Tortured Logic

http://reason.com/archives/2011/05/09/tortured-logic

Tortured Logic
Does the killing of Osama bin Laden vindicate the use of torture?
Steve Chapman | May 9, 2011

An old joke: "Why do elephants paint their toenails red?" I don't know. "So 
they can hide in the tomato patch." There are no elephants in the tomato 
patch. "See? It works."

That's the sort of logic deployed by defenders of the Bush administration's 
torture program. After being waterboarded, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh 
Mohammed admitted knowing someone later found to be Osama bin Laden's 
courier. The CIA eventually located the man and followed him to the house 
where bin Laden was killed. Voila! The information from Mohammed vindicates 
these methods.

But it turns out that Mohammed also lied about the courier, saying he was a 
retired nobody. From this, CIA officials now claim, they knew the guy had to 
be a big deal. It was a crucial clue.

That's right: When tortured detainees provide truthful information, they 
prove torture works, and when they lie, they prove it works. If Mohammed had 
broken into a chorus of "Y.M.C.A.," that would have proved the same.

This bizarre reasoning is one of the many oddities about the defense of 
torture. Another is that the advocates never, ever refer to it as torture.

Mark Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote a 
column for The Washington Post defending what he called "enhanced 
interrogation techniques." Former Justice Department official John Yoo 
referred to them as "tough interrogations."

Let's be more specific. Mohammed underwent simulated drowning 183 times. 
Methods used on him and others, reports The New York Times, include "slamming 
prisoners into walls, shackling them in stress positions and keeping them 
awake as long as 180 hours." The CIA admitted making detainees stand for up 
to 40 hours and dousing naked captives with cold water in chilled cells.

If treatment like this were inflicted on captured American soldiers, no 
American would dispute that it was torture. But when we resort to it, the 
likes of Thiessen and Yoo can't bring themselves to use the honest term. 
Calling it "enhanced interrogation" is like calling the Alabama 
tornadoes "enhanced weather."

The evidence that vicious methods work is modest. Matthew Alexander, who 
wrote about his experience as a military interrogator in Iraq in his book 
Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al 
Qaeda Terrorist, says that far from being helpful, brutality usually makes it 
harder to get information from a prisoner.

Alexander, an Air Force Reserve officer who conducted or supervised some 
1,300 interrogations using traditional techniques, told me, "I was surprised 
that the people we thought would be the hardest were the easiest to 
interrogate."

He cites the case of a Muslim scholar, a high-level al-Qaida operative who 
was "as hard-core as you could find." Using a non-coercive approach, "in six 
hours I convinced him to cooperate."

How can it be that a violent, determined enemy of the United States could be 
persuaded to talk without extreme measures? "He's human, he's not a robot," 
says Alexander. By establishing a personal connection, interrogators can 
induce prisoners to open up. But if detainees are abused, he found, "they 
quit talking."

Sometimes, no doubt, torture can loosen a tongue. But once a high-value 
operative is brutalized, there is no way to know what he might have divulged 
under more patient, humane interrogation. If he spills secrets after being 
waterboarded, it "proves" that torture works. If he withholds information, 
it "proves" that nothing else would have sufficed.

But what if torture does sometimes work? Mere effectiveness is not enough to 
justify it. Yoo was once asked about the legality of "crushing the testicles 
of a person's child," and he did not rule it out.

Why should he? If torturing a terrorist failed, wouldn't we be justified in 
torturing his wife or his children to get the truth?

If waterboarding is OK, why not crushing testicles? Why not pulling out 
fingernails? Why not the most agonizing methods an evil mind could devise? 
The advocates of waterboarding are much more eager to declare what is allowed 
than what is forbidden—if anything.

In the end, they don't really care about imposing limits, and they don't 
really care if torture is effective or not. Torture, in the minds of its 
apologists, is not a means to a good result. It's a good result all by itself

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