What The Tapes Would Have Shown

Kevin Drum on what the destroyed evidence would show us:

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

I was thinking of this the other day when once again pondering the "does torture work" question. It's a reminder that the right issue isn't "could there be times when torture produces useful information?" it's "is torture as a policy a good way of obtaining useful information?" In other words: Does the time wasted on obtaining bad information, or -- worse -- acting on it, outweigh the good it is. From what we've been able to see peeking out of the shadows of the Bush torture regime, the answer looks like a very resounding "no." In addition to the time wasted and the innocent people killed, the administration was able to confirm a lot of its wrong preconceptions about Iraq, and in the battlefield scenarios at Bagram and Abu Ghraib set the stabilization missions backwards by turning our forces into hated occupiers. Even if some operationally useful intel has come out of this (and with so much garbage sloshing around, how could you even tell?) the systemic impact has been to flood the system with nonsense and brutality.

Comments

The brutality isn't a bug - it is a feature! How else are we going to piss off people enough so that they retaliate so that we have to go off and kick their asses too? If we keep all this up, all their bases belong to us!

Posted by calipygian | December 8, 2007 2:08 PM

Exellent point. Just for the record, how much did it cost to maintain torture facilities and were the results were the money?

Posted by Garuda | December 8, 2007 2:13 PM

Wrong. This argument shouldn't be utility at all. Torture, even if it were useful, would still be a legal crime and a moral abomination. Because Jesus and my mom say so.

Posted by Adrian | December 8, 2007 2:33 PM

I haven't spoken to Jesus or Adrian's mom, but I agree that morality rather than consequentialism should be the basis of our arguments against torture.

Don't dignify the Krauthammer argument by adopting its premises.

Posted by southpaw | December 8, 2007 2:44 PM

Cali has it right.

As Eisenhower warned about money and power interests based around the perpetuation of the cold war, we have today security, military and industrial interests financially and politically benefiting from a state of open-ended war on terror. Which means that their entire identity to some degree is based around the concept of terrorists in every rice bowl.

So given that chasing insurgents is a full-time job and provides nice political hay, why would you ever want to totally eliminate the problem? Furthermore, does it really matter so much that torture is ineffective when you have the fringe benefits of the psychological release in showing your enemies how brutal you can be, and insuring that a new crop of targets is produced in the resulting outrage?

This all sounds unrealistically nefarious on the surface, but consider the Cold War crowd that had the Soviet menace pulled out from under them. Think about the "Team B" folks formed during that time and consider their mindset and how they drifted until finding a home in the current administration and a new ideological bogey man around which their own existence now had meaning.

Posted by Condor | December 8, 2007 2:49 PM

Despite my desire to think better of my fellow humans, I have to believe that this is why advanced nations have largely abandoned torture. As a policy, it IS ineffective in gaining information. Not only does it result in the issues you identify, but a policy of torture crowds out the recruitment and training and actual investigators. Rather than finding the truth, people are rewarded for extracting confessions, which plays to a completely different "skill set". I can imagine how, if entrenched, a policy of allowing intelligence gathering through torture would degenerate the entire intelligence infrastructure.

Posted by Brian | December 8, 2007 2:53 PM

Despite my desire to think better of my fellow humans, I have to believe that this is why advanced nations have largely abandoned torture. As a policy, it IS ineffective in gaining information. Not only does it result in the issues you identify, but a policy of torture crowds out the recruitment and training and actual investigators. Rather than finding the truth, people are rewarded for extracting confessions, which plays to a completely different "skill set". I can imagine how, if entrenched, a policy of allowing intelligence gathering through torture would degenerate the entire intelligence infrastructure.

Posted by Brian | December 8, 2007 2:53 PM

...or to shorten that up:

For the crowd in charge, effectiveness is not why they torture in the first place.

Posted by Condor | December 8, 2007 2:59 PM

I always find it hilarious when the likes of Dum and Yglesias believe someone like Ron Suskind - a writer so bad at presenting the facts that he was debunked by his own source in his Paul O'Neil book. Meanwhile, the 9/11 Commission report - somewhat less of a Bush-hating source than Suskind - found that Zubaydah was a very high level al Qaeda figure - a major figure in the Millenium plots, for example.

But of course, given a choice between someone with zero cridibility but who is a Bush hater, such as Suskind, ad the much more credible, but not Bush hating 9/11 Commission, Yglesias and Drum go for the non-credible Bush haters every time. Isn't that the definition of hackery?

Posted by Al | December 8, 2007 2:59 PM

it also serves as yet another wedge to drive between the left and the right. and, to some, that's a good thing.

Posted by cleek | December 8, 2007 3:01 PM

i·ro·ny (ī'rə-nē, ī'ər-)
n., pl. -nies.

1. Al calling anyone else a hack

Posted by cleek | December 8, 2007 3:03 PM

I'm assuming Al is a lawyer. I'd like to think that only someone professionally trained in selectively presenting purported facts could possibly be so consistently, laughably wrong.

Seriously, nearly every post is an exercise in "look at this little point that I claim backs my side up, and kindly disregard the big picture." Treating the whole charade as a form of performance art, I have to admire Al's complete lack of shame.

Posted by mrsaturdaypants | December 8, 2007 3:11 PM

Torture produces 2 things without fail: pain and depravity. Whether it ever produces useful truth is beside the point since it also produces empty statements that are sworn to as truth to get the torture to stop.

It took a pig like Bush (who when he was younger tied firecrackers to small animals for fun) would have brought us down to the level of using torture AND defending it.

Who recognizes this country any more? Torture is defended in public!

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 8, 2007 3:22 PM

I'm also assuming that Al hasn't actually read The One Percent Doctrine. Mainly because his hackery suggests a limited capacity to read passages of more than cereal-box length.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | December 8, 2007 3:25 PM

Does torture work?

That depends on what your definition of "work" is. For now, let's put it like this: No one ever got a woody from the rule of law.

And that, I cynically suspect, is the measure we must employ to judge the "effectiveness" of torture.

Snark aside (if indeed it is snark), it is profoundly tragic when one considers that this nation was founded and its government carefully crafted to ensure that the whims and quirks of individuals would not determine the destiny of the nation. It is a grotesque failure of our system that Bush and his coven were ever installed in the White House. But it is an outright betrayal that those given the authority, the obligation and the tools to at least blunt -- if not stop outright -- the damage he and his fellow criminals have done to our nation, have so utterly ignored the duty entrusted to them.

Posted by Roddy McCorley | December 8, 2007 3:32 PM

I think that morality aspect and utility aspect are not disjoint, and one should not be "ashamed" of either.

One should recall why the "morality aspect" exists. Indeed, for much of human history torture was one of the standards of civilization. Then came Enlightement and in less than 100 years torture ceased to be a standard legal method. In the meantime government had to handle problems not unlike 9/11: piracy, rebelions, revolutions, terrorism. Yet, norms changed and changes were codified. Were the reformers idiots?

Where American Founding Fathers idiots? Did USA ratify Geneva Conventions in some fit of collective madness?

I would extend a causality chain: torture -> depravity -> idiocy.

Depravity imposes a tremendous negative selection on the people involved in the process and rots the minds of people who remain. People become ruled by manias and obsessions. This includes those who are designing and approving the process, and even those who merely advocate it. Prof. Deschowitz did not start his carrier as a cretin, but who wrote that (paraphrase) it is not true that torture does not work, because it worked for Gestapo fighting French Resistance. (It worked all right, and somehow Third Reich lasted quite a bit less than 1000 years.)

Posted by piotr | December 8, 2007 4:06 PM

Matt, you're still mistaken about the frame. Torture is never done to gain information. Everybody--no exceptions, anywhere, at any level--knows that it is useless for that purpose. It is done because its victims are thought to deserve it. It is never--NEVER--NEVER--anything other than an expression of sadism. This must be understood before anything else has any chance of making sense.

Posted by Frank Wilhoit | December 8, 2007 4:39 PM

Most of the people we're torturing aren't al Qaeada operatives.

In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful -- some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings.

We're not torturing terrorists, we're making new ones.

Posted by croatoan | December 8, 2007 8:39 PM

According to the Red Cross, a supermajority of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when they were picked up. The Pentagon has admitted to photographic evidence of a male soldier raping a female soldier there. Male prisoners were sodomized with fluorescent lights. When the Soviet Union' KGB (who developed some of the techniques we now use) realized that a prisoner had actual information, they didn't torture him and instead made him feel it was safe to talk. They understood that the point of torture is to get a false confession to find fake class enemies and Trotskyites.

"The brutality isn't a bug - it is a feature! How else are we going to piss off people enough so that they retaliate so that we have to go off and kick their asses too? If we keep all this up, all their bases belong to us!

Posted by calipygian | December 8, 2007 2:08 PM"

The US government, brought to you Riley Freeman.

Posted by Reality Man | December 8, 2007 9:39 PM

I wonder if the White House wanted them destroyed, and suggested as much with wink, wink, nod, nod. Now, they throw the CIA under the bus, and make it look like the CIA is covering up the “CIA Torture”. This will divert attention from the fact that torture was Bush’s personal policy eagerly implemented by his/Cheney White House.

Posted by erict | December 8, 2007 9:53 PM

Frank Wilhoit has it right, and Al--God bless him--continues to prove himself such a pathetic wretch that I'd almost feel sorry for him if I didn't suspect he was a total creation of some GOP website.

Posted by Henderstock | December 8, 2007 10:57 PM

I got distracted by Al (I take it that that's his job), and forgot to say:

There's nothing necessarily wrong with making both the principled and the practical case against torture. I know that it seems like making the practical case accepts the "frame" that supports torture, but in practice I think many citizens know torture is wrong, but worry that it's the lesser evil compared with allowing more innocents to die at the hands of terrorists. When you have only principle on your side, make that case. But when you have both, make both. It will make the right decision more appealing, and will make it easier to make the next time.

Posted by mrsaturdaypants | December 8, 2007 11:22 PM

Where's Mixner? He should be in here citing God and the Christian Church for the value of torture, like he was the other day.

Al is a poor substitute for true nutcases like Mixner and Ford.

Sorry, Al!

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 9, 2007 2:17 AM

Pelosi knew!

Huge scoop in the WaPo today. Pelosi knew about the waterbourding - torture!!! - in 2002. And not only did she not object - she and the others who were briefed (excepting only Jane Harman) provided "encouragement".

So I guess that leaves us with the following conclusion: Pelosi = torturer.

Posted by Al | December 9, 2007 12:05 PM

Al, you leave us with the conclusion that you're a torturer.

Pain and depravity, Al. You've got a home.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 9, 2007 1:09 PM