What Doesn't Work About Torture

My colleague-who-I've-never-actually-met Mark Bowden writes in defense of waterboarding for The Philadelphia Inquirer and, I think, misstates the "torture doesn't work" thesis in the course of it: "Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information."

This is a strawman that's easy enough to knock down. The thesis that "torture doesn't work" isn't the thesis that one can never torture a guy into saying something that's true. In the limiting case, if you capture a guy who you think is a terrorist but who is not, in fact, a terrorist and then torture him into giving up information about plots the victim will, at some point, plead that he doesn't know anything. The question, though, is whether or not torture enhances your overall knowledge of the situation. The problem with torture isn't that it's some kind of truth-negator that makes people lie. The problem is that it just makes people talk and talk and talk and talk until you stop torturing them. Will some of the information be good? Possibly. Will any of it be reliable? No.

Comments

Will some of the information be good? Possibly. Will any of it be reliable? No.

Oh, please. Matthew is using more straw to build his straw man than Bowden did.

There is no reason to think that a person who isn't "tortured" will produce any more reliable information. After all, what reason does a non-"tortured" person have to tell anyone the truth? None.

Maybe in Matthew's fantasy land, people who aren't "tortured" will just talk to interrogators and everything they say will be the truth. But in reality, it doesn't work that way. A non-"tortured" person can tell the truth or lie, just as a "tortured" person can.

In both cases, you are dealing with the probability that the person will tell the truth. And that probability is likely higher in the case of "torture" than in the case of non-"torture".

("Torture" in scare-quotes throughout, since waterboarding is not, necessarily, actual torture.)

Posted by Al | December 24, 2007 9:36 AM

you have no rational basis or defense for your stated belief that causing someone excessive physical pain or fear will tell you the truth.

As has been stated over and over, what you do produce is an environment where you are told what you want to hear, what you ask to hear.

That and the truth are often quite at odds, look into the history of law enforcement on the south side of Chicago for some good examples.

Posted by dbt | December 24, 2007 9:46 AM

The fact is that torture for the purpose of extracting confessions, whether true or false, is very effective (just ask John McCain). However, in the absence of corroboration, torture to obtain information is a waste of time. Without corroboration, there is no way of telling whether the information obtained is true or not.

Posted by SLC | December 24, 2007 9:53 AM

I've been meaning to track down a rather interesting book I read sometime back on torture in early modern France, and this finally got me around to doing it:

Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France, by Lisa Silverman.

From the blurb (and no, there's nothing about Swarthmorofascism . . .)

"At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice."

No comment (except perhaps something about how it's one thing to try to undo the New Deal, or Progressive-era reforms, but this crew is trying to drag us back to the 17th century. When do we start getting literal witch-hunts, I wonder?)

Posted by Dan S. | December 24, 2007 9:58 AM

Professional interrogators aren't idiots. Whether or not they are using "torture" (I use the scare quotes here for the same reason Al does), interrogators don't just take captives' information at face value, they attempt to corroborate it, test it for inconsistencies, etc., and they call bullshit when they catch the captive in a lie. As the captive realizes that his interrogators are able to tell when he's lying, lying becomes a less viable option. Jesus, hasn't anyone here ever watched NYPD Blue? They demonstrated how this works about 300 times. Yeah, it was a TV show, but there were real NYPD cops working on the show as consultants.

Posted by Fred | December 24, 2007 10:00 AM

I would love for someone to waterboard Al and Fred within an inch of their lives and have them report back on whether or not it was "torture."

Posted by Bill | December 24, 2007 10:06 AM

Al, Fred,

Please die painfully in a fire, monsters.

Posted by LarryM | December 24, 2007 10:07 AM

Something about the 'does torture work' debate makes me uncomfortable.

The reason I'm against torture is that it's horrifying and barbaric to do these things to another human being. The fact that it's rarely effective is convenient for me - it helps get to the same place, but if I argue that I am implying that if it were REALLY effective, I'd have to give in and so 'ok, let's torture people' - something I still don't believe we should do.

It would probably be effective to round up the children of our Gitmo prisoners and hold them hostage, mutilating and slowly killing them in the event of a terror attack over a live video feed into their father/prisoner's cell. If it were found THAT were effective, would everyone be ok with it because it 'works'?

I don't think so. Sometimes you just have to draw a moral line in the sand, in spite of potential cost.

Posted by ssdagger | December 24, 2007 10:12 AM

Nice post, Matt. This nails it.

Trolls like Al and Fred aside, the wingnut meme is that "liberals" believe the tortured can never tell the truth. But to the tortured, the only truth is that the torture must stop, and anthing that brings relief is good enough.

But I do have to laugh at poor Fred, who takes TV entertainment for fact. Guys like Fred self-admittedly prefer fiction to truth and don't even see the irony of defending torture for that reason.

Smarter trolls, please.

Posted by Joel | December 24, 2007 10:13 AM

Agreed with others that this is a silly line of argument. Surely many who are tortured give up valuable information they otherwise wouldn't, however the averages play out.

I believe the best argument is the one made by The Economist, which appropriately makes these speculative does-terror-really-work arguments irrelevant (as if guys like Yglesias have any clue either way in the first place...):

" Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it. "

Posted by Steve Conover | December 24, 2007 10:15 AM

The other thing about torture that doesn't work is defiance of global standards for decency. Making every civilized country distrust and despise America hurts our security; and if continued much longer, it will hurt us much more.

Posted by Gary Sugar | December 24, 2007 10:24 AM

Did any of you bother to read the Bowden essay Matt linked to? It doesn't seem so. Key graph & change:

"It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.

Which is why I say that waterboarding Zubaydah may have been illegal, but it wasn't wrong."

Posted by Fred | December 24, 2007 10:38 AM

I would love for someone to waterboard Al and Fred within an inch of their lives

...and then go the extra mile...

Posted by McKingford | December 24, 2007 10:39 AM

If torture always produces false information, it would be incredibly valuable. Just ask yes/no questions and negate.

It's all about entropy people!

Posted by Eric Rachlin | December 24, 2007 10:46 AM

In both cases, you are dealing with the probability that the person will tell the truth. And that probability is likely higher in the case of "torture" than in the case of non-"torture".

("Torture" in scare-quotes throughout, since waterboarding is not, necessarily, actual torture.)

Surely you see the problem here, Al, which I assume flows from your own moral misgivings about torture, however much you try to suppress them. On the one hand, you want to suggest that torture is more likely to produce truth than non-torture, but on the other hand you want to resist the suggestion that waterboarding is torture. Well, which is it? Do you believe that waterboarding is more likely to produce truth than conventional interrogations methods and than what you would consider indisputably torture? Or do you want to say that all methods of torture are more likely to produce truth than conventional interrogation methods?

Are you, in other words, making an argument specifically on behalf of waterboarding as a superior interrogation method - but against torture, either for moral reasons or for efficiency reasons? Or are you embracing torture as a more effective set of interrogation techniques, in which case your precision about scare quotes is pointless or an expression of your own moral rejection of torture?

This is leaving aside other empirical questions about whether waterboarding is a more effective interrogation technique than conventional interrogation techniques - I take it we have absolutely no evidence that it is, and in fact the assertions of what we gained from waterboarding AZ and others from top officials like Tenet and others have been surprisingly tepid when you look closely at them, and certainly have not offered an affirmative answer to one of the essential questions, which is whether valuable information was garnered that could not have otherwise been obtained.

Posted by Jeff | December 24, 2007 10:51 AM

This line -

("Torture" in scare-quotes throughout, since waterboarding is not, necessarily, actual torture.)

- is also from Al and should have been italicized in my comment on it.

Posted by Jeff | December 24, 2007 10:54 AM

Jeff,

You misread Al. He's the kind of guy who volunteers for death squads. He has no moral misgivings about torture. He realizes that some people do, though, so he resorts to dishonesty. Well, in Al's case "resorts to" isn't really appropriate; it's sort of like saying that someone "resorts to" breathing.

Posted by LarryM | December 24, 2007 10:56 AM

Remember, there's no longer any justification for our society and its institutions to follow honorable standards in and of themselves.

With the modern right wing view, mature and bold people are only required to be slightly more honorable than the worst imaginable suspect in custody.

Thankfully, it is much simpler now, as we now know that any time spent in thinking of what sorts of people we ought be is wasted time -- we only need think of what our enemies might be like.

Any other approach to thinking about our own standards of honor and rectitude is obviously the product of wretched and cowardly obsessions for the accused.

Also, no possible harm could ever come from training and encouraging the spread of a professional core of sadists.

Those who worry of such things are falsely and seditiously open to the notion that U.S. military or police personnel are merely humans, instead of the completely self-controlled and supra-psychological demigods which Good Americans know them to be.

Posted by El Cid | December 24, 2007 10:57 AM

Jesus, hasn't anyone here ever watched NYPD Blue? They demonstrated how this works about 300 times. Yeah, it was a TV show, but there were real NYPD cops working on the show as consultants.

Jesus indeed. It seems really telling to me that people defending the utility of torture often cite examples from TV cop shows to buttress their arguments. N.B., guys: regardless of what "consultants" the producers of "24" or "NYPD Blue" might hire, the shows are still fantasy.

Posted by James Gary | December 24, 2007 11:05 AM

The fact that such vulgar discussions as these take place in formerly decent quarters, where colleagues at publications like The Atlantic now routinely debate the expected utilities of various forms of induced agony, leads me to think we have already lost something so precious that we might never get it back.

Perhaps there is just something to be said for the preservation of unthinking cognitive and moral taboos, Forbidden Zones of human waywardness where monsters are known to dwell, and even rational calculation declines to tread.

I'm just one American so I only get one vote, but I personally would prefer that the agents of my government refrain from the worst forms of barbarism, even if that means I must accept the risk that the occasional barbarous enemy might exploit our self-restraint to do me harm. I love my life, but I am not so cowhearted that I would authorize my protectors to do absolutely anything they need to do to preserve it.

Posted by Dan Kervick | December 24, 2007 11:05 AM

The fact is that torture for the purpose of extracting confessions, whether true or false, is very effective (just ask John McCain). However, in the absence of corroboration, torture to obtain information is a waste of time. Without corroboration, there is no way of telling whether the information obtained is true or not.
Posted by SLC

The great mistakes Lefties make are: (1)Assuming that the interrogators go into an isolated room with a terrorist and lack any means of going outside that room and verifying if the terrorist is lying or not.(2)Assuming the Muslim college student recruited into terror is automatically smarter than any of the interrogators and thus able to outsmart them with lies. (3) That all Muslims are piled into the interrogation room, willy-nilly, innocent and guilty alike, and any truth gained will be overwhelmed with the lies of the innocent Jihadis saying anything...

1. Corroboration is vital to the interrogation protocol at each step. It is built in, and gets better when you know more and more about the Jihadi enemy. You have a global database at hand, thousands of interrogations and a database of forensic evidence from raided terror camps, intercepted communications and many of the questions asked are questions the intererogators know with 100% confidence the answer to - but the captured enemy does not know they know. The reason to ask those questions is to learn when the enemy lies, and destroy their confidence that lies will pass undetected and unpunished. When going into the unknown, when the terrorist names preachers or recruiters or co-bombers...we go out and check if such people exist with the intelligence resources of over 60 countries cooperating with us. Caches of explosives described have combat teams going out and verifying if the cache exists while the Islamoid gets other questions. Plots are analyzed, sometimes by "B-Teams" set up to prove the terrorist is lying and opposing what the interrogators believe. All along the way, every nugget is scrutinized - is it gold or turd, and how do we check it out?

2. Not only are the Muslim college students and the suicide bomb fodder less bright than most nations interrogators - Even the most highly intelligent and fanatic, like KSM, are made "stupid" by lack of sleep and wearing them down with teams pressing on them.

3. We have limited numbers of interrogators. That is why every effort is made to weed out the Jihadis into high-value targets we suspect have great intelligence value and reject wasting any time on the stupid 17 year old Talibani goatherder handed an AK-47 two months ago or the dumbass Black Muslim recruited by a Jihadi cell in America that is at a junior level, knows nothing, and used mainly to fetch coffee. During interrogations, every effort is made to match info from various people interrogated and weed out those that have only useless or out of date info as a waste of time and resources.

McCain, of course, is lying out his ass when he makes blanket statements that "Torture Never Works!". It worked on him. He admitted such in a book he wrote in the 70s. His only success was in exploiting weaknesses in the Vietnamese ability to corroborate & detect lies (his captors lacked databases, shared info between interrogation teams poorly)

Posted by Chris Ford | December 24, 2007 11:08 AM

I have a proposal on intelligence gathering in preparation for the CIA. All I can say about it at this point is that it involves acquiring one million monkeys and one million typewriters; the actual procedure for information gathering is still secret. The two advantages my proposal has over current techniques are (a) it should produce results that on average are as informative as those produced by torture, and (b) it's not actually immoral.

Posted by RSA | December 24, 2007 11:08 AM

You misread Al.

It doesn't really matter (and I note that dishonesty and moral misgivings are hardly inconsistent). The point is that there is a deep inconsistency, or evasive unclarity, in Al's position which he should address. Does he believe that torture generally produces better results in interrogation than other techniques? Or does he think specifically waterboarding produces better results? Does he think waterboarding is torture? If not, does he believe torture would produce better results than waterboarding? If that's the case, does he advocate torture, and if not, why not?

To be honest, I don't think those sorts of questions are questions that Al has thought about - it seems more like he is interested in a series of tactical moves in a political debate, not anything to do with the facts of the matter and the moral evaluation of the matter.

Posted by Jeff | December 24, 2007 11:15 AM

Hey, there we have Chris Sime Fraud who is only worth spitting at and never reading pitching for torture. Slime on degenerate Chris Fraud.

Posted by Jennifer | December 24, 2007 11:15 AM

Notice how all the crazy monsters come out to play here like crazy monsters will do. Just for Christmas. Dreaming of torture.

Posted by Jennifer | December 24, 2007 11:18 AM

Al, who wrote, “There is no reason to think that a person who isn’t ‘tortured’ will produce any more reliable information” (and others interested) would surely benefit from reading Stephen Budiansky’s article on the topic, “Truth Extraction,” which was published right here in The Atlantic a couple years back.

Posted by jason | December 24, 2007 11:19 AM

Matthew is using more straw to build his straw man than Bowden did.

It's not a straw man if it's in quotes.

There is no reason to think that a person who isn't "tortured" will produce any more reliable information. After all, what reason does a non-"tortured" person have to tell anyone the truth? None.

Wow, that is the most pathetically wrong statement I've ever seen from Al.

Yeah, without torture, prisoners never do any talking. There is no such thing as plea bargaining, guilty consciences, boredom, ego or attempted disinformation.

Back on this planet, prisoners have lots of reasons for talking. Decent interrogators (not all of them are, and the CIA has a lower ratio of them than law enforcement) must sort between the various motivations to distinguish truth from lies. With all the items I listed, the prisoner has some incentive to tell at least *some* truth--otherwise, everything they say will be completely disregarded--or the criminal penalties they'll be subject to will increase.

Torture, which focuses on the immediate consequences of telling a piece of information, doesn't have that incentive for the truth. Lies work as well as the truth. By adding that powerful short term motivator for lies, the more subtle, fruitful means of extracting information become lost in the noise.

Posted by Consumatopia | December 24, 2007 11:20 AM

The great mistakes Lefties make are: (1)Assuming that the interrogators go into an isolated room with a terrorist and lack any means of going outside that room and verifying if the terrorist is lying or not.(2)Assuming the Muslim college student recruited into terror is automatically smarter than any of the interrogators and thus able to outsmart them with lies. (3) That all Muslims are piled into the interrogation room, willy-nilly, innocent and guilty alike, and any truth gained will be overwhelmed with the lies of the innocent Jihadis saying anything...

Obviously, if we're interrogating them, that implies that they know things we don't know. They know whether they personally are a terrorist. They know the local social networks, the local language, the local culture--information that won't be in the databases of a Western bureaucratic culture. This is an information asymmetry that they employ to their advantage--even if the "advantage" might just be an innocent goat herder pointing fingers at people of rival tribes so that torture will stop.

McCain, of course, is lying out his ass when he makes blanket statements that "Torture Never Works!". It worked on him. He admitted such in a book he wrote in the 70s.

You're pathetic.

Posted by Consumatopia | December 24, 2007 11:38 AM

Re Chris Ford

Mr. Ford, in his rather lengthy discussion, failed to refute what I said in my comment. I stated that information obtained under torture is worthless unless corroborated. Mr. Ford provided a long discussion which agreed with that statement. Mr. Ford also is suffering from a reading comprehension problem. My reference to Senator McCain was relative to his making a false confession of war crimes under duress, which was what the North Vietnamese, like there predecessors, the North Korean/Red Chinese military, was mostly interested in for propaganda purposes.

Posted by SLC | December 24, 2007 11:42 AM

I would love for someone to waterboard Al and Fred within an inch of their lives
...and then go the extra mile...
Posted by McKingford

But meanwhile you blubber and piss-drench your panties about the Great crime Against All Mankind of waterboarding the 9/11 Mastermind and two of his 9/11 plot confederates. Men that had killed thousands and whose interrogation saved thousands of Americans, Singaporeans, and Brits.

I guess it depends what side you are on, McKingford.

***********************
Al, Fred,
Please die painfully in a fire, monsters.
Posted by LarryM

Join your Jihadi pals, LarryM. I alsways thought there should be a medal awarded to any US soldier who kills an American caught working with the enemy.
**********************
Mark Bowden - It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.

This is where I disagree with Bowden. His assumption that US interrogators are so patriotic, so noble, so into saving American lives that their critics who simultaneously call them the most low and evil of all people - worse than the terrorists - join Bowden in believing that they will happily risk their lives, freedom, and life savings from lawsuits by ACLU types serving Al Qaeda defendents, to save the day.

That way, all those who want to seize the moral high ground and make all torture illegal can have their cake and eat it too by putting all the onus on American professionals working counterterror jobs. If the interrogators guess right and get life-saving info, some will call them heroes as they are prosecuted and lose most of their savings in court and finally get "mercy" from some politician or lawyer in robes who "mitigates" their punishment. Of course if they are too late to save lives, or corroboration lags...then they are fully guilty and no one is calling them heroes. They are hung out to dry and the lawyers can destroy their lives.

That is assuming a lot.

The reality is that many in counterterror are perfectly willing to CYA, not risk their careers, freedom, and family's security - and follow the law blindly....If Congress wishes no torture - ever - even to save innocent American lives - THEY are the ones who will accept the consequences. The blame. Not the FBI, not the CIA.

On a Milblog, some interrogators working in Iraq joined a discussion. All said that if orders were to not interrogate, even if it meant American deaths, they would follow orders except - maybe - for something that would kill a lot of their fellow troops. If a Muslim attack then happened in a blue American city and killed thousands, tens of thousands - too bad for them. The survivors can then sit around like after 9/11 and redebate the laws protecting terrorist rights. One said he'd torture to defend his own community, but not a place like San Francisco.

I know that as a Vet, that if I was back in and assigned as a subject matter expert in WMD areas and interrogating a terrorist to save my own people's lives from them, I would happily serve and do duty. But if orders were not to do more than try and befriend the fanatic and offer tasty Halal honey treats if they cooperated, I'd do that, and no more. If I suspected the terrorist was lining up a city - Newark or NYC or Boston - I'd pass that info along so we insiders could save friends and family and the government could have "high-placed" people evacuate those three cities and leave the common folks to their possible fate. But the decision to sacrifice US lives for the "moral high ground" of absolute terrorist rights was made at a higher level than me - so I would offer the tasty honey treat and accept the decision made to sacrifice US lives for Jihadi comfort as the tasty honey treat was spit back at me.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 24, 2007 11:43 AM

I love Chris Ford's description of this fantastic, well-oiled machine of interrogation and intelligence gathering that efficiently weeds out high value targets from low value ones and every piece of information obtained in the torture cha-- er, interrogation room is then verified in the field. Surely such an amazing system wouldn't result in an innocent cab driver getting his bones pulverized in Bagram, or a Lebanese-German car salesman spending five months in secret prisons before being dumped in Macedonia, or thousands of soldiers and police running around the United States chasing down nonexistent plots confessed to under torture.

Posted by Hank Scorpio | December 24, 2007 11:44 AM

According to a former colleague of mine who was a navy flyer during the Vietnam War, we had a very effective interrogation method at that time. They would take the subject up to 10,000 feet in a chopper and give him a choice of two options. Either start talking or be tossed out of the chopper without a parachute. According to my former colleague, this method was eventually quite effective, especially after the first two or three captives took the quick way down.

Posted by SLC | December 24, 2007 11:51 AM

One said he'd torture to defend his own community, but not a place like San Francisco.

Someone who feels that way really shouldn't be an interrogator, and interrogators that include such folk in their ranks should not be given the power to torture.

I know that as a Vet, that if I was back in and assigned as a subject matter expert in WMD areas and interrogating a terrorist to save my own people's lives from them, I would happily serve and do duty.

Good God, I thought I had a low opinion of CIA interrogators, but not even I would imagine a dude like Chris Ford among their ranks.

Posted by Consumatopia | December 24, 2007 11:54 AM

I didn't misread you, SLC. You went with the Jew opinion that torture is only good for extracting confessions from the innocent or guilty, given lack of corroboration.

My rebuttal is coerced interrogation (not torture in almost all cases the way we do it) aims at getting intel, not confessions, and corroboration is built into the process.

Your dredging up McCain as the great torture expert was also disingenuous. The primary interest of the Communist enemy was not false confessions when our people first fell into their hands but actionable intelligence. Codes, American targeting, secrets of their warplanes and ECM, all their Academy graduate friends, American strategic intent, info on morale of US soldiers and populace, carrier ops. And they got plenty of the vital early intel they sought from POWs, including McCain - just as our side got tons of truthful intel from high-ranking VC and NVA we captured. It typically took the Vietnamese interrogators under a week to get signal codes and target intel from American POWs and that forced America to change codes, scrap ECM systems the Vietnamese learned to trick out, and change target lists because SAMs got deployed along paths of targets the POWs hadn't hit yet before they were downed.

The Soviets, after their fall, said they got enough intel from US Navy POWs in Vietnamese hands to reconsider their decision not to build carriers as too complex to start from scratch and started laying keels for two of them.

It was only after the useful military intel was squeezed out of prisoners that the communists went the extra step and tried to get confessions for propaganda and media consumption - something the America media was not interested in from America's captured NVA or VC - or we would have put the effort the Commies did into it.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 24, 2007 12:00 PM

Surely you see the problem here, Al, which I assume flows from your own moral misgivings about torture, however much you try to suppress them. On the one hand, you want to suggest that torture is more likely to produce truth than non-torture, but on the other hand you want to resist the suggestion that waterboarding is torture. Well, which is it? Do you believe that waterboarding is more likely to produce truth than conventional interrogations methods and than what you would consider indisputably torture? Or do you want to say that all methods of torture are more likely to produce truth than conventional interrogation methods?

Are you, in other words, making an argument specifically on behalf of waterboarding as a superior interrogation method - but against torture, either for moral reasons or for efficiency reasons? Or are you embracing torture as a more effective set of interrogation techniques, in which case your precision about scare quotes is pointless or an expression of your own moral rejection of torture?

That's a lot of questions. But I don't think that there any inherent contradictions is what I wrote.

From what I've read, torture can be more effective than non-torture interrogation in producing reliable information. Likewise, "enhanced interrogation", not constituting torture but also not typical interrogation, can also be more effective than typical interrogation techniques. I'm sure that the effectiveness of all of the techniques depends on, among other things, the form of technique and the skill of the interrogator.

So how should we decide which techniques to use? We need to balance the morality of the technique against its effectiveness. Are there some techniques that may be very effective but which are also morally repugnant so that I would not permit their use? Of course. Are there some techniques which are somewhat less moral than others, but which are also likely to be more effective than the typical techniques? Yeah, and I would advocate using them only in special situations. I think that waterboarding can be one of those techniques, depending on how it is done (i.e., I would rule out techniques where the subject is actually drowning, rather than just having the sensation of drowning as the CIA's technique apparently does).

Like many things, it's all a balancing act.

But what I don't understand are people like Matthew who insist that waterboarding, and other "torture" techniques (as well as techniques that are, actually, torture) can't be more effective that the typical interrogation techniques. The morality of the technique and the effectiveness of the technique are independent variables. The idea that all of the most effective techniques just coincidentally happen to be the moral techniques is absurd.

Posted by Al | December 24, 2007 12:02 PM

Thanks to jason--the Budiansky article he linked is must reading on this topic.

Best relevent short exchange:
Wolf Blitzer, "Is waterboarding torture?"
John McCain, "Of course it is."

Torture is, and always should be, against the law. The harm it does to our cause is vastly disproportionate to the very rare, and even more rarely verified, benefits. The idea that our "intelligence network" is capable of doing the kind of corroboration even torture advocates recognize as essential is a risible myth. The "ticking bomb" scenarios are pure tv. In the one in a million situation where such a thing seems real, the junior officer or non-com on the spot makes a decision that this is the case and accepts the consequences. This is called "taking responsibility", something more Americans should have a chance to learn about.

The fact is, we have plenty of time, and time is our ally when it comes to interrogation. Read Solzhenitsyn, a real expert.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 24, 2007 12:08 PM

From what I've read, torture can be more effective than non-torture interrogation in producing reliable information.

What have you read? Because as far as I can tell, there has been very little systematic inquiry into the effectiveness of torture, and what research in that area we have suggests the contrary. I am thinking of the Intelligence Science Board's Phase 1 Report, Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art. Foundations for the Future, which was published in late 2006 I believe.

I will observe in passing that your balancing test is also completely narrow, tactical and blind to larger strategic questions of "what works" - that is, you unaccountably seem to leave out in your cost-benefit calculus the strategic costs of using torture (or what you euphemistically call "enhanced techniques") and being known to have done so. (For fairness' sake, it's also worth including the potential strategic benefits, such as that the bad guys get scared out of doing bad because they've learned or fear that we torture. But somehow I don't think Dick Cheney comes across as all that nasty and menacing to the bad guys.)

But more immediately, you're still being rather evasive. I take it from your response that there are at least some forms of torture that for you are simply unacceptable, regardless of how effective they might be. And then there are enhanced interrogation techniques which, for you, do not constitute torture but which are still morally problematic, but not so morally problematic as to ban them because, in your judgment (though the basis for that judgment remains unclear), they are effective. You seem to believe waterboarding falls into this category. Are there also interrogation techniques that count as torture but that are acceptable because they are effective, on your account?

I also want to note that while you complain that

people like Matthew who insist that waterboarding, and other "torture" techniques (as well as techniques that are, actually, torture) can't be more effective,

you have actually shifted ground to arguing in terms of possibility, which is very thin gruel and hardly grounds for engaging in what I am confident in calling torture (i.e. waterboarding), whereas initially you had been arguing in terms of relative probability, and had confidently asserted that it was probable that torture was more likely to produce truth than non-torture, though again it's worth noting how evasive and dodgy that original formulation was, and I take it to indicate that you probably don't really have any empirical basis for your assessments of probability. Which brings me back to my initial question here: what have you read that has informed your assessment of probabilities? I'm curious to see the solid research on this, since as I said, the research I've seen goes in a different, and to some degree contradictory, direction to your assertions.

Posted by Jeff | December 24, 2007 12:24 PM

It's clear that Al has served as a Republican party operative of some sort, either on Capitol Hill or the Executive Branch...or possibly in their media wing. So his various pronouncements are a useful indication of the thinking (or "thinking") in these circles.

For instance, this:

There is no reason to think that a person who isn't "tortured" will produce any more reliable information. After all, what reason does a non-"tortured" person have to tell anyone the truth? None.

This tells you all you need to know about their understanding of human beings. Take their approach with the more intelligent and honest analysts at the CIA, whom they view as their enemies. What reason is there to think an enemy analyst would tell the truth if he weren't threatened with career destruction? None. Thus it's important to threaten these people as much as possible, until they give you the information you need -- for instance, about all those Iraqi WMD.

In any case, it's always entertaining to watch the various strains of conservative monsters on display here. There's Al, who in the Soviet Union would have been a speechwriter for members of the Politburo. There's Fred, who would have been a bureaucrat in the NKVD. And there's Chris Ford, who would have been an alcoholic factory worker who fantasized about being a Secret Agent in service of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Posted by 23456 | December 24, 2007 12:26 PM

Jeff:

I take it to indicate that you [Al] probably don't really have any empirical basis for your assessments of probability.

What Al has is the same thing a speechwriter for Stalin's Politburo would have had: a need to protect the Party. Al would have been great at it, too. It's too bad he wasn't born in a totalitarian dictatorship, where his natural gifts would have caused him to rise quickly to the top.

Posted by 23456 | December 24, 2007 12:33 PM

Re: There is no reason to think that a person who isn't "tortured" will produce any more reliable information.

Actually, during the Cold War we had pretty fair luck with turn-coats and defectors and informants spilling important secrets to us. Sure, we got some disinformatsiya along the way too. But the fact that we were (for the most part) The Good Guys gave people dissatisfied with Communism a reason to talk to us as they had decided we were the better option, better enough in fact to betray their own compatriots. Unfortunately we have lost that now, and it will take a long time to get it back. Why would anyone defect now if they know the water-boarding chamber awaits them?

Posted by Jonf | December 24, 2007 12:34 PM

Chris Ford: people who express the views you have expressed here ought to be barred from service in the military.

1. Corroboration is vital to the interrogation protocol at each step. It is built in, and gets better when you know more and more about the Jihadi enemy. You have a global database at hand, thousands of interrogations and a database of forensic evidence from raided terror camps, intercepted communications and many of the questions asked are questions the intererogators know with 100% confidence the answer to - but the captured enemy does not know they know. The reason to ask those questions is to learn when the enemy lies, and destroy their confidence that lies will pass undetected and unpunished.

You are correct that torture under these circumstances can be effective. The problem is that this is an argument for ROUTINE AND UBIQUITOUS torture as a standard method of interrogation, NOT for the exceptional "ticking bomb" scenario. To the extent that Vietnamese torture of US POWs was an effective method of information gathering, it was precisely this type of routine torture used as punishment for lying in interrogations intended to confirm information they already knew. The effective torture I've read about involved captive GIs, rather than pilots, confirming the NVA's already very detailed intelligence regarding US battlefield deployments and operations.

You are thus arguing that it would be helpful to US intelligence to routinely torture captives in order to confirm or expand information that may be helpful in the long term. Let me just suggest to you that the overall effect of the United States' adoption of torture as a routine method of interrogation under the Bush Administration has not been a net security or political gain for the United States.

Posted by brooksfoe | December 24, 2007 12:36 PM

"I know that as a Vet, that if I was back in and assigned as a subject matter expert in WMD areas and interrogating a terrorist to save my own people's lives from them, I would happily serve and do duty."

Good God, I thought I had a low opinion of CIA interrogators, but not even I would imagine a dude like Chris Ford among their ranks.
Posted by Consumatopia

Funny, I thought I had a low opinion of traitors that thought enemy comfort was more important than American lives, but not even I would imagine a dude like Consumatopia would be so open about it.

If you had knowledge in a vital area, like Marfan virus, and the US government said that had a terrorist who was dabbling with it and they wanted your expertise to assist in an interrogation to save lives - a normal American would not refuse to help. A Left would. A Lefty like Consumatopia would pray the "Jihadi freedom fighter" held out.

*********************
According to a former colleague of mine who was a navy flyer during the Vietnam War, we had a very effective interrogation method at that time. They would take the subject up to 10,000 feet in a chopper and give him a choice of two options. Either start talking or be tossed out of the chopper without a parachute. According to my former colleague, this method was eventually quite effective, especially after the first two or three captives took the quick way down.
Posted by SLC

Never happened.
It was one of the great Jewish Left media false atrocity lies of the Vietnam War. Now repeated by Jews and Lefties as if it was Gospel as to what did happen. The myth has been well analyzed by military historians who found the only incident was two disgruntled servicemen cooked up a plot to photograph one of the two pushing a KIA VC corpse out of a helocopter then send it and a phony letter about interrogation to one of the two's girlfriend, who knew an anti-war Jewish reporter in Cleveland eager to run an anti-American "atrocity" story. One of the servicemen received harsh discipline (stockade, hard labor) for corpse abuse of the enemy, the other had been discharged and was out of the reach of military justice, as were the girlfriend and the anti-war Jew who it turns out embellished details not in the original letter to make the actrocity story more "riveting". The helo pilot was also reprimanded for not writing the plotter up on corpse abuse - he knew it had happened - and it took CID investigators to figure out the plot the pilot should have revealed before the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran the photo and false story.

That was the only incident. None. Absolutely no other incident of Americans chucking enemy from helicopters was formally alledged and found even partially true after investigation. And Lefties and progressive Jews, who rarely have military experience, remain blithely unaware how noisy a helicopter is, especially one with an open door. Interrogation is impossible. Communication is by hand signal or by intercom shielded by earmuffs.

The only question I have is if SLC is the liar or the liar is his supposed 60+ year old Navy Flier "colleague" -who was offshore.

Of course, what the ARVNs did and the S Korean Tiger ROK Marines did is a different matter....but what they did doesn't hold a candle to what perversions of humanity's most cherished values were violated daily by the Commie side. Facts the Lefty Jew media assiduously avoided reporting to the American public. Because revelation on the standard business atrocities of the Commies was bad for their cause, might give Communism and progressivism a black eye.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 24, 2007 12:44 PM

Um, for those not as familiar with the people around here, are these last two Chris Ford posts parodies, or is he really a raving anti-semite as well as a moral monster?

Posted by Hank Scorpio | December 24, 2007 12:48 PM

"Jesus indeed. It seems really telling to me that people defending the utility of torture often cite examples from TV cop shows to buttress their arguments. N.B., guys: regardless of what "consultants" the producers of "24" or "NYPD Blue" might hire, the shows are still fantasy."

If you knew any NYPD cops well enough for them to speak candidly with you, you'd know that the only aspect of the NYPD interrogations that was "fantasy" was how infrequently the cop characters in NYPD Blue resorted to violence. In any case, my point wasn't about the use of violence but about the use of corroboration and tests for inconsistencies that was part of the interrogation technique on NYPD Blue. Chris Ford did a better job of explaining this in a different context in a later post.

"Chris Ford: people who express the views you have expressed here ought to be barred from service in the military."

When liberals start volunteering for the military en masse, and demanding that ROTC be reestablished at their elite universities, then you might have the luxury of barring people like Chris Ford from the military. If that happens, you can even start increasing the ratio of Feist fans to Toby Keith fans in the service. Until then, you'll just have to deal.

Posted by Fred | December 24, 2007 12:56 PM

Um, for those not as familiar with the people around here, are these last two Chris Ford posts parodies, or is he really a raving anti-semite as well as a moral monster?

No, that's all Chris Ford.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 24, 2007 1:00 PM

"The problem is that this is an argument for ROUTINE AND UBIQUITOUS torture as a standard method of interrogation." Exaactly right!!! If you look at places and regimes (during the modern era) where torture actually was used (URSS, Algeria, Vietnam, several South American countries, etc.),you generally see something in common; a need to convert a very large number of more or less common soldiers into interrogators. The thing is that torture is not so much an especially effective method of interrogation as an effective and SIMPLE method, a crude but easy to use tool that you fall back on when you when you have an insufficient number of highly qualified interrogators. That's why you rarely see torture used in the highly selective manner that Chris Ford describes/imagines; once you break the moral barrier, it only makes sense if you go massive.

Posted by Carlos | December 24, 2007 1:06 PM

Chris, I just want you dead, painfully, not tortured, because torture is wrong. But the reason that I specifically hope that you die in a fire is that it is, I understand, the most horrible way to die. Specifically, I want you badly burned (3rd degree burns over more than 50% of your body) and linger in indescribable pain for several days, begging to be put out of your misery. After that, you hopefully will burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.

Posted by LarryM | December 24, 2007 1:06 PM

What have you read? Because as far as I can tell, there has been very little systematic inquiry into the effectiveness of torture, and what research in that area we have suggests the contrary. I am thinking of the Intelligence Science Board's Phase 1 Report, Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art. Foundations for the Future, which was published in late 2006 I believe.

The evidence is anecdotal. As Educing Information acknowledges, there has been virtually no systematic research on the subject. Accordingly, I am left with what we all have - anecdotal evidence.

But if there is little evidence other than anecdotes, how should we evaluate what we have? Matthew cannot convincingly state that waterboarding is less effective than not-waterboarding. In these situations, others may be more knowledgable than I am - folks like the professions CIA interrogators, who believed that waterboarding is more effective than typical techniques. So why not trust the professionals as to effectiveness? (Of course, professionals should be deserving of no deference on the ethical question, since they are professional interrogators, not professional ethicists.) After all, we are prepared to trust professionals in plenty of other situations - why not here?

Posted by Al | December 24, 2007 1:06 PM

If that happens, you can even start increasing the ratio of Feist fans to Toby Keith fans in the service. Until then, you'll just have to deal.

No, it doesn't matter. I've got friends who served in Iraq and it was spelled out explictly that if they said the wrong things or in the case of the last election voted for Kerry they would be "smoked out" and set up for dangerous duty. The people in the military aren't who you think they are and it doesn't matter what they privately think.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 24, 2007 1:09 PM

Al

First of all, you misrepresent the claims of Educing Information. There has been little or no systematic research on whether torture works; the preponderance of reports that exist suggest that it does not; and there is other research in psychology and elsewhere that suggests that coercion or pressure may actually increase resistance and non-compliance by the tortured. I would add there is also the point that Matt has made repeatedly, which is the association of torture with authoritarian regimes intent not on truth but on confession.

In these situations, others may be more knowledgable than I am - folks like the professions CIA interrogators, who believed that waterboarding is more effective than typical techniques. So why not trust the professionals as to effectiveness?

If this is the basis for your position, as you seem to suggest it is, you are in deep trouble. When the CIA undertook to torture prisoners, it had no experiential or experimental basis for any belief that waterboarding would be more effective than non-torture techniques. After 9/11, the CIA was flying blind on interrogation. It certainly had no empirical basis for judging torture more effective.

Furthermore, as Philip Zelikow pointed out last spring, those who developed the new interrogation methods did not draw on available evidence, particularly from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that did, as Zelikow points out, have much more relevant experience with the interrogation of hostile captives. And we know what the FBI thought of the CIA's use of torture.

Furthermore, the ex post defense of what the CIA did from . . . the CIA and the administration that authorized them to do it can hardly expected to be the kind of professional, objective analysis that would be required to substantiate anything like your reliance on them. As far as I know, nothing like that has happened. And in fact, as I pointed out, when you examine closely the statements from Tenet, Bush, Cheney, Hayden and Kiriakou (among others), they very evasively parse their statements about what interrogation methods produced what useful information - to say nothing of even coming close to addressing the question (which they of course are not in a position to address) of whether the information purportedly obtained could only be obtained through torture.

So basically, we are left with the assessments of probabilitis, and that assessment, so far, weighs preponderantly against your position. And when you add in the unquestionable, multiple strategic disasters that having torture as a policy has caused to the U.S. in its prosecution of the campaign against Al Qaeda, it weighs even more heavily against your position. And all of that is without even getting into the fact that torture is, as some of its exponents put it, a grave moral evil.

Of course, if the CIA acted under necessity and judged that necessity compelled some of its officials to torture someone at some point, then the corresponding duty is to go public with that fact and throw themselves on the justice of the country, and let us and our representatives judge whether that was really so. But instead we got a policy of torture, the performance of torture, the cover-up of that policy and performance, the disclosure of it, the destruction of evidence of it, and we are potentially in for another round of the disastrous pendulum-swings between excessive risk-aversion on the part of the IC followed by political criticism followed by gloves off and going to the dark side by the IC, followed by abuses, followed by cover-up, followed by revelations and political criticism, and so on. All that too, of course, is a major strategic cost to our policy of torture.

Posted by Jeff | December 24, 2007 2:38 PM

LarryM - Spoken just like your Al Qaeda friends would say it without all the flowery "Oh infidel, just as Allah sweeps the impure menstruating women from our midst, surely he will smite you" language they use.....
Join your buds!
If a US Marine kills you in company with your terrorist friends, that should be considered a bonus. A life less valuable and honorable than a foreign Jihadi whacked, the world nevertheless a better place for it.

**************************
Booksfoe - You are correct that torture under these circumstances can be effective. The problem is that this is an argument for ROUTINE AND UBIQUITOUS torture as a standard method of interrogation, NOT for the exceptional "ticking bomb" scenario.

My argument is that corroboration be ubiquitous and diligently followed in ANY interrogation where the Islamoid opens their mouth, be it from the joy of tasty halal honey treats proferred or from being kept 3 days without sleep. It was not an argument for making harsh interrogation ubiquitous. Nor are the Bushies doing that. We have captured over ten thousand Islamoids. Under 30 have been subjected to enhanced interrogation by US interrogators, and only 3 - 3 of the absolute worst - waterboarded to save lives.

Nor is interrogation really for the "ticking bomb" scenario the media and ethicists love to discuss. That is rare, it is at the endpoint of the enemy's military ops. The true value of interrogation is in folding up networks BEFORE they can put a ticking timebomb in place. Interrogate to find co-Islamoids, the financiers, people in their logistics rat lines, the explosives experts, and leaders no where near any time bomb. In war, your goal is not to shoot down the loaded bombers coming at you one at a time. Your goal is to destroy the bombs and bomber factories, where the pilots may be slaughtered or captured in the hundreds in their barracks. In combat ops, to get them to tell you how many of the foe there are, where they are, what their plans are.

. Let me just suggest to you that the overall effect of the United States' adoption of torture as a routine method of interrogation under the Bush Administration has not been a net security or political gain for the United States.

Let me suggest that 3 Islamoids waterboarded in 6 1/2 years is hardly routine.

******************
Carlos - That's why you rarely see torture used in the highly selective manner that Chris Ford describes/imagines; once you break the moral barrier, it only makes sense if you go massive.

Not true.
The Brits were very selective in who they used coerced interrogation on in many cases - like the 80-year conflict with the IRA or the 12 year war with Mau-Mau radicals.
We only waterboarded 3. There was no "moral barrier" to break, the US never went massive - its a waste of time on most low-value targets.

************************

Posted by Chris Ford | December 24, 2007 3:03 PM

Chris Ford types: "You went with the Jew opinion . . . "

Which discredits everything that follows.

Fucking Nazi.

Posted by Joel | December 24, 2007 3:04 PM

Re Chris Ford

The navy flier I referred to was a colleague back in the 1960s so his reflections were fresh. By the way, he was a lieutenant commander in the navy flying A4 Skyhawks off a carrier. Mr. Ford is partly correct. The questioning and actual shoving out of the copters was done by South Vietnamese soldiers. As my colleague put it, American soldiers don't do that kind of thing. Of course, American pilots were flying the choppers and were present during trhe festivities.

Re Yglesias

How much longer is Mr. Yglesias going to allow white trash like Mr. Ford to fulminate his antisemitic diatribes on this blog. I think it's about time that he was banned.

Posted by SLC | December 24, 2007 3:14 PM

"How much longer is Mr. Yglesias going to allow white trash like Mr. Ford to fulminate his antisemitic diatribes on this blog. I think it's about time that he was banned."

Entirely understandable: his comments and positions are vile and disgusting. But he provides (unwittingly) a useful service, by starkly illustrating the depths of the moral rot that underlies so many of the pro-torturers. Open the door to torture, and this is the kind of monster that will come through the door.

Posted by retr2327 | December 24, 2007 3:57 PM

Heh, I think "white trash" is as offensive. But I agree that he's trash.

Posted by Gary Sugar | December 24, 2007 4:00 PM

Fred,

When liberals start volunteering for the military en masse, and demanding that ROTC be reestablished at their elite universities, then you might have the luxury of barring people like Chris Ford from the military.

Did you see the kind of crazy anti-semitism Ford has been spewing here? "It was one of the great Jewish Left media false atrocity lies of the Vietnam War. Now repeated by Jews and Lefties as if it was Gospel as to what did happen."

Any reasonable person, left or right, should be able to agree that our nation would be better off with any defense position left unfilled rather than being filled by an apparent neo-nazi anti-semite like Chris Ford. There is never such a shortage of personnel that it makes sense to recruit those who would only bring us harm. (It goes without saying that torture and even more benign intelligence gathering misapplied can rapidly make us less safe.)

Posted by Consumatopia | December 24, 2007 5:06 PM

SLC- Its a little late in the game to maintain the Jewish immunity from all criticism persists, SLC. It was great when you and the media could get away with it and get people to both fear Jewish power and punish it's critics, even about Israel policies. The immunity amulet was a great source of power no other group wielded so assiduously and for so long.

Alas for you, actions of Israel, actions of Jews when they helped run the Soviet Union, then the oligarchs that followed, the Jewish seditionists and communists in America in the 1st half of the 20th Century, and the mostly Jewish-owned media of the Vietnam era and ensuent movies are all open for criticism now.

Your, and people like you now are slowly realizing your power to stifle is gone. A time long overdue, as anti-Semitism was overused as a club to avoid any scrutiny of Israel's actions, AIPAC, or past activities of the Hard Left Jewish Communists and their many Front orgaizations.

You cried antiSemite, Jew-hater too much at too many people that challenged your power and activist goals. Now you lost their solicitude and pity from Europe to Asia and now into the Americas, where Hispanics and blacks harbor large resentment on the past of Jews as the only tax collectors, slumlords, merchants they knew in America and Latin America . You face a well-deserved ending of an abused entitlement.

*****************
Consumatopia - If people like me no longer serve in the military, there is no way people like you will voluntarily step up and offer to sacrifice instead. Even if you did, were forced to - your sympathy with enemy feelings and rights would lead real American soldiers to either shoot you or beat you to a pulp so you could not endanger them or the mission.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 24, 2007 9:39 PM

I'm pretty sure, Mr. Ford, that "people like you" includes only a small number of Jew-hating crazies whom would be missed by no one but themselves. It was fantastic mistake for any military organization to allow you to wear their uniform, assuming that any military organization ever actually did so.

Posted by Consumatopia | December 24, 2007 11:08 PM

Chris,

I don't know if it's Christmas yet in your lair, but if it is, let me be the first to wish you a painful death on Christmas day. It would be a wonderful gift for me. And then may you burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.

Posted by LarryM | December 25, 2007 12:55 AM

"Fred,

Did you see the kind of crazy anti-semitism Ford has been spewing here?"

I don't agree with Chris Ford's broad-brush criticisms of Jews qua Jews (as opposed to criticisms of leftist lawyers and activists, many of whom happen/happened to be Jews), but if I ignored his posts because of that, I'd miss out on some intelligent and insightful contributions he makes on other issues. People are entitled to their own opinions, even if I may disagree with them. If I closed myself off to the contributions of everyone who had a bug up his ass about Jews, it would be my loss.

In any case, attempts censure these sorts of anti-Jew rants are as pointless and self-defeating as the broad-brush rants are themselves. You can't police another person's thoughts. Mel Gibson may have kowtowed after his drunken outburst against Jews, but do you think he likes Jews anymore after the ADL (which seems less concerned about actual murders of Jews by radical Muslims than by the words of peaceable Christians) excoriated him? Not a chance: despite his abject apologies in public, it probably heightened Mel's Jesus/persecution complex, and I'm sure he hates Jews now even more. Let him hate Jews if he wants. He is entitled to his own prejudices. Society is only entitled to police his actions.

Similarly, Chris Ford's broad-brush anti-Jew rantings are self-defeating. It's true that reflexive cries of anti-Semitism are no immunity amulet, but gratuitous expressions of contempt for Jews, or any other group (the bizarro world of leftist university campuses not withstanding), are still an express ticket to marginalization.

Posted by Fred | December 25, 2007 1:58 AM

We've been over this a hundred times here.

It's not that torture doesn't "work" occasionally. What it doesn't do is work consistently or work BETTER than other methods, EVEN in the "ticking clock" scenario.

As I've said before, the most immediate and direct way to get information is to simply threaten the possessor with immediate death - not torture. And preferably be able to demonstrate - by killing someone else in front of him - that you mean it.

But even that will not work many times with a motivated enemy.

"I'd miss out on some intelligent and insightful contributions he makes on other issues."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!

Like what, moron?

By the way, as for why Matt allows Ford to spew his anti-Semitic crap here, it's because he takes his cue from Josh Marshall, who does the opposite. Any Zionist thug can accuse even Josh's contributors like M. J. Rosenberg of being anti-Semitic or hostile to Israel, and Josh will bend over backward not to ban him. But let somebody seriously criticize Israel, and you get banned over there.

Look at the current post of Rosenberg's at TPM, where he explicitly called for the responders not to engage the Zionist troll "Davai". Andrew Golis, the Deputy Publisher at TPM, has repeatedly tried to tell Davai to cool it with no effect. But he doesn't get banned.

Why? Because he's a Zionist thug - and Josh Marshall is a "crypto-Zionist" - a Zionist who doesn't haven't the balls to actually admit it and engage his readers and admit that he agrees with these thugs.

Matt's just trying to bend over backward here in the opposite direction.

Or more likely, he simply doesn't read these posts and doesn't give a shit.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 25, 2007 6:02 AM

That should read "doesn't have the balls..."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 25, 2007 6:04 AM

Interesting dialogue; sometimes.

In reading through much of this diatribe, it would seem to belie that we are a Christian nation, founded on Christian...oops...Judeo-Christian values(sorry Chris).

So many, in other venues, have argued that the deaths of servicemen in Iraq or Afghanistan were honorable and righteous because they died for principles, those of love of country and the values that country stands for, yet, what that country stands for apparently can be bartered under the guise of saving other innocent lives - were the lives of those servicemen any less innocent?

When moral principles begin to become relative the fabric begins to unwind and soon principles are remanded to the history of a kinder, gentler era.

Posted by Art A Layman | December 25, 2007 10:22 AM

I'd imagine Atlantic as a whole doesn't ban people. Once you start doing that, you are sort of complicit in what anyone says. If you just let any idiot rant on and have his fit on the tubes than no one can accuse you of anything, but if start down that road everyone has to wonder why you let this other idiot rant on and not shut him up.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 25, 2007 10:52 AM

If I closed myself off to the contributions of everyone who had a bug up his ass about Jews, it would be my loss.

Look, I understand being nice to people on Christmas, but Chris Ford's continued posting here is a bad substitute for the therapy the dude obviously needs. Encouraging him will only make his problems worse.

Posted by Consumatopia | December 25, 2007 11:32 AM

"Look, I understand being nice to people on Christmas, but Chris Ford's continued posting here is a bad substitute for the therapy the dude obviously needs."

The idea that anyone who says something you find offensive needs "therapy" is a puerile one. It may be illogical and wrong to feel dislike for an entire group of people based on the actions of a subset of them, but I highly doubt it's a sign of mental illness.

Posted by Fred | December 25, 2007 3:03 PM

Um, yes, very obviously, thinking the Jews are responsible for all of your problems is a very clear indication that you've got some serious emotional, not logical problems.

He's insane, and you're without common sense. You need to spend some time off the Internet or something.

Posted by Consumatopia | December 25, 2007 3:42 PM

You are right Fred. Chris is a monster; that's why I want him to die horribly. If I thought he was mentally ill, I'd want him to get help. Of course, you are just about as bad, you evil piece of shit. Have a shitty Christmas, asshole.

Posted by LarryM | December 25, 2007 3:53 PM

MORONS

Posted by StephenD | December 26, 2007 9:06 AM

All of YOU! And the Nazis facist PIG Comments are UNAMERICAN.

God Help US ALL

Posted by StephenD | December 26, 2007 9:10 AM

"Um, yes, very obviously, thinking the Jews are responsible for all of your problems is a very clear indication that you've got some serious emotional, not logical problems."

Like I said, Chris Ford's broad-brush antipathy toward Jews is wrong, but it's not necessarily the product of insanity. It's more likely due to extrapolating from numerous examples of anti-American leftists who happen to be Jews, and assuming that this is a feature of Jews qua Jews (to over simplify, this is a thesis of an academic favored by those who dislike Jews, Kevin MacDonald). The two logical problems with this are that 1) There are plenty of non-Jews who are anti-American leftists; and 2) There are plenty of Jews whose political views are the complete opposite of anti-American leftists.

"He's insane, and you're without common sense. You need to spend some time off the Internet or something."

If spending time on the Internet deprived one of common sense, neither of us would have any.

"Of course, you are just about as bad, you evil piece of shit. Have a shitty Christmas, asshole."

Thanks, Larry M. I hate to report that my nominally Jewish self and my nominally Episcopalian girlfriend had a pretty decent time yesterday.

Posted by Fred | December 26, 2007 9:32 AM