Does It Matter If Torture "Works?"

There is controversy right now about whether the practice of torture generated information that led to finding bin Laden in Pakistan. The monsters who advocated it in the first place say that informants gave up critical information after being tortured, justifying the use of the techniques.

First of all, the media are starting to call this EIT, the acronym for "enhanced interrogation techniques." I am not going to do that. I am also not going to spell out "enhanced interrogation techniques," because it is a propagandistic euphemism intended to reduce the shame of what our country has done. The correct term is torture. Torture is not enhanced interrogation, it is an act of evil.

There are two degrees to the controversy. The argument in the press is about whether the techniques worked or not. To me, it doesn't matter if torture works, it's just wrong. Pulling out a pistol and robbing little old ladies "works," too, it can be a successful way to acquire wealth, lots of things "work." Causing pain, panic, and hopelessness is not something that civilized people do, it doesn't matter if it works or not.

Fascinating, the religious conservatives who call on moral justifications for their beliefs are the very ones who don't care if torture is moral or not, as long as it works. Real Christians should point to any number of quotes in Scripture and say, we love our enemies, we do not torture them. I'm not seeing that, are you?

After eight years of depravity in the White House, on February 24th, 2009, the new President Obama told a joint session of Congress, "... I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture."

Doesn't matter if it works or not, we are proud Americans and we don't torture people.

Now - given that we do have citizens, even some leaders, who have no moral standard when it comes to abusing their fellow man, the question in the air is whether torture worked in this case, that is, whether waterboarding and other techniques led to the information that allowed US investigators to pinpoint bin Laden's location and kill him.

By the way, I have no moral objection to terminating the life of a man who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Normally I'd like to see a trial but I suffer no pangs over the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Amy Goodman interviewed a man on Democracy Now who conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq. He goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, and is currently a fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations. I wish I could copy and paste the whole interview in here but it's pretty long. Let me take pieces of it, quoting him ...

The debate is skewed at this point. And one reason why is because we don’t know all the details, and secondly, because a lot is being left out of the conversation. And let me talk a little bit about that. One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Sheikh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn’t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.

The other thing that’s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we’re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information. Former Military Interrogator Matthew Alexander: Despite GOP Claims, "Immoral" Torture "Slowed Down" Effort to Find Osama bin Laden

Okay, so first point, torture didn't work. It didn't get the names. It wasted years of everybody's time.

Another good point made by Alexander:

... when you look at the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques in the case of the trail of evidence that leads to Osama bin Laden, what you find is, time and time again, it slows down the chase. In 2003, when we—or '02, when we have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have the person most likely to be able to lead us to bin Laden, and yet we don't get to him until 2011. You know, by any interrogation standard, eight years is a long time to not get information from people, and that’s probably directly related to the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times.

The other piece of the story that we don’t know yet is we don’t know how the CIA learned the real family name of the courier, who again, his nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And we don’t know how the CIA got his real family name, which really was the key piece of information that led us to be able to monitor phone calls and emails and discover his first name, his full name, which led to us finding him and then him leading us to the compound. So, until we have that information, which we don’t even know if it came from interrogations or if it came from a source, then we really don’t have a complete picture of how we got to bin Laden.

You can debate it as much as you want to, but we don't really know what happened; so far all you have is opinions.

Okay, here are some reasons not to torture that ought to convince anyone:

My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.

And reasons that ought to convince anyone with a heart or a conscience, or intelligence, or belief in God.

You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn’t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn’t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective—we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don’t use them. But we make this—carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they’re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.

And that’s an insult to American interrogators, who are more than capable of defeating our enemies and al-Qaeda in the battle of wits in the interrogation room. And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War.

Torture is against the law and it's not necessary.

Man, this guy is good.

When I was in Iraq, I oversaw the interrogations of foreign fighters. And those foreign fighters, the majority of them, said, time and time again, the reason they had come to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse of detainees at both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. And this is not my opinion. The Department of Defense tracked these statistics. And they were briefed, every interrogator who arrived there, that torture and abuse was al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool.

And remember, these foreign fighters that came to Iraq, they made up 90 percent of the suicide bombers. They killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers. And so, this policy of torture and abuse did not make America safer. What it did was it caused the deaths of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers who are now buried at Arlington National Cemetery. So, this policy has been counterproductive in so many ways.

And one thing you’ll never hear the torture supporters talk about, Amy, is the long-term negative consequences of torture. They won’t talk about the fact that al-Qaeda uses it to recruit. They won’t talk about the fact that future Americans are going to be subjected to the same techniques by future enemies using our own actions as justification. They’re not going to talk about the fact that it makes detainees more resistant to interrogations as soon as they walked in the interrogation room, because they see us all as torturers. So they’re not going to talk about all these long-term negative consequences.

That is a very important couple of points. Rational people understand that torturing somebody is the defining act of evil, and good people will sign up to oppose that. Thus it ends up being a recruiting tool for groups like al Qaeda. And further, if we use these techniques then the other side is justified in using them against us -- it endangers our own forces.

I was shocked during the Bush administration to see that they considered torture something that Americans could and should do. I grew up to have pride in my country and to believe in freedom, liberty, justice, and respect for humanity, I never thought I would see the day that we tortured people.

There are lots of good reasons not to torture, and no good reasons to do it. It is too early to determine whether torture resulted in someone giving us information that led to bin Laden, and it will always be impossible to know whether a USA that interrogated its suspects ethically would have found him sooner.