THE CABAL
| The National Review's Stupid Defense of Torture | |
 by Daniel Koffler, November 8, 2007
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It's mildly amusing to see Andrew Sullivan mournfully assert, in the context of discussing National Review's increasingly tight editorial embrace of unlimited executive authority, that the magazine has abandoned the principles of William F. Buckley Jr., considering that a tight editorial embrace of Francoism generally and Generalissimo Franco personally was among the principles upon which Buckley founded NR.
Kudos to Andrew nonetheless for flagging this embarrassing paean to torture by Deroy Murdock that appeared in National Review Online a few days ago. Murdock's argument is that:
1) Khalid Sheik Muhammad is a very bad man
2) He was waterboarded
3) He consequently sang like a canary
4) His torturers aver that torturing him helped lead to the apprehension of a number of other VBMs (such as the scourge of Highland Park, Jose Padilla)
5) Torturing Khalid Sheiik Muhammad saved countless many lives
Minor conclusion: "Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud." Major conclusion: "President Bush [should] reinstate waterboarding, proudly and publicly, so America can get the information we need to prevent Muslim-fanatic mass murder and win the Global War on Terror." Jewcy's readers are invited to play spot-the-fallacy. (Allow me, on a peremptory note, to allay Murdock's fears: We are quite likely engaged in an array of innovative, unconscionable intelligence-gathering activities this very moment; and surely, as soon as we've become more inhuman than our enemies, victory in the GWOT is at hand.)
Needless to say --- and I hope it is needless to say --- every single one of Murdock's premises is factually and pragmatically, never mind morally, way off base. First of all, no one would dispute that Khalid Sheik Muhammad is a mass-murderer for whom lifetime incarceration is eminently justified. Yet citing KSM, alone of all the victims of torture in the extra-legal American detention system, and pivoting from that one instance to the assertion that "Waterboarding is used on foreign Islamic-extremist terrorists, captured abroad, who would love nothing more than to blast innocent men, women, and children into small, bloody pieces" is a deceitful rhetorical canard that Murdock makes use of so that he and his readers need never concern themselves with the fact that the vast majority of individuals held incommunicado in secret detention centers, or otherwise rendered to bestial governments to be dealt with as bestial governments deal with their prisoners, have no proven connections to terrorism and have been picked up on the basis of hearsay and circumstantial evidence. (Murdock's claim is also an example of an inductive fallacy, for those keeping score.) Pace Murdock, you (and I) have no idea who the victims of waterboarding are.
Secondly, of course Khalid Sheik Muhammad sang when he was waterboarded. That is what happens when you torture people --- they'll tell you whatever they think you want to hear. No one, however, by dint of being tortured, magically becomes disposed to giving his or her interrogators reliable, accurate information; all that one hopes to achieve by confessing in the face of torture is to make the torture stop. It is up to interrogators to sort out useful information from non-useful, and doing so requires doing precisely the hard intelligence work that would obviate the need for torture as a means of extracting information in the first place. If the goal of an intelligence policy is to garner, well, intelligence, adding torture to the toolkit yields either zero or negative utility. (For an example of the latter, have a gander at the case of Ibn al Sheik al Libi, who is, yes, a Very Bad Man, who was tortured by the CIA at a black site near Kabul and "confessed" to his captors that Saddam Hussein had been providing training and materiel to al Qaeda fighters. God knows how al Libi might have gotten the notion that US intelligence services were seeking evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. One way or another, al Libi's testimony made its way into Colin Powell's infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN. Funny, that.)
Thirdly, any discussion of torture for the sake of the GWOT is bound to be misleading if it does not take account of the hyperbolic, wolf-crying tropes that government officials employ every time a suspected terrorist is apprehended or a plot foiled. (Gregory Djerejian has a good summary with commentary of one instance of the sort of thin gruel we're talking about.) Whether it's a small group of Cherry Hill, NJ poseurs diabolically scheming to attack a heavily armed and armored US military base with weapons they didn't have, or a lunatic who hoped to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, or UK-based terrorist scoundrels who might have succeeded in hijacking planes to the US if wishes were ponies, or that weirdo who packed his shoes with C4 but didn't have the means to detonate it, the US (and UK) government(s) have consistently, deliberately, shamefacedly overhyped, oversold, and outright lied about all these and many other purported existential crises. (DHS might admit, sotto voce, that a particular plot "was not technically feasible," but why should nuances such as these stop a hack like Murdock when he's on a roll.)
Just a sprinkle of induction should get us from the premise that the administration and its defenders will trumpet the best examples of the utility of torture they've got, to the conclusion that this sad assortment is the best they've got, so forgive me if I'm not quivering in my boots.
Before going any further, take a moment to review Murdock's piece. You'll notice the absence of any consideration of whether waterboarding is, in fact, torture (except for one perfunctory closing sentence, about which more in a moment). This is not a bug, but a feature. By the lights of Murdock's argument, the moral status of any interrogation procedure is wholly determined by its utility, which is in turn determined by the tendency of that procedure to produce raw, unanalyzed data, regardless of the reliability of such data. (Murdock, I'm sure, would demur; let's hear his principled distinction between the KSM and al Libi cases, then.) Torture itself, on this view, becomes, if not an empty concept, a useless concept for deciding what boundaries to place on the acceptable techniques interrogators may use, since the tendency of an interrogation method to cause severe physical or mental suffering is completely orthogonal to its justification.
Murdock does, before putting his pen to rest, make gestures towards a comprehension that some forms of torture may be so bad that they should never be undertaken (but waterboarding isn't it.) Murdock unfortunately gainsays this one nugget of decency in his very next sentence when he observes, "If terrorists suffer long-term nightmares about waterboarding, better that than more Americans crying themselves to sleep after their loved ones have been shredded by bombs or baked in skyscrapers," thereby bringing us back, through a dizzyingly circular logic, to the original question. (I must pause here to note the aptness of John (not Juan) Cole's questions for the GOP candidates, particularly the first: "Would you have sex with a man to stop a terrorist attack?")
To return to the thought with which I began this post, if there is one bit of advice William F. Buckley would be uniquely suited to give to the current generation of NR writers, it's that they should stop giving bullshit a bad name.
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Daniel Koffler is a Clarendon Scholar and graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. More... |
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zbird
utility of waterboarding/torture
In general I oppose the Bush administration's actions in the "war on terror," but I can't seem to get fully behind the absolutist, anti-waterboarding movement for two reasons:
First, I think it's disingenuous to call it torture. I have no doubt waterboarding's extremely unpleasant (that's the point), but so was junior high. And from the descriptions I've seen, waterboarding seems more like the sort of thing a bully would subject you to than the shocking, horrendous, unthinkable, quasi-surgical Spanish Inquisition-like procedures (electrodes on genitals, pulling teeth, medieval torture devices) that come to mind when you think of torture. If the military can test waterboarding on its own personnel, and if protesters can do it to themselves to make a point (see http://www.kfsm.com/Global/story.asp?S=7315477), then waterboarding is nothing like the types of punishment that the word "torture" was invented to describe.
It could be that the US shouldn't do water-boarding, but to call it torture is to suck the meaning out of that word and lessen its shock-value when it really happens. Now the next despot can justify chopping hands off civilians by saying "hey, look at the US--they do waterboarding." And that's not the fault of the US government; it's the fault of the ACLU and other "never met a convict who didn't deserve punishment" types who will oppose absolutely everything the US does.
The second reason I can't get behind the water-boarding hype goes to the utility argument Sullivan brought up. I'm not about to join Sullivan (if that's what he really said) in saying that the ends always justify the means. At the same time, the cries of waterboarding opponents that it can never lead to useful information in TWOT just sounds too shrill and too certain, to be true. I'm no CIA agent or anti-terror specialist, but it seems logical to me that some degree of physical and emotional unpleasantness could occasionally soften up a hardened terrorist just enough to get him to talk a little more than he otherwise would.
Of course it won't always work--but somehow I just can't believe all the lawyers and civil rights advocates who think they can answer this question better than the people who interrogate for a living. Frankly, I don't think most of them believe that torture is useless--they would just oppose it even if it could prevent an attack.
--Z
Daniel Koffler
The Water Torture
As a matter of fact, waterboarding was invented during the Spanish Inquisition, when it was called 'torturo del agua'. The semiotics, to say nothing of the semantics, of this phrase, speak for themselves. Wikipedia has a pretty good roundup of the history of the practice. It was consciously designed as a torture method, and until a few years ago, it would not have occurred to anyone to deny that it was torture. Under a more decent government, the US considered it a war crime and prosecuted WWII era Japanese practitioners. The literature on the long term physical and psychological after-effects of waterboarding is extensive. I really don't think there are reasonable differences of opinion about this.
Audrey B
Yes, Daniel
But you forget that zbird is not rational, but a religious fanatic hell bent on defeating those Moslems any way he/she can. Much the same way Moslem fanatics want to defeat Israel any way they can. Cousins under the skin, no doubt.
zbird
Daniel, You say that "The
Daniel,
You say that "The literature on the long term physical and psychological after-effects of waterboarding is extensive." Couldn't you say the same thing about confinement? Does that mean the government should not ever be able to put people in jail?
The fact that you need to point out literature on after-effects just shows that water-boarding is not in the same category of horrendous, gut-wrenching actions that are normally called torture. No study of "after-effects" needs to be done to show the effects of the rack in the Tower of Londer or of pulling teeth without anesthetia. Once again, I'm not saying water boarding is pleasant or that our government should take it lightly--but I think we lessen the moral stigma of torture when we apply the word to anything we don't think the government should do to prisoners.
--Z
GILMORE
torture or not - ask Geneva Conventions?
<i>The fact that you need to point out literature on after-effects just shows that water-boarding is not in the same category of horrendous, gut-wrenching actions that are normally called torture</i>
Your distinction is vague = are "gut wrenching" forms of torture worse because they are yuckier to watch by a third party? The amount of 'suffering' caused by any practice has less to do with its yuckiness and more to do with whether it can crack the people it is used on. Waterboarding has been demonstrated to be as effective as any "gut wrenching" practice, and has even killed people when done improperly. As a question of individual 'suffering' or risk to life, it's on equal par or worse than the forms of 'real torture' you cite.
Waterboarding is controlled asphyxiation. It is banned under the UN Convention on Torture, to which the US is a signatory; it's banned under the Geneva Conventions - in fact at Nuremburg, Nazis were convicted of war crimes specifically for use of the procedure; all the US service field manuals specifially prohibit it (partly because of its over-use in the Spanish American war in the Philippines - see this here = http://hnn.us/articles/44411.html)
The question as to whether this particular practice is 'torture' or not has been settled for some time; the real question being asked (and which you - zbrid- dont seem to care to try and answer) is whether as Americans we think it's OK for us to torture people ("because of how bad they are?"), while still pretending to maintain some kind of moral high ground. We cant have it both ways. To suddenly pretend that this particular practice is now OK, when for 90+ years we've condemned it, is self-delusion
zbird
the definition is necessarily vague
Gilmore criticizes my definition of torture as vague but in the next breath proposes an equally vague definition, namely, whether it can "crack" the detainee. So what exactly does "crack" mean in the metaphorical context you use it in? Does it mean to give up information? So then any method of interrogation that is successful is, by definition, torture?
Opponents of waterboarding think they can draw a bright line around torture that cannot ever be crossed, when in fact the line is inherently hazy. Reasonable people can disagree about what level of treatment amounts to torture--to paraphrase myself in light of Gilmore's comment, does confinement amount to torture if it "cracks" the detainee? In that case, can we never arrest anyone?
Also, Gilmore misquotes the UN Convention, which does not mention waterboarding, but instead defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person...." Notice the word "severe"--a vague word open to multiple interpretations.
Regarding your second point--about whether the US can accept torture under any circumstances, no how many people could die from a lack of information--I think you have a good point, and a far more honest point than those who would conclusively state that no good can ever come from torture. Also, I think the UN convention (which the US did indeed sign) is completely clear that IF waterboarding amounts to torture, then it is illegal for the US to do it. But I still doubt that waterboarding is really torture.
--Z
MIke
Hazy
Zbird, you're re-running a dead pro-torture argument that the Geneva convention is "unclear" and that water-boarding is in a hazy zone. As the comments above have made clear, there is no question on waterboarding It has been considered torture by the United State government for over a century. It's people like you who are trying to muddy things with Clintonesque parsing the meaning of words like "severe".
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