Did Waterboarding Pay Off?
A major debate raged recently about whether or not waterboarding had helped the CIA arrest terrorists who planned to commit large-scale attacks. Former Vice President Dick Cheney especially repeated on several occasions that more Americans would have died if interrogators would have played by the rules normally applied to prisoners.
Some CIA officials later confirmed Cheney’s statements, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked Cheney for having ‘no credibility.’
The debate continues today, and is likely to continue for weeks to come. The New York Times published several articles about it in an attempt to distinguish fact from fiction, lies from the truth.
Writing for JustOneMinute, Toby Maguire looks at these articles and analyses them superbly. His conclusion:
The OLC memos make it clear that deterring attacks was the lesser benefit of the enhanced interrogation program. The real value was in learning the names, leads, motivations, and the organization of Al Qaeda. For instance, information from Khalid Sheik Mohammed led to the arrest of Hambali, a leader of the group responsible for the Bali bombing. That may or may not have disrupted a specific attack (Hambali was working on the Library Tower attack and his first team was arrested prior to KSM’s arrest and interrogation), but the arrests clearly had value. Put it this way – would capturing Bin Laden have value even if it did not disrupt a specific attack?
I think that Maguire’s interpretation of the facts is correct. Waterboarding may not have helped federal agents obtain information about imminent attacks, but the information certainly enabled them (and others) to arrest terrorist leaders: perhaps no imminent attacks were prevented, but it is pretty safe to say that these individuals had no plans to retire from terrorism and that they would have ordered attacks sooner or later.
The above does not mean, of course, that the Bush administration was right to condone waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’ As far as I am concerned, they were not simply because I do not believe a modern government should be allowed to subject any suspect to such treatment.
Still. We should be informed about the pros and cons, and we should have all the facts in order for us to seriously debate the issue. Interestingly enough, it becomes less black and white the more I think about it – not because I change my mind, but because I am starting to understand ‘the other side’ more and more.
This whole avalanche of agitprop from the NYT seems to be preparing the elite liberal zampolit retro-squad for an agenda calling for investigations of the DoJ under Gonsalez & before. This is not even prosecuting political stances, but is prosecuting legal opinion which was pursued with due diligence by the DoJ in constituting what was “cruel and unusual punishment” and what was not. This reminds me of a run-up to what eventually became Stalin’s purge trials in the Soviet analogy to the American rush to “socialism in one country.”
Parenthetically, as an Arabist and Political Officer in the U.S. State Dept, I can assert that the momentary disorientation called waterboarding is nothing compared to the insane torments devised by Arab and Islamic secret services. The Syrian version of the “screw chair” brought on slow painful death by slow impalement, for example. The regime which practices this violent form of capital punishment is the one Nancy Pelosi cosied up to last year, politely wearing a head scarf to demonstrate her deference to the Assad Regime.
Of course, Saddam’s sons were notorious in devising cruel tortures leading to death. Note the YouTube of the clever Mercedes SUV run-over in the UAE by the brother of the head of the National Police. Short investigation, case dropped.
When wusses and moral defectives like Sullivan and Greenwald rant about the DoJ, you know they are pursuing an agenda to weaken U.S. defenses against terrorism, if you know anything about the Middle East.
In fairness, Dave, wouldn’t you prefer that our standard of behavior as Americans be somewhat more elevated than “at least we’re not as bad as the Uday and Qusay”? I don’t know about you, but I would prefer that Americans’ moral yardstick be somewhat better than that provided by the Syrian intelligence service. Don’t get me wrong — I agree that non-Americans in agencies like Amnesty International are being unfair and biased when they focus on comparatively small American and Israeli wrongs and ignore monstrous evils committed by al-Qaeda et al, but I’m talking about Americans positioning ourselves here.
I thought it was interesting how interrogators called in after the Abu Ghraib scandal found that intelligence gathering improved when using less harsh techniques than when using “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
It seems to me that one of the most disorienting things we could do to captured al-Qaeda flunkies is treat them firmly but with respect, just like we would treat POWs. Treating them harshly tends to confirm what they were told the Americans would be like. Treating them humanely would cause them to wonder what else they might have been lied to about, thus causing them to question their loyalty to al-Qaeda and be more likely to open up enough for a skilled interrogator to get useful information.
It seems to me that many of the fans of enhanced interrogation techniques look upon it (like you say) as a form of punishment. That indulgence in emotional gratification takes your eye off the ball, however, which should be effective intel gathering. And the evidence that anything was obtained through waterboarding that could not have been obtained through less morally problematic and possibly more long-term effective means is speculative at best and theoretically unlikely, given what we know about the effectiveness of torture generally. And even if it is marginally more effective under some limited number of scenarios (which is the best case for the pro-waterboarding position) the cost to our values and our reputation is too high.
Actually, Jason, most of the Gitmo prisoners have been treated as humanely or more so than other countries, including EU members like France or the UK might have treated them. I also lived in France for some years in the State Dept service as an FSO and have heard stories of how the CRS treated its own civilians to think highly of EU “opinion” on these matters.
A sentence like And even if it is marginally more effective under some limited number of scenarios (which is the best case for the pro-waterboarding position) the cost to our values and our reputation is too high. would sound hollow to someone who might have been killed in the LA Library Tower had KSM NOT been submitted to waterboarding and Hambali had succeeded in its plans for an LA attack.
And the subsequent whining of Andrew Sullivan that Tom Maguire isn’t as “brilliant” a lawyer as his own “ex” Glenn Greenwald demonstrates to me the Ad Hominem and basically silly arguments being advanced by the zampolit liberal enforcers on the Left to prosecute Bush Administration members, possibly even trying to get Dick Cheney in the crosshairs of their nefarious plotting.
These clowns are turning the US into a version of Venezuela, with the Left taking over the media step by step through positioned elites. Thank God the American military is politically neutral.
Speaking of ad hominem and whining.
shifting the torture debate on to the narrow question of whether torture has “worked,”
[Sargent: PlumLine]
Maybe Garland might want to join the the debate on whether ends justify means with his theological pals Andy & Glenn.
First, it was used three times, and waterboarding isn’t torture by any international standards, except for ex post facto theologians.
Second, ask those 400 victims in Bali, including many Americans, whether they think Zubaydah & KSM deserved kid gloves. Oops, that’s going to be difficult, since they’re all dead.
Third, the silliness of your buddies Andy & Glenn deserve a response, it is in payment in kind. They don’t argue, but engage in polemics based on half-truths and Monday-morning quarterbacking. They both would never be allowed to positions of responsibility in foreign policy circles, even with the standards diminishing to today’s Obambi level of apologetics.
Uhhh…just 3?
The “enhanced interrogation” supporters were using that one before this story came out. Not following your math, Dave.
“Not following your math, Dave.”
Not surprising. Math is a logical and challenging enterprise, quite unlike the spreading of fark-level rhetoric.
A regime which uses torture against terrorists is a regime which adopts the values of the terrorists.
One of Al-Qaeda’s goals is to corrupt democracies by the fear.
My point along with that of Maguire is that if the Hambali was stopped through information provided by Z or KSM stopped the LA Library Tower plot, after the Bali massacre, then a lot of the theologizing is mere angels on the head of a pin, which is what the Merritt response, [yes, I should have said on three individuals, nitpicker] and Garland, who simply is a late scholastic logician freak, ignored. ["fark-level?" hahaha]
Guess you guys and the real world intersect on the level of abstractions.
There’s a long history of torture yielding false confessions. Under torture Anne Boleyn’s brother confessed to incestuous relations with her. In Stalin’s Great Purge, Old Bolsheviks such as Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev “confessed” to crimes they could not have committed. The Spanish Inquisition has hundreds of years of meticulous records in which there are many cases of things they could not possibly have done, at least in the physical world as we know it. A former co-worker was waterboarded at SERE school; he said that he would have done anything to have it stop.
Torture encourages people to tell us whatever will make us stop and it lowers us in the process. (“We’re not as bad as the Syrians!”)
Let me steal from Tallyrand: torture is worse than an crime; it’s a blunder.