Torture – Asking the Right Questions

Torture – Asking the Right Questions

Despite the evidence that our military and CIA interrogators have used torture against prisoners held in Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the American public seems to have put aside concerns about what these practices are doing to our reputation abroad and to our own sense of ourselves as a people who uphold the rule of law, including the Geneva Conventions.

Instead, we have a President who sees himself as the “Decider” and who believes his role as Commander-in-Chief gives him carte blanche to ignore the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution so long as he feels his actions are intended to “fight terrorism” and “to protect the American people.” Given that the moral debate over torture has reached this impasse, we should consider the whole question of torture from a different angle. Instead debating the immorality of using torture, what the American public and the American media should be asking is a simpler question: Does torture work?

Let us for the moment grant the Bush Administration the premise that it might need to use torture under some hypothetical circumstances. What logically follows is a series of questions: What kind of information can be extracted under these circumstances? To what degree is it credible information? And given that our practice of torture renders our own soldiers vulnerable to the same techniques if they are captured on the battlefield, and that it gravely damages our reputation in the world, is torture really worth it?

Sadly, because of the history of torture practices around the world for many centuries, we already know the answers to some of these questions. People under torture will say anything, anything, and especially anything they think their torturers want to hear.

As Ron Suskind notes in his book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” when the United States tortured Abu Zubaydah, an alleged key conspirator of Osama bin Laden, the CIA quickly discovered that their suspect suffered from a host of mental problems and was probably schizophrenic. This unbalanced man under torture began to suggest that everything was a terrorist target, sending our defenses towards the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a number of large malls, in an enormous and ultimately futile expenditure of millions of tax-payer dollars to protect American landmarks that were never targets at all.

The only useful information Abu Zubaydah provided was the identity of the 9-11 central plotter, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who has himself has alleged that he was tortured in secret CIA prisons and has made so many extravagant claims in his Guantanamo Bay confession that many question his veracity as well.

For example, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and currently a professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University, maintains that Mohammed is a still “a very big fish,” even as he acknowledges that it is “extremely unlikely [he was] involved in all of the more than 30 plots listed” in a Pentagon transcript of his confession (“Sifting Through Mohammed's Confession to Plots,” All Things Considered, March 15, 2007.

Evidence of the damage to the United States' international reputation is unequivocal. Repressive governments like of Russia and China use the alleged threat of “terrorism” to justify the often brutal tactics the take against their own citizens.

Worse, resentment against US policies in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, especially the occupation of Iraq makes ordinary citizens less willing to help, even in the legitimate quest to fight terrorism.

Dr. Steven Krull testified before the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight on May 17, 2007 and noted that “Muslims share the worldwide view that the US does not live up to its own ideals of international law and democracy.” But anti-American feeling has also intensified in recent years. Dr. Krull pointed out that eight in ten people in the four Islamic countries he studied believe that the United States is intentionally seeking “to weaken and divide the Islamic world.” Because many Muslims see the United States such a great threat, they have begun “to suppress their moral doubts about al Qaeda.” The practical effect of this has “widespread support for attacks on US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, (http://www.publicdiplomacy.org/81.htm).

The United States is already perceived as a kind of “warlord” power in the Middle East, arrogant, hypocritical, and power hungry. Add to this perception, the reports and images of torture used against Muslims that have been disseminated through the news media in the Middle East, and you have a situation where US soldiers are rendered vulnerable even in situations where they are trying to help with reconstruction or just provide security in a situation of near anarchy like Iraq.

The worst effects of the practices of torture endorsed by the Bush Administration have, of course, been felt by the many innocent victims. Kahlid El-Masri, a German citizen, was picked up, flown to Afghanstan and tortured by the CIA and then released without charge after the Bush Administration realized it had the wrong man. Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was apprehended when in was in transit between flights in New York. Through the euphemistic “extraordinary rendition” program he was sent to his native country where he was was brutally tortured and then released without charge. Arar told Jane Mayer in a New Yorker article that “he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. 'You just give up,' he said. 'You become like an animal,'” (“Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America's 'extraordinary rendition' program,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact6).

Dr. Steven Miles in a June 2006 Morning Edition interview about his book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror, claims that "torture has never been confined to narrow channels,” and argues against its utility on the grounds that it “yields bad information,” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5516533).

The book adds to the many documented accounts of people who have been sent to Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan or to secret CIA prisons where torture is freely practiced.

In one harrowing account Dr. Miles presents the case of a young taxi driver who, in yet another case of mistaken identity, was apprehended in Afghanistan by US soldiers and tortured to death over a series of days. The first autopsy found that Dilawar's death was a “homicide, caused by 'blunt force injuries to lower extremities'...later a coroner testified that Dilawar's legs were 'pulpified' and that the body looked as if it had been 'run over by a truck.'” Dilawar's family ultimately received three different death certificates as the Pentagon gradually changed its claim that he had died “of natural causes” to admitting that he had been seriously beaten. No one was charged with murder.

So when we think about the relative merits of torture, even from a practical standpoint, the evidence against its efficacy is overwhelming. Torture is unreliable, damaging to our national reputation abroad, and ultimately responsible for causing irreparable harm to many when our government fails time and time again to substantiate its suspicions of terrorism or even terrorist intent.

As American citizens, do we really want to go on deluding ourselves that we're living in an episode of 24? Or do we have the rational principles and the moral stomach to look at what our government has wrought by using torture in the name of “protecting” American citizens and utterly reject this madness? If we continue on this path will we have any standing at all in the court of world opinion for claiming that we are different from repressive governments around the world whose attitude towards torture is at least more honest, if just as brutal? And when will we come clean with our citizenry about what we are doing to people in the name of fighting terrorism?