has been made legal (in any circumstances) it has the effect of making people think that it is acceptable. And that, in turn, would lead, over the years, to a widening of the originally narrow scope of 'legal torture' (may the quotes always remain on that phrase!).

I know this is a slippery slope argument, and I don't always think such are justified. Here, though, I do. That is because the urgency of an emergency, the fact that officials don't have all the information in front of them, and the fact that they know they will face recriminations if they make a mistake, all often lead to irrational decisions. If torture were legal for, say, a terrorist who knew where a bomb was hidden, how big would the bomb have to be, before it would be legal to torture him? Would it have to be likely to kill thousands? Hundreds? (And how could such an assessment even be made in advance? Perhaps only the terrorist would even know the scope of the plot? But could you torture him first, to find out whether it was a plot that you could torture him to find out about??) But the thing is, if you have a law that says, say, that you can torture a terrorist whose plot might kill hundreds, and you think his plot is smaller, so it only kills forty, still: how do you tell the relatives of those forty people that they weren't important enough to stop a plot that could have been prevented, if only more people had been in danger (_assuming_, for argument's sake, that torture might work)? When we saw the grieving relatives on TV, I'm sure there would be calls for an inquiry, for why officials didn't use "all options available to them". Over time, this would inevitably lead to a broadening of the law. Once you make torture acceptable in some situations, everyone who is afraid of someone like, say, the Washington sniper, will want to know why you won't use torture to protect them in that situation, since you will use it in other situations. What if some people thought that torture could help us to find a kidnapped child? If it's an acceptable technique at all, why isn't that child's life worth its use? Once you make it legal, there is no realistic way of limiting its use over the longterm, as Dershowitz thinks we could.

Third, a related point, not specifically in reference to Dershowitz, but in reference to the general idea of making torture of detainees legal. Torture needs to be illegal because once it becomes legal, it becomes, for many people, mandatory. If a captain in Iraq thinks he is allowed to use torture, and he doesn't use it, and his soldiers are attacked and some are killed, he may always wonder whether he could have prevented it by torturing a captive. And his soldiers may well think he could have. Then there will be pressure on the captain (at least internally, if not externally) to torture next time, whenever it might make a difference. In a difficult, gruelling conflict like the one in Iraq, I'm sure that officers feel that they have a duty to do everything legally permissible to protect those serving under them. If torture of detainees is legal, they will feel obligated to use it.

This is one of the reasons for the rules of combat under which the military operates. They take certain, difficult, morally wrenching choices, choices that may torment a soldier for a lifetime, out of the soldier's hands. Capt. Fishback's comments, and those of others, make clear that in Iraq, when soldiers believed that torture was permitted by the military hierarchy, they then had to make the choice of whether to apply it. Many of those people will have to live with the memories of what they did for the rest of their lives. War already takes a terrible toll on soldiers; this is one burden that we shouldn't place on their shoulders. (A similar principle applies for law enforcement personnel.)

_Assuming_ for the sake of argument, that there might actually be situations so disastrous, so catastrophic, that torture was the right thing to do, it should still remain illegal. I cannot imagine a jury convicting (or if so, a judge sentencing, or, if so, a president not pardoning) the person who just prevented a nuclear device from destroying all of Atlanta.

We try hard to frame our laws well and we do a pretty good job, but laws still can't be a perfect fit for every situation. That means that sometimes it is right to break the law. It is right to run a stoplight to get a badly wounded person to the hospital. But if we made a law that said so, soon there would be other exceptions added, legislatures being what they are, and eventually our traffic system would be an utter mess. So we leave it illegal to run stoplights for any reason whatsoever. But if you have a good enough reason, a) you should be willing to take the mandated punishment anyway, in order to do the right thing, and b) you can always explain to the judge why you did what you did.

Thoughts?


4/21/2009, 6:57 p.m. PT
MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press


WASHINGTON (AP) — WASHINGTON (AP) ? Interrogators have centuries of experience extracting information from the unwilling. Medieval inquisitors hanged heretics from ceilings. Salem magistrates used fire to elicit witchcraft confessions. And CIA officers waterboarded terrorism suspects in clandestine prisons.

Yet it has not settled a debate as old as interrogation itself: Does torture work?

Secret Justice Department memos, released last week revealing the CIA's harshest interrogation methods, do little to resolve the question. The memos credit waterboarding, face slapping, sleep deprivation and other techniques for producing the country's best intelligence following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They also note that nonviolent tactics more often were successful than violence.

President Barack Obama, who ordered the memos released, said Tuesday they showed the United States "losing our moral bearings." He did not, however, say whether he believed the tactics worked.

In 2006, a group of scientists and retired intelligence officers set out to settle the matter. They sought to find the most effective interrogation tactics and advise the U.S. government on their use. Their conclusions, laid out in a 372-page report for the director of national intelligence, argued against harsh interrogation.

"The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information," former military interrogation instructor and retired Air Force Col. Steven M. Kleinman wrote in the Intelligence Science Board report. "In essence, there seems to be an unsubstantiated assumption that 'compliance' carries the same connotation as 'meaningful cooperation.'"

In short: Slam someone up against the wall, keep him awake for days, lock him naked in a cell and slap his face enough, and he will probably say something. That doesn't necessarily make it true.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has long maintained that the CIA's harshest interrogation tactics, which the U.S. now considers torture, prevented terrorist attacks and saved lives on President George W. Bush's watch after Sept. 11. He called on the Obama administration to release documents showing that success.

The documents, which are referenced in the Justice Department memos, say the interrogation program "has been a key reason why al-Qaida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001."

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, Obama's top intelligence adviser, told personnel in an April 16 letter that "high-value information came from interrogation in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaida organization that was attacking the country."

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Blair backed away from what appeared to be an endorsement of the techniques' effectiveness.

"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means," he said. "The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

Intelligence from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, two detainees who were waterboarded, led to the discovery of a terrorist cell, the capture of other suspected terrorists and an understanding of the terrorist network, the documents say.

Darius Rejali, a Reed College political scientist who studies torture, is dubious of such claims. The British claimed that tough interrogation of Irish Republican Army suspects thwarted dozens of terrorist attacks, Rejali said, but evidence later proved the intelligence was often useless.

"When the data comes it's usually just incredibly embarrassing," Rejali said.

Elsewhere in the Justice Department documents, there are suggestions that the toughest tactics weren't always the most successful. Of the 94 terrorist suspects in the CIA program, only 28 were subjected to "enhanced" methods, the documents said. That means two out of three detainees gave up valuable intelligence in simple interviews.

When the CIA decided to use waterboarding ? a tactic that simulates drowning ? officials ended up using it far more than intended. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 82 times in August 2002, the documents said. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003.

"You keep thinking, 'Maybe one more time, and one more time," Rejali said, explaining how interrogators ramp up their methods even as their effectiveness wanes.

If such tactics are unreliable, why would CIA officers, Justice Department lawyers and the White House all sign off on seven days of sleep deprivation, locking detainees in wooden boxes, forced nudity and simulated drowning?

The answer, Rejali said, is the same one that explains so much in Washington: bureaucracy.

"The correct answer for a bureaucrat is always to torture, even if you know it doesn't work," Rejali said. "Nobody wants to be the guy who could have done something and then didn't do it."

The stress CIA officers were facing is clear from the Justice Department memos. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed taunted his interrogators when asked about planned attacks: "Soon, you will know."

Tensions were high, the country was in the midst of one war and on the brink of another. "And we suspended the whole idea of quality control," said Jack Cloonan, a former member of the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit. When interrogators asked for permission to ramp up their interrogations, Washington signed off.

The lawyers sidestepped some thorny questions, such as the consequences of using tactics the U.S. has condemned in Egypt, Iran and Syria. They repeatedly approved the interrogation policies.

"They're suits, They're sitting at desks in Washington trying to find a way to allow things to happen, to provide a legal basis," Cloonan said. "It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of these techniques."

Releasing the memos and changing U.S. interrogation policy was relatively easy for the Obama administration. The real test will come after a terrorist attack, a threat against the United States or the capture of bin Laden, when the CIA comes to the White House and asks the president what it is allowed to do.

___

Associated Press writer Pamela Hess contributed to this report.