Mr Obama’s administration has released documents about details of “harsh interrogation techniques” that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences – assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked – then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what “hope and change” meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)
Torture, and its use, is one of those “canary in the mineshaft” issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.
As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.
Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.
I have no idea what to make of this, but I’m sure that if any administration, past, present or future, is intent on secretly detaining people, possibly including torture, it can easily do so in numerous places other than Gitmo, without announcing the exact location to the whole wide world, allowing visits by lawyers and media, etc. Also, if O were to take up arms against an abuse by the W administration, I’d be much more impressed if it were the Patriot Act rather than Gitmo.
If Obama wants to send signals that he is not like Bush, and therefore (in the new administration’s plans) wants a better and more mutually satisfying dialogue with other nations – especially those who feel “wronged” by the US – he should remember he is trying to talk to people who may not have any compunctions about torture and even execution without a fair trial.
That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try, but it is likely that various other “leaders” will dismiss it all as spin or hype or even as inconsequential to what they really want for themselves.
As a bargaining tool for US foreign policy, I don’t get it.
AM I wrong, or is JP claiming a right to his own facts?
By reports, the internees at Gitmo have been and are combatants and “hostiles” taken from places of actual hostile engagements; not ” terror suspects.”
In terms of “prosecutions,” consider whether the issues are derived from differences in “judgement calls;” “concepts of duties (and to whom owed);” or anger over the ultimate results.
There appears to be a strong case that we are in a state of long term hostilities that we did not initiate, but which have required and show every sign of continuing to require aggresive actions – not passive responses if we are not to sustain deep and lasting injuries.
It can not be honestly said the there were no prior efforts to evaluate the actions to be taken in the past – in fact, it is those evaluations that have been the subject of proposed “prosecutions.”
Think it through again. Or, have all join the military and enjoy a different way of evaluation.
Only in America could the Justice Department have to rule on whether it would be legal to put a caterpillar in the cell of a detainee who was scared of insects. Meanwhile the main concern of our enemies is how to keep their knives sharp when hacking off the heads of prisoners. I am sure they quake with fear at our ferocity.
I don’t think this is a bargaining tool. Assuming that he is sincerely against torture, I think Obama is doing it because use of torture is wrong. Period. On the other hand, it might just be a bit of partisan grandstanding. He’s a politician.
Like I said, his refusal to launch prosecutions seems bizarre and also unjust: if the evidence of torture exists and has been published, then it tarnishes the previous administration, and they are entitled to rebut and respond to such accusations. On the other hand, if the evidence is solid, then they need to be punished so that this does not happen again.
And only in America would you get folk making jokes about waterboarding or likening sleep deprivation etc for days on end as no more than frat-boy hazing. These are not trivial matters. Those who want to defeat terrorism do their side no favours by dismissing this issue as a sort of joke.
John K,
You have a point. And perhaps force and coercion to gain information has a place.
This might be tyring to draw a too much of a stark black and white in a gray world, but there are two polar ends as to how a society can function – a Civil Society with times and places for forms of adjudication, and a Martial Society wherein dangers are clear and present and long horizons aren’t a luxury. Realistic libertrarians know that there may be times and places where fighting and force are necessary and martial law is necessary. It’s a matter of knowing what fight is yours and fighting it at the right time the right way.
But if you want to preserve a Civil Society you don’t engage in select martial activities as it suits. You either fight those with sharp “beheading knives” and eliminate them squarely or you don’t. If we are at a crossroads for a great settling between the West and the East, then let’s get on with it. Fishing a few hundred souls and putting them in a box and harrassing them without any clear definition as to what they are – terrorists, enemy combatants, law breakers – and subjecting them to any kind of torture in a casual “let’s see what we can get out of ’em” sort of way without any clear or present danger, is a scary precedent to set.
So, if the time has some to fight the beheaders, let’s get on with it and do it like men protecting their lives and their property from clear and present threats. Leaving the dirty work to men in sunglasses and fadoras in out of the way cells as a Public Program like water treatment or road signage goes against simple Civil ways of living. Simply put, it could be you next for going against whatever the men in the sunglasses and fadoras decide is right.
So if these fellows who were tortured were criminals – try them. If they were enemy combatants – kill them on the battle field, if they give up, put them in a camp until hostilities are over and repatriate them, and if they present so clear and present a danger – execute them forthwith.
I might be a bit of an alarmist, but I have little doubt that in the long term, the next few hundred years, if radical Islam isn’t checked it will succeed. So we can either confront it now, in a manly manner, or we can enjoy our lemonade and almond cookies in peace until the tide comes. Half measures (if that) and torturing people to obtain a scrap of information that is now a half decade old doesn’t seem to be much of a plan.
I wonder if you haven’t inadvertently answered your own question there. Perhaps the actual evidence of torture turns out to be a lot tamer than what has been suggested by certain media speculation, and perhaps it was administered in such a way that the previous administration has plenty of plausible deniability besides. Obama advisors make the reasonable calculation that more damage is done to the previous administration in the public imagination than would be by the reality, and so choose not to act. Inaction comes with the side benefits that the door is still open for this administration to use the same techniques if it finds them convenient (which it may well do now that it has full access to national security intelligence reports), and that it doesn’t start a mudslinging contest of trumped-up prosecutions between alternating administrations in the future. One builtin failsafe in democratic political systems is that you really do need a clear smoking gun most of the time to go after political opponents with prosecutorial means for fear that acting on less will cause your opponents to respond in kind when they are next in power.
If there had been clear evidence of anything that might be called torture – not sleep deprivation or waterboarding, those are barely inconveniences, compared to what Al Qaeda does – I’m sure prosecutions would have been initiated, either under Bush or Urkel. So rather than lose, the Urkelites have retreated and now see the trouble their bloviating and lies have got them into. As to the Islamic menace, their only saving grace is that their incompetence matches their savagery.
Robert Spiers writes:
first of all, denying someone sleep for 7 days or half-drowning them, making them endure exreme cold, heat, etc, is not a “minor inconvenience”, to use your blase expression. It is torture. Sure, not as bad as some other things – but let’s not play the mistake of saying “it’s okay, the other side is even worse” crapola which passes for excuse-making.
You should also be aware that governments that feel they have some sort of excuse to torture terror suspects – and I am not just talking about folk captured in places like Iraq, but right here in the UK, US, etc – are capable of using this against other real or imagined enemies. I find it bizarre that so-called defenders of liberty, such as most of the readers of this blog, suddenly go all credulous when governments trot out excuses for holding suspects indefinitely and mistreating them.
JP got in first. I’d just like to add are we really prepared to let them set the bar? Isn’t that a bit like… well losing?
“The problem is not the lawyers or those who relied on the lawyers, but the law. There will be no prosecution because under the statute as passed by Congress, there was no prosecutable crime committed.”
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-prosecution-because-no-crime.html#comments
First of all, you are starting from at least one false premise: “assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked“. The point of the Office of Legal Counsel memos the Obama Administration just released is that such coercive techniques are not illegal. So there is nothing to prosecute. Instituting any sort of criminal proceding would be merely criminalizing a policy difference, which is a very dangerous practice as it will without fail come back to haunt them when they (inevitably) fall from power themselves. Obama is smart enough to know this.
Secondly, the definition of “torture” is highly subjective, even personal. My definition is that it is the infliction of severe physical pain. Not psychological, not emotional, but physical. I don’t know about waterboarding; that could fall on either side of the line. To me, sleep deprivation doesn’t constitute torture. Nor does playing loud music. Frankly, if I were interrogating Muslim terrorists I would be tearing out pages of a Koran, pissing on them and flushing them down the toilet, and then showing them naked photos of women (preferably their own sisters). None of that is “torture”.
Which brings me to the last point: I have no moral objection to torture if the circumstances and intended use warrant it. If the object is merely to obtain a confession, I’m with you that it has no place. But if the point is to obtain actionable intelligence for which there is a pressing need, and not for use in a criminal trial, then go for it. If we capture someone who has planted a nuclear device in Los Angeles and the timer is ticking, I’d be slicing off his fingers and toes one digit at a time until he told me where it was and how to disarm it. This is “actionable” intelligence: its truth is immediately verifiable and the need is unquestionable. There is a good editorial on this in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The US has used “coercive” techniques (not all of which would rise to the level of “torture” in my book) on only a couple of dozen high-value al Qaeda operatives, and it has led to significant useful information (preventing planned attacks and capturing senior officials). The Obama Administration is foolish to give this up; we will pay for it in the long run.
Laird, I like your comments but you have really fallen down here, I am afraid.
Since when have these methods been sanctioned by the law? If they were – and frankly I find that hard to believe – why has there been so much fuss about the issue? Has the illegality of stuff like waterboarding been just part of Andrew Sullivan’s crazed imagination?
Oh come on, damaging a religious book is hardly the same as physical pain, such as application of extreme cold, half-drowning, etc.
Which begs a big question of who gets to decide this, and who gets to decide whether a suspect terrorist is such.
George Orwell’s repeated point was — lose the language, lose the capacity for rational thought.
Visit any old European castle, and you can see the instruments of torture. Europeans broke other human beings on the rack, and fried them in giant frying pans. They tore out prisoner’ eyes. People died slowly, in extreme pain. That was torture.
By calling robust methods of interrogation “torture”, all we do is destroy the language. What now do we call the Islamist’s hacking off of a human head?
There has indeed been torture over the last few years, but we all know who really did it. As is quite clear, Europhilic Obaminoids have no shock at real torture, and no interest in actually stopping real torture. All they are interested in is domestic politics.
It is likely that Obama is setting Bush officials (including the ex-President) up for a Congressional inquiry. By effectively ruling out prosecution of any possible direct perpetrators, he can assert that he is not “betraying” front-line folks who were only “following orders” and being good soldiers. Pelosi is slavering at the chance to haul senior Republicans into a court of some kind, just as she is planning to have at Wall Street “villains”.
Do not underestimate the vindictiveness, bordering on psychopathic hatred, of the core Democrats. They see the election of Obama as being validation of their beliefs, and permission to overturn all such concepts and practices as bi-partisanship, mutual respect between public representatives and open sharing of proposals. The stimulus bill was un-read by most representatives due to a deliberate ploy by the Speaker’s staff—nevertheless, the tame seals voted for it.
As to torture: the Justice Department memos outlined the limits of coercive force. What evidence is there that these limits were (a) exceeded; (b) routinely approached? And whilst the definition of torture has proven debatable, the effect on the recipients may also be debatable. An Al-Queda manual released some years ago prepared potential captives for these and other techniques, and counselled that claims of torture must be made whether there was any actual application.
At the end of the day, the issue revolves around judgements as to the subjective definition and effect of interrogation methods, the nature of the current struggle and the limits of executive power. The latter two points range well beyond the first. Care must be taken that “torture” does not define the debate over the other two far weightier questions.
You’re getting your information from Andrew Sullivan?
Bwahahahahahahahahaha
Well, going down the road of using torture is a dangerous precedent. On the other hand, the techniques described here are undoubtedly mild. On another site, I saw one lefty describe the “insect in a box” as being “straight out of 1984”. But if the climactic scene replaced the ravenous rats in a cage around Smith’s head with having a harmless caterpillar crawl on him… well, not quite the same terrifying impact, is it? Frankly, with the eexception of waterboarding, which we knew about already, most of these things are milder than kids can do to one another. I was surpised not to find “chinese burn” or “putting a spider down his shirt” on the list.
Notably, on the same site there was a link to a youtube video of a guy who’d been stopped by a police inspection point and refused to open his trunk for them or get out of his car. They smashed in the windows, rammed his head into the broken glass (11 stitches), then repeatedly tasered him, before grudgingly taking him to hospital by the scenic route then keeping him in a cell for the night. Which frankly struck me as a far greater abuse of power over a man who had committed no crime, than telling Mohammad Al Towalhad, murderer and senior terrorist, to hold his hands above his head to make his arms ache a bit or threatening him with a caterpillar.
See my previous comment Alice about not saying that because the other side is horrific, half-drowning suspects etc is legitimate. How many times do we need to make that point?
If at any time I read that the current Obama administration uses harsh methods to get facts out of its political enemies, I will feel willing to point out that these issues can come back to bite those who start them.
Which incidentally, is why this is not just an issue that is relevant to understanding the history of the Bush government, but the subsequent one. It is also relevant in the UK, given what we have seen happen under the current Labour government recently.
My own thinking is that it probably won’t ultimately triumph, but it has immense capacity for immense disruption and destruction along the way, particularly for Europe. Most worryingly, if it does come down to a straight fight, non-muslim Europeans will have little choice but pogroms; and if that happens, liberal democracy will be well and truly dead. That’s a future we can avoid, but it may not always remain a future we can avoid if we don’t start actively trying to avoid it.
I agree with most of the posters here. We should be concentrating on more serious abuses by the state like taxes and speed cameras than minor inconveniences like torture and indefinite detention without trail.
Ian B,
This might interest you (Link)
I do wonder about the dismissive attitude of some commentators to “mild” torture. Stress positions are apparently excrutiating. And standing sleep deprivation for days… That’s gotta be awful. This isn’t some copper in the ’70s giving a suspect a dry slap…
Sheesh… some of you guys wouldn’t be happy unless the CIA was to break out the thumb-screws and the rectal pear.
When torture was last discussed her I got the impression folks tended to be a lot less tolerant of it. Hmm…
Sorry –
I have to agree with several other posters.
Sleep deprivation, loud music/bright lights, using a person’s phobia, waterboarding are NOT torture.
Read about some of the rather ingenious devices conceived and built during the crusades. Or some of the more recent um, asian methods. THOSE are torture.
They leave lasting physical evidence – scars, things that are missing or no longer function ( imagine having both of your arms intact and attached but COMPLETELY USELESS for the rest of your life ).
We are now watering down the meaning of the world to the point that in a few years having to get out of bed before noon and not having your toast and coffee at your elbow will be called torture.
I also agree with the above poster who said that in order to stop some horrific act, he would do ALMOST ANYTHING to someone to get the knowledge needed to stop said act and save lives/property whatever.
Again, having underwear placed on your head is NOT torture
The issue is not whether torture should be illegal – it should be, is, has been for many years, and both the current and previous administrations agree totally. The issue is where you draw the line between torture and mere unpleasantness – there is a continuous spectrum of nastiness with no discontinuous Rubicon on which to make a stand.
It is thought that many of the techniques approved for use were designed as part of the SERE courses for use on American troops to give them the psychological experience in preparation for resisting actual torture while remaining bearable. People volunteer for those courses. I should think a significant number of the interrogators have experienced those techniques on themselves. I would be interested to know if Obama plans to shut the SERE courses down, too?
While waterboarding makes the headlines, it was hardly used in practice. Hundreds – possibly thousands – more innocent Americans have been waterboarded than Gitmo inmates.
Considered more widely, there are a lot of things that happen that someone of a lefty-lawyerly bent could describe as ‘torture’. From gruesome medical procedures in your local A&E through BDSM games to school PE lessons. I’ve slept the night in a cramped minibus in winter on the Yorkshire moors – stress-positions, cold, and lack of sleep combined. Other people drive themselves to exhaustion, suffering aches, soreness, and risk injury, all in the name of sport. There was a lady on TV the other week setting the world record for eating ultra-hot chillies. Jobs like logging, mining and deep sea fishing are hard labour, unpleasant, and dangerous. There’s the dentist’s chair. Prisons for more ordinary criminals are frequently horrific places, with rape and violent assault, lives of generalised brutality and constant fear becoming routine. You can even make an argument for endless years in boring jobs, the humiliation of being told off in public, or being made the subject of a media smear campaign being ‘torture’.
Where do you draw the line? At what an A&E nurse would do to someone to save a life? At what people have been known to undergo voluntarily? Permanent damage? Intense and unbearable pain? Physical discomfort? Emotional discomfort? Shouting at someone harshly and making them cry? A less than sufficiently plumped pillow on their comfy chair?
The issue is not over whether torture is to be legal or not, it’s about Obama slightly redrawing the line that defines it. (It’s not for the CIA functionaries to be defining that line for themselves – that’s what we have elected representatives for. You certainly wouldn’t want them erring in the other direction on their own initiative. And retrospective illegality is a problem for any concept of law.) You can argue by all means over whether they’ve drawn the line in the right place, or at least a better place, but it’s a different debate.
Obama and others may like to spin it as something else for their own political purposes, but they’re not ‘ending the use of torture’.
A few things.
JP:
What law was alleged to be violated?
That’s a serious problem here.
Cuba is not in the United States, nor any one of the several states. Therefore, neither US code nor any state law clearly applies.
There is not a single US Federal District Court with jurisdiction over anything at all to occur in Cuba. Nor is there a single US state court with such jurisdiction.
A military court-martial? Okay, sure. It’s a Navy/USMC base, so a judge from Navy JAG would have jurisdiction…over service members. However, if the alleged torture was committed by a civilian (say, a civil service CIA employee or a contractor to a non-DoD agency) then the military court may not have jurisdiction either (RRS may know this better than I do.)
Translation: no remedy at law here.
As for “They cut people’s heads off on TV so we should be allowed to drown them”:
I do not propose to calibrate my moral compass by what the enemy does. Do you also let a guy go free who raped a 12-year-old, because Islam blesses the rape of 9-year-olds and at least you’re not being quite as bad as them? Fuck that noise. Right is right and wrong is wrong and THAT’S WHY THEY’RE THE ENEMY: BECAUSE THEY DO THINGS THAT ARE WRONG.
That being said: ticking timer on a nuclear bomb in Denver and a suspect in front of me? “This is the Taser X-26, which delivers 50 kilovolts in nineteen pulses per second. These are your testicles. Shall we discuss where this bomb is?” And then I’d go home and probably eat my gun afterwards.
Johnathan, I expected your response. I’m afraid we’re just on opposite ends of the spectrum on this one.
The reason I cited the OLC memos is that, while they could be incorrect (lawyers can disagree on anything!), they are entitled to a presumption of correctness. Thought and analysis went into their preparation, and at the very least they demonstrate that whether the coercive interrogation techniques actually employed were, in fact, illegal is not as cut and dried an issue as you would have us believe. I was merely objecting to your conclusory declaration that these actions were/are “clearly illegal. “Clearly”, they are not.
Incidentally, the reason I mentioned desecration of the Koran as an interrogation tool is that such a technique is specifically prohibited by current policy and regulations. Some consider it to be a form of “torture”. I think that’s ludicrous; it should be the first line of attack in these matters, right up there with playing off phobias (fear of insects, for example, although I note in passing the we are now learning that unfortunately such technique was never used, merely discussed).
“Which begs a big question of who gets to decide this, and who gets to decide whether a suspect terrorist is such.” Now that is a crucial question, probably the most important one in this whole debate. I will grant you there is no easy answer, and it does make me uncomfortable. Probably the best we can do is to have a lot of checks and balances, with no one person making a unilateral decision. Oversight is important too. There’s lots of room for debate here, but we shouldn’t let ourselves dodge the issue by taking the easy route of simply forswearing the use of torture at all times and in all cases (especially when we have “defined down” the definition of “torture” to the point of meaninglessness, as has already been noted by Alice and others).
This has all the earmarks of a long and tendentious thread. I plan to watch from the sidelines for a while.
What is important to note at the outset, however, is to distinguish between the law and morality. Not everything which is immoral is illegal. To be guilty of a crime, one must violate a specific criminal law. The criminal law invoked here is 18 U.S. C. sec. 2340 and 2340A. Those who are calling for prosecution need to read the statutes. A plain reading of the language makes clear that there was no crime committed.
18 U.S.C. sec. 2340 provides the definitions of what constitutes torture (emphasis mine):
As used in this chapter–
(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from–
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe
physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.
18 U.S.C. sec. 2340A provides for criminal sanctions for conduct which constitutes torture as defined in sec. 2340:
(a) Offense.–Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b) Jurisdiction.–There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if–
(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.
(c) Conspiracy.–A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
The key wording in the statute is “specifically intended” and “severe.” A generalized intend to cause harm, but not necessarily severe pain or suffering, is not a crime. Similarly, a specific intent to cause some, but not severe, pain or suffering is not a violation. There are no guidelines as to what constitutes severe pain or suffering, other than that in the case of mental pain or suffering, the effects must be of a long duration.
This is a poorly written statute, and it will be interesting to track the legislative history of why and how the key terms were inserted, and further definitions omitted. What is important for the present discussion is that the requirement of specific intent, and the use of terms such as “severe” and “prolonged” means that Congress meant to set a very high bar before there could be a prosecution. Congress clearly intended to give wide latitude to those conducting interrogations before one crossed the line into illegal torture.
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-prosecution-because-no-crime.html
Nah, don’t do that, have a couple of beers instead, you’d have earned them.
While I don’t doubt that the Democrats would be committing multiple acts of Onanism over the prospect of charging anyone to the right of Trotsky with war crimes, torture, and barratry on the high seas; there are two major obstacles in this particular case. One, the lesser one, has been mentioned. No chargable crime has been committed, although ex post facto has become a feature of the current regime.
The second problem for prosecution for “torture” is that it is also hard to avoid charging accessories to the “crime”. Literally the entire Democratic Congressional leadership was briefed on the specific techniques, by the Bush administration, and approved of them, in writing. If George Bush is placed in the dock; Pelosi, Reid, et. al. would have to be alongside him. That is unless a new Volksgerichthof system is imposed. Which no doubt they would like.
I am sure that they are looking for other chargable crimes against the people that they can safely distance themselves from.
Subotai Bahadur
All your caterpillers are belong to us.
VR: that was…a rather short comment:-)
I’m practicing being pithy as well as nonsensical. Got the second part down just fine…
Restrictionist immigration policies are the solution.
This whole thread got me thinking a bit. It got me thinking down the boozer so…
I shall not address the many issues yet… But I’m glad Sunfish pitched in.
The short version is that I would define torture thus:
“The application of material force against the will of the recipient for purposes of information gathering or punishment with or without causing permanent physical damage damage.”
And that is beneath us. And also probably not that useful even in the “ticking bomb” situation in the short term anyway. Because if you torture anyone enough they will just say what they think you want them to hear and that don’t make it so. Or they’ll just say anything.
Because tortue or “interesting” intrerogation takes time. It is either about cross-referencing or “breaking” them and that always takes time.
And also probably not that useful even in the “ticking bomb” situation in the short term anyway. Because if you torture anyone enough they will just say what they think you want them to hear and that don’t make it so. Or they’ll just say anything.
Not true, really. Torture has been used such a lot because it’s very effective. If you want a genuine confession, it’s useless. But if you’re after verifiable information, it may pay dividends, as in the ticking bomb situation. You may get the answer you’re after, or may not, but that’s still better than definitely not getting it by not trying. So, morals aside, torture is a rational strategy.
Me, I’d last about three chinese burns and a spider down my shirt before telling everything. Never post me behind enemy lines with the secret plans.
What is the diffenence between, “a genuine confession” and, “useful information”?
Ian – telling eveyone *everything”. Exactly. You’d admit to having started the Great Fire of London.
And it doesn’t make it so.
You didn’t did you?
NickM –
He didn’t say “useful information,” he said “verifyable information” – a crucial distinction. Yon can definitely torture “verifiable” information out of someone – because if you can’t verify the information they gave you, you simply resume torturing until they give you information you can.
NickM:
It is not beneath us. If a guy is pulled off a battlefield, after trying to kill American troops, then he has no rights as far as libertarian moral theory goes and it is not immoral to do anything to him. After one violates the natural law, he loses his natural rights. Simple as that.
Now, if you are talking about someone who has not violated another person’s life, liberty, or property, then it is immoral to be holding him in the first place.
When it comes to utility…torture is like gun control – there are plenty of empirical data showing it works and there are plenty of empirical data showing it does not work. Much of the difference can be attributed to the bias of the researcher, which is not unexpected.
I welcome critical responses to my assertions.
Nick, suppose you ask where the secret bomb factory is, with judicious application of pliers. Eventually, the guy tells you it’s at 23 Acacia Avenue. You now can go to 23 Acacia Avenue, and see if it is there. If not, all you’ve lost is a bit of time checking it out. If he was telling the truth, you’ve found your bomb factory. And, he’s got a good incentive to tell the truth, because he knows that if it’s not at 23 Acacia Avenue you’re going to come back and make with the pliers again.
It’s not guaranteed to get you the information, but it’s certainly got a chance of doing so. That’s why people use torture. Because it works.
There are good moral arguments against torture, and good practical arguments about everybody agreeing not to do it, but the “it doesn’t work” argument is a fallacy.
Of course, it’s even better if you threaten to torture his wife and children. That’s why bad guys in movies always do that.
Regarding the legality – someone mentioned earlier that the statutes were poorly written and was interested in why. The reason is because the Geneva Conventions require signatory nations to proscribe torture, and lots of these statutes will have been drawn up to comply.
Why should that make a difference?
Well, it’s a kind of hole in the normal application of the Conventions. Generally, all of the Geneva Conventions are prefaced with a clause that states that they only apply to signatory counterparties, and also to counterparties who may not be signatories but agree to abide by them for the duration of combat. Which is to say, if you’re fighting an enemy that doesn’t adhere to the Geneva Conventions, the mitts are off for your side too.
The stipulation that signatories draw up their own laws proscribing torture was intended to make torture a kind of exception to this framework. That is, the Geneva Conventions’ protections don’t apply to enemies who don’t extend you the same courtesy, but we’d still like to draw the line, to some degree, at torture. Emphasis on the “to some degree.” I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that the reason the statutes are poorly written is to hedge against this hole in the Geneva Convenations framework. Yes, on the one hand, we the “civilized” should hold ourselves above torture to some degree regardless of what the enemy does. On the other hand, it is somewhat unfair to send our boys off to be tortured when we can’t reciprocate. End result: statutes that proscribe torture, but not completely. Which is the situation we have here.
The “torture” memos are available online for public reading through the ACLU. 90% of everything written there is devoted to laying out the legal case that torturing this and that individual using this and that method does not actually violate the statutes. Most of it is also convincing, though I am admittedly not a lawyer.
Hmm, not so simple. I’d presume you can only apply this “violation of natural law” argument in a situation in which the enemy soldiers are indisputably an aggressor force attacking a libertarian, utterly non-aggressor nation. For instance, didn’t the US and UK violate the “natural law” by invading Iraq, and Afghanistan? Who started that? When did USUK get the right to kill (even collaterally) non-combatant Afghans and Iraqis- in the former case some aggressors against the USA were being sheltered by the Afghan regime; in the latter Iraq had merely violated a UN resolution or two, which themselves were violations of Iraqi property rights. Who is the aggressor, and to whom does the natural law and rights apply?
Also, does a violation of another person’s natural rights entirely abolish one’s own? If a starving man steals a bread roll from the bakers, can we apply a death penalty?
Ian,
Liberal Democracy is already well and truly dead-yeah, I know, you have the outward forms,but that is all it is, on your side of the pond anyway, and God knows it is likely on the way out here, too.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Don’t you get it? Obama wants to use the same techniques!
It’s no longer the college debate society of the campaign trail. Since January, he’s had actual intelligence briefings. He knows he’ll have hell to pay if another terrorist incident happens on American soil. He knows they’re talking nukes now. The stakes are higher.
He’s not closing Gitmo and freeing the captives. He’s starting a new resort and retirement community on a tropical island specifically for a select group of honored Muslim guests.
No net difference.
If those Gitmoistas are released into the US, there should be websites outing them, like registered sex offenders and AIG bonus-earning execs. If the rule of law can’t defend the citizen, it is up to the citizen. We’ll look the other way and whistle while the crazies among us get the job done.
I think they should have been killed long ago in covert ops, like the way things used to be. Things were so much simpler then. *sigh* Good times.
I used to be a “Greek advisor”–attempting to supervise a fraternity and sorority system. Anti-hazing policies and education and all that.
What is defined as torture is typical frat hazing behavior.
If it’s torture, be ready to go after all those fraternity boys and sorority girls.
If sleep deprivation is torture, medical residents should bring a class action law suit.
Ian. I don’t think we’re very different on the “ticking bomb”. I did say it can work given time. But that’s exactly what you don’t have with “ticking bombs”.
There is also the danger of torture providing information that isn’t true.
Let’s say you suspect Abu Hatstand is an AQ big wig and you yank in some bloke you suspect is Hatstand’s minion. There is a danger that – after you’ve given his knackers a few slaps – he tells you what you want to know… Well what if it ain’t the case and Abu Hatstand has nowt to do with AQ and the guy you really want is Abu Coathook. There is a danger of confirmation bias especially as the torturee becomes desperate not so much to spill the beans but to please the torturer. The long litany of false confessions over the years is a testimony to that.
Also I think it must be considered that a fair few in the torture game are gonna be flat-out sadists who are more interested in process than results so to speak.
Kentuckyliz,
Nobody makes anyone join a fraternity. Also hazing is of a specifically limited duration. Those are big differences.
I admit I tortured him; I sneered at his Holy Book which tells him it’s okay to try and kill me.
What my dear husband said (7 years ago in Cry Havoc: Taking Off The Gloves):
Wars are not “law enforcement matters” and conflating the two, and conflating the rules of the two, is not only wrong, it’s a suicide pact of Western Society.
I don’t care if we use REAL torture against unlawful combatants. They’re not lawful combatants and in choosing to become unlawful combatants, they’ve chosen to suspend the rules that would apply to them, had they chosen differently.
America did not sign on to the Geneva Convention, even though we comply with the rules. Water boarding is NOT torture. It’s scary and intimidating, as well as USEFUL, but it is not torture.
This idea that we can make war politically correct and somehow not horrible or brutal is just wimpy and stupid.
IanB writes:
Possibly a SQOTD.
Up to a point; it is true that when the security services in a nation such as the US or here get a tip-off from a source, such as double-agent or “mole” of some kind, they might pull in some suspects to verify a story. The trouble is when the persons feeding the info make a mistake. The person “verifying” the “story” can sing like a canary just to get free.
People on this board are correct in pointing out that revolting though it is, torture has sometimes been effective in getting vital information; what we are not told, however, is that a lot of such interrogations yield no valuable information or even damaging misinformation.
Some character wrote:
I hope the author of those words was being deliberately sarcastic.
That’s why Dershowitz has a point suggesting that torture should be legalized, with numerous limitations and checks. It will always be done regardless, so we might as well at least attempt to confine it to instances where it has a real chance of being useful, while holding the people doing it accountable, or at least more accountable than they seem to be now.
Personally, I’m against torture. The thing is, I see torture as being something along the lines of having a blowtorch held to your bollocks, or seeing your children raped in front of you. You know, the sort of methods Saddam Hussein employed before he had to do the Spandau Ballet. Sharing your cell with a caterpillar doesn’t really cross that line for me. What next? The comfy chair?
Perhaps, at this point, it’s useful to try and define what exactly is torture? I offer the following:
And to add, torture, as described above, is a breach of property of oneself and thus wrong.
So, by the above definition, waterboarding and sleep deprivation are torture. Wiping your arse with the Quran and showing the accused “Debbie does Dallas” are not.
Edward, I reject your definition. I offered my own way back in my post on 4/17 at 4:16 PM; I won’t repeat it here.
“Torture is the use of force to compel testimony”
Must remember that one when the demand comes to fill in my tax return.
Actually, the ultimate purpose of torture in most places it is used is to induce obedience among the oppressed. The point is to make sure everybody knows that if you annoy the authorities, horrible things will happen. They’re not interested in the truth, they’re interested in fitting you up. The information gathered is almost incidental – it’s fundamental purpose is deterrence.
It has been noted in counter terrorism ops that ordinary people have little reason to cooperate with Westerners, even if they quite like what they’re trying to do. Annoy the Westerners, and nothing bad will happen. Annoy the Islamists, and very bad things will happen. People are therefore careful not to annoy the Islamists. In that sense, torture works fine.
If you want to elicit information, there are much better ways. Lying for an extended period of time, in great detail is actually very hard, and there are interview protocols that make it very difficult to maintain a consistent lie. Those telling the truth start out hesitant, and get more fluent as they go on. Those lying start fluent, and become more hesitant, as they try to remember the ever increasing number of details they’ve made up. It’s a sort of “tangled web” principle.
As a rule, deception is mainly detected by noting increased stress and anxiety, which is surely easier if the subject is not already as stressed as they can get. On the other hand, mild stress and tiredness tends to lead to people making mistakes. I would assume that interrogators would use both, as the situation suited, but that if they want accurate information they won’t bother with any of the more extreme methods. If they do actually use them, they’re not only unethical, they’re incompetent, too.
But I can think of good reasons why you might want your enemy to think you use them.
…what torture… i see no evidence of ACTUAL toture. Is this some kind of joke?
Another point to bear in mind is that, given that the Big O has declassified these documents, AQ and its allies now know that the USA does not use “torture” as they would understand it. The sort of treatment described here is what most police forces in the middle east would use on traffic offenders. Captured AQ types in the past might have thought waterboarding was going to kill them, now they know that, even if it was still used, it will not. They know how long they might be exposed to loud noise, sleep deprivation or scary caterpillars. These are people who saw off the heads of their prisoners don’t forget. In future it may well be wiser not to bother taking any of them prisoner, really what’s the point? To show that we are “better” than they are? All they will see is weakness. Frankly I’d rather that Binyan Mohammed was now wormfood in Afghanistan, instead of which we are going to have to support the nasty little fuck for the rest of his worthless life.
I cannot believe that people are defending the use of torture & CID. Nor can I believe that they are trying to spin this as “what most police forces in the middle east would use on traffic offenders” and hence a legitimate way to treat prisoners. Totally amoral and provides a revealing counterpoint to the GWOT as Manichaeism narrative.
Go to the leaked ICRC report and read Annex 1, page 29 (the treatment of Abu Zubaydeh), and then tell me that it isn’t torture: http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf
And torture is torture irrespective of what AQ does or doesn’t do — just as saying, “ah, well, in Libya a man once had his teeth pulled out and his genitals burnt” is a massive non sequitur with no bearing on the issue of whether so-called “enhanced interrogations” constitute torture.
Prosecution is not possible for several reasons;
1: We water-board our own special forces soldiers as part of their training. No one has mentioned prosecuting the trainers or the people who set that policy. That seems telling to me as to the true motivations of those who seek a legal remedy. It is OK to torture our own… but not our enemies? Really?
2: All of the high ranking Democrats on the intelligence committees signed off on it. One even asking if the techniques were not too mild.
3: It was decided that water-boarding was not torture. Labeling it such after the fact does nothing to change the fact that no injury is done. You experience the same thing when your big brother holds your head under the water at the pool. I imagine we would see a lot more torture prosecutions at the local swimming pool than we would ever see of the military if everything were enforced equally.
4: The only right illegal enemy combatants are afforded under the rules of combat and under the Geneva Convention (before the legislators on the Supreme Court got hold of it) is the right to be shot for being out of uniform. Anything short of that ultimate sanction would seem to be fair game. Such was certainly the case in WWII.
5: Obama knows he will have to do the same thing in the future by one means or another. The alternative is to turn the prisoners over to our allies who will do much worse than we ever will.
6: It was widely known that the brouhaha over “torture” was a means for the left to get the rubes worked up because no one was naive enough to actually believe that there would not be coercive methods used to gain information on the battlefield. It was a given that whatever techniques were chosen would be called torture.
7: I am not aware of any war of any size that has ever been fought with as much input as to what is “legal” and what is not than the current one. This has been much to the detriment of both our soldiers and the enemy (not an unlikely outcome given the nature of lawyers). It is now necessary not to take prisoners whenever possible given the due process rights they are likely to be afforded…. so more are killed on the battlefield. As mentioned above, when we are forced to take a prisoner they will go somewhere much worse than Guantanamo.
8: Enhanced interrogation techniques like water-boarding were effective. Lives were undoubtedly saved by their usage. This can be shown in court.
To put things in perspective, if given a choice between being water-boarded and paying your taxes the rest of your life, which would you take? I believe you would be able to find a water-boarding concession in every city if such were the case. I don’t think that would be so were it actually torture of any sort.
All of that being said, I am sure there will be some sort of circus before all is said and done. It will be mostly for show (unless the new administration needs a distraction) to please the rubes.
Sorry Vimothy, just because the Big O decides waterboarding and use of caterpillars constitutes torture don’t make it so. And I absolutely stand by the argument that minor offenders in the middle east would get a far worse roughing up from their local police. All this has done is to alert AQ to the fact that none of their prisoners will be hurt in any way if captured, and thus ensure that no intelligence will ever be gained. As Ben says, this is a good recipe for not bothering to take prisoners in future, after all, the other side only take prisoners so as to saw theie heads off on al Jazeera, so I’m fucked if we have to Mirandize these nasty bastards in future.
It all comes back to the definition. Merely offering a conclusory statement that something is or isn’t “torture” doesn’t make it so. The released memos make it clear that no prisoner’s life was ever at risk (the medical procedures ensured that) and none was ever in danger of suffering serious pain or permanent injury. Fear of a (real or imagined) stinging insect isn’t “torture”. If having someone believe that he will actually be tortured or killed (even though it never happens and won’t happen) constitutes “torture” in your book, then we’re so far apart that further discussion is pointless.
vimothy, I am afraid you are not the only person to be perplexed at some of the arguments on this board. As I mentioned in another thread, given how riled most of the commenters rightly get about the abuse of police powers by the UK cops, for example, and the arrest of folk like Tory MPs for doing their job, it is amazing that such doofuses should be entrusted with harsh interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding. And yet folk don’t seem to be able to make the connection. It’s weird.
One person has tried to argue that waterboarding is no worse than college pranks or minor bullying, and that a lot of soldiers have to undergo such stuff as part of their training. Er, in a volunteer army, I guess harsh training is part of the deal. But a terror suspect is not in the same position to say that they consented to having electrical leads attached to their genitals, or to be frozen, or made to sit in a crouch for days on end, or suffer sleep deprivation.
Which lives were those? What terror attacks were prevented by sticking Alphonse al-Jihaddi’s head under a faucet?
If it’s so effective, and there can be no doubt about it’s life-saving ability, then even one verifiable example should be easy.
Johnathan,
I don’t think I agree with (or really understand) all the opinions on this board, either. But that’s nothing unusual. Getting Libertarians to agree is often like herding cats. But it’s often worth trying to understand the reasons for other’s point of view, I find.
Comparing to the abuse of police powers by UK cops is a variant on the blurring of civil/military boundary, and the attempts of human rights lawyers to apply civil law to military operations. It’s much the same principle by which soldiers get to shoot the enemy. We’d object if the UK police did that, too. The point is that they’re enemy soldiers captured in a war and therefore not subject to civil jurisdiction, and because the Geneva Conventions are treaties between nations only requiring restraint where it is reciprocated, terrorists are excluded by their own tactics from that, too. (Which is probably a good job for them, because I think the Geneva Conventions would require we hand them over to the Afghans to be tried as war criminals.) We’re restrained in our treatment of them only because we choose to be.
The question, then, is how one justifies in a libertarian context the means for fighting a war for liberty against theocrats intent on snuffing it out, who themselves observe no such restraints on tactics or treatment of prisoners. How do we justify shooting them? Because if we can answer that, the same sort of reasoning will apply to other tactics of war, like interrogation.
Part of the problem is that a lot of libertarians don’t. Many don’t think our armies should fight for other people’s freedom, and don’t think we should be interfering with other countries outside our own domain except in direct self-defence. They certainly don’t want to be made to pay for it. If you can’t justify the war, you can’t justify the measures used in fighting it. As you know, that’s a point of view that I don’t agree with or entirely understand, but I acknowledge that it’s a common one. If that’s your view, I can’t argue you round.
But if you accept that the war is justified, then there are various ways you can talk about how to set limits – based on reciprocation, cost-benefit tradeoffs, diplomacy, morality, preventing harm, and so on. That’s a big topic that would require a lot more discussion, so I’ll leave that one there.
That’s one general line of argument that people have taken. The other, completely different one is that there is a continuous spectrum of possible treatment from the luxuriously pleasurable to the agonisingly horrific, with every shade of undistinguished grey between, but the law requires a sharp boundary to be drawn across this fuzziness. Wherever you draw it, some people will argue.
Everybody puts up with a bit of suffering. The limits we set on that depend on the circumstances, but we send people to prison and to boarding school, we send people down coal mines and off to war, we make them poor, we shame and publicly vilify them, and we give them dirty, boring, low paid jobs as tax cattle until they’re too old to work, and then stuff them in a care home. I’ve seen good people break down in tears just thinking about the endless misery that constitutes their everyday lives, through no fault of their own.
We tolerate that people should suffer, and that sometimes it is imposed on people against their will. The question is, what limit is appropriate to stop the plans of someone we believe to be a fanatical Jihadi intent on destroying our peace and liberty? Given what we tolerate being done to the innocent, what will we tolerate for the guilty?
So the US government has drawn a line, well below what the enemy does to our people, and concluded that this much isn’t unreasonable. People can disagree about which shade of grey they should have drawn that line across, and will, but they should understand that this isn’t a debate about whether to allow torture, it’s one about how you define it. And some people define it a little differently to others.
Obama’s policy is no different in kind to Bush’s, he has simply shifted the boundary a little.
Sunfish,
I expect the answer to your question is still classified. I think Kiriakou was on record saying it had disrupted ‘dozens’ of attacks. But how do you verify an attack that never took place, because you stopped it?
Look up the word “Manichaeism” in an encyclopedia; the War on Terror has its foolishnesses, but I wouldn’t have thought that rejection of all earthly pleasures as demonic and the substitution of the Old Testament for works of a Persian mystic was one of them.
My two cents. In WWII, British conscripts could be could be court martialled for publicly stating that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, which meant languishing in a cell where there weren’t any caterpillars, because the rats had eaten them all. A cursory glance at History will tell you that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been carried out with faultless pussiness all round (nothing necessarily wrong with that, they are, after all, fairly incidental to national security). Frankly, those who go into coniptions over treatment of Islamist prisoners fall into roughly the same category as those who think ancient liberties are infringed by the absence gay marriage despite it never having existed anywhere in the world, ever before the 1990s and deserve the same derision. Similar hysteria has been precipitated by historically very, very low American troop losses. Something about the WOT seems to derange people a bit.
In any case, treatment of prisoners of war has never led to a domestic slippery slope before and I see no reason to think it should now. If anything the more sensitivity our country has shown to the enemy, the more it has oppressed its own citizens; nor is this phenonemon historically unprecedented. I would encourage you to reflect on that.
If there’s a dangerous precedent in this, it is the discosure of classified information about a war for political gain while that war is still ongoing. THAT wouldn’t have happened when we in the West enjoyed civilized government.
Exactly. We will pick this issue up again in the future.
Yes, thank you — I’m able to use Google. I was clearly using “Manichaeism” as a metaphor, as in, you know, the GWOT as good guys vs. bad guys, light vs. darkness. FFS.
Did any of the people claiming that a regime consisting of being denied food for months, being tied naked to a chair, being denied sleep, and only being released to be slammed into a wall with a neck brace, or to be beaten about the stomach and face, or to be waterboarded (which is to say, drowned), or to be placed in a box where it is impossible to sit down, or to be placed in a box where sitting up properly is impossible, is not torture, actually read the ICRC report I posted?
vimothy,
I agree with your take on this 100 per cent. Don’t let the torture-rationalisers get you down. I don’t.
The idea that this is somehow legal — though I accept that prosecution is unlikely — is ludicrous. Mendacious, in fact. The rule of law is not optional, dependent upon whether one is engaged in a struggle against a particular class of enemy. And CIA interrogators couldn’t even follow the OLC instructions on waterboarding properly. So even the “good faith” defence cannot hold.
Furthermore, the idea that these techniques (which constitute a regime — it isn’t a question of a single act) are not torture is clearly false if we consider their purpose. Otherwise, they would not have been used.
But anyway, this is the state of libertarianism, is it? Semantic games and after the fact justification and rationalisation of government sanctioned regimes of torture. Fucking pathetic.
Cheers Jonathon. I guess I was a bit shocked.
vimothy,
Since you ask, I did have a look at the report you linked to. Not that it told me anything I didn’t already know, because I already knew about the methods used for SERE courses. While I would expect Jihadists to exaggerate for political effect, I don’t disbelieve it either.
While there’s no argument that the treatment is bullying and unpleasant, and meant to be, it can still be argued that it falls short of being torture.
There is a difficulty here that ordinary people are so ignorant of and unused to the idea of torture that they don’t understand how far it is possible to go down that road. People calibrate their terminology according to their own experiences, and something beyond their own experience can easily trigger an exaggerated reaction. They then don’t have any words left when the real thing turns up.
To take your examples in turn:
Being denied food for months – lots of people go hungry. It’s bearable. Some people even diet voluntarily, or go on fad diets where certain foods are excluded. Unless you want to classify WeightWatchers as an organisation of torturers, this only counts if the diet they were put on damaged their health. And I fully expect it was designed by dieticians specifically so that it wouldn’t.
Being tied naked to a chair – that one doesn’t even hurt! Being restrained in custody is nothing unusual. Nakedness in front of the opposite sex is embarrassing, an affront to one’s dignity, but many people who goes to hospital long-term can expect to have to show the nurses. Are you going to classify nurses as torturers?
Being denied sleep – it depends how long it goes on for. I think everyone has experienced a day or two of this, and the temporary impairment it causes. I certainly have – I have got to the point where I was starting to hallucinate. In that case though, it wasn’t torture, I had to stay awake because we were in a fairly dangerous situation and knocking off for a couple of hours wasn’t an option. It never occurred to me to even complain.
Being slammed into a wall and slapped – that’s like being roughed up in a bar fight, except that they don’t normally bother with providing a neck brace for those. I’ve seen people come out of those with cuts, grazes, black eyes, bleeding noses, and bruises all over. And they just dust themselves off and carry on. It’s a way of life for some people. Being roughed up where they’re not allowed to cause any damage sounds like a breeze by comparison.
Waterboarding – this one I’d say there was some argument for. It triggers a gag reflex that is very hard to bear. However, it is something that people have undergone voluntarily and repeatedly, and have willingly inflicted on their friends and colleagues. That’s one that I think is on the borderline, and if the US government was to classify it as torture I wouldn’t disagree. But I think that if you’re going to do so, then for consistency you would have to outlaw it for SERE too.
And finally, stress positions – achingly uncomfortable, but bearable for a few hours. As I know from experience. It could become torture if extended for much longer. Although putting a number on it would be tricky.
So in summary, most of the measures I’d categorise as being roughed up and mistreated, but not torture. Speaking as someone who has had toenails ripped out for real, (well, OK, one toenail), has been operated on without anaesthetic, and has been hit in fights, I’d say it could have been a lot worse.
And as for the stuff about caterpillars and panties on the head, that’s just rubbish. Al Qaida ought to be ashamed for even bringing that up.
Describing some of this as torture devalues the use of the term, which considering that real torture is still practised elsewhere (to near silence from the usual suspects) I consider a moral wrong. Other bits, it’s worth debating. Certainly there’s a valid debate to be had whether we should be doing this sort of thing, whatever you might call it.
I have no doubt that you’re both going to still disagree, and that’s fine with me. I respect the position you’re taking. All I’m saying is that the definitions aren’t as cut-and-dried as you make out, and that it’s possible to rationally disagree.
–
My respects to Johnathan, for maintaining the polite and civilised debate in the face of a no doubt disappointing response.
PA annoyed — it has already been acknowledged that the treatment of prisoners was a lot harsher than that of special forces on SERE courses, aside from the obvious fact that special forces undergoing torture in controlled conditions under the watch of their peers know this for a fact.
The claim that you have endured worse is BS, pure and simple.
Use of what Darius Rejali calls “clean torture”, namely torture that leaves no marks and so is invisible to human rights monitoring, is actually something with a long and ignoble history, has been pioneered by democracies (ably chronicled in Rejali’s “Torture and Democracy”) and has been exported to non-democracies around the globe.
The fact that much of this debate constitutes an attempt at defending torture by means of semantic obfuscation is, I would say, highly revealing.
And an argument that states, well, it could be worse, so it isn’t torture, is no argument at all.
Well, there are bound to be some silly examples of maltreatment; I agree that if that is used, it does make some of these folk seem pathetic. It is almost as if they are deliberately trying to discredit themselves.
Thanks anyway for your remark directed at me, however. This is an emotive topic, and rightly so. When governments use harsh interrogation methods, in secret, it is a sign that our society is still functioning that people make a fuss. I’d be worried if the reaction of most people was to shrug their shoulders. Then we’d be in trouble.
“The claim that you have endured worse is BS, pure and simple.”
Except you didn’t actually say that.
UNCAT, to which the US is a signatory, defines torture in the following way:
For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
And by the way, torture for the purposes of intelligence gathering is largely ineffective, and there are mountains of evidence in support of this fact. What torture is good for is intimidation.
vimothy,
You are entitled to your opinion that for anyone to disagree with your personal definition is semantic obfuscation. But your definition isn’t the only one.
The UNCAT definition is worth considering for a bit, though. It’s quite odd, in several respects. The operational bit seems to be the four words “severe pain or suffering”, with the rest looking like padding and get-out clauses.
The largest part of it seems to be to do with listing the possible reasons for doing it, which seem to me irrelevant to a definition. The list doesn’t seem to include or cover somebody doing it simply for fun.
I don’t think it should require the involvement of a public official to be counted as torture. And the last sentence is truly bizarre – apparently allowing anything so long as it is legal.
I assume that last bit was put in by those nations who like to stone people to death, and similar “legal sanctions”. I’m a bit surprised you picked this definition, given that it seems to exclude anything a government wants to. It’s not something I’d accept as part of a definition.
So the actual definition here is “severe pain or suffering intentionally inflicted”. What does it mean by “severe”? What’s the threshold, and how do you measure it? Is it “severe suffering” or only “suffering”? Does sending someone to prison, or taking their kids into care, or sacking them count as “inflicting suffering”? If a girl knees her would-be rapist in the nuts, is that “deliberately inflicting severe pain or suffering, punishing him for an act he committed or coercing him” into not committing it? If she happened to be a public official, would that be torture?
You see, with such a loosely-worded definition I can include everything or nothing, as I choose. International treaties are often like that – they’re deliberately worded vaguely, so that nations always have a get-out if they really need one. The end result usually seems to be that they can be used to beat up only the ones who treat it honestly, while the ones it was targeted at can ignore it. It’s the inevitable result of negotiating with complete bastards, which is what the UN is all about.
I’m curious as to why you chose to cite it?
I chose to cite it because the US signed it and, according to this definition, the treatment of Abu Zubaydeh was torture, nothing more and nothing less. Hopefully, the interrogators, the lawyers and policy makers responsible will be prosecuted.
You respond with more semantic obfuscation: “People have limbs removed voluntarily, therefore chopping off somebody’s leg isn’t torture, and to describe it as such devalues the term. People have teeth removed voluntarily, therefore pulling out somebody’s teeth isn’t torture and to describe it as such devalues the term. People have toenails removed voluntarily, therefore pulling out somebody’s toenails isn’t torture and describing it as such devalues the term….”
The upshot of the modern reliance by governments on legitimacy and human rights monitoring is the use of clean torture techniques. For instance, if I kidnap you, hold you without charge in a foreign country, deprive you of sleep, not for a few hours but for weeks, shackle you to the ceiling, not for a few hours, but for weeks, hold you in a freezing cell without food, not for a few hours, but for weeks, and take you down only to slap you, waterboard you or electrocute you, then I am torturing you regardless of purpose and regardless of the actions of other interrogators acting on behalf of other governments. The goal of torture is not to produce scars (irrelevant), but to produce pain.
The reason I am using these techniques and not burning you with a blow-torch is that I don’t want to make it obvious that I am torturing you. If you are deprived of sleep, you will become hyper-sensitive and the feelings as I bounce your head off the wall will be excruciating, even if I have designed the technique not to leave a mark. You will be in agony. I will retain plausible deniability.
Would you wish to be treated like that? No, of course not. Is it compatible with liberal democracy? No, of course not. Is it a useful method of intelligence gathering? No, of course not — the evidence is very clear on that, as one would expect. What, then, is it useful for? Producing confessions and intimidating people.
Incidentally, I would be interested in reading your own definition of torture.
Vimothy:
Sorry, but I’d have to play the world’s smallest violin for you here. I have absolutely no sympathy for these unlawful combatants. They could have been quite legally shot on the battlefield, and they are in fact lucky that they were taken prisoner and treated, in the circumstances, decently.
I’m afraid that I don’t accept that any of the methods used on them is “severe”, and that it is therefore not torture. Indeed, the CIA seems to have bent over backwards to ensure that the treatment was not legally torture, no doubt anticipating that one day someone like the Big O would be in the White House, grandstanding with national security for his own political purposes. As I have said, I oppose torture even for these rotters, but in my opinion they were not tortured, but subject to harsh interrogation in a controlled environment. However I rather suspect I have not convinced you!
“[T]he CIA seems to have bent over backwards to ensure that the treatment was not legally torture”.
Er, no, no they didn’t. They had the OLC memos and their defence is good faith reliance upon them. That is all. This defence is both inadequate according to numerous treaties signed by the US (and thus the US Constitution), and irrelevant since the CIA clearly transgressed the guidelines laid out in the OLC memos.
Of course — having the vague notion that the CIA probably wouldn’t do anything illegal, in addition to diverging radically from the facts (and, please God, from your natural inclination as a libertarian), does not constitute any kind of defence whatsoever.
Vimothy:
We are dancing on the head of a pin here. We both agree that our governments should not use torture, but clearly we disagree about what constitutes torture. I think the CIA did try and establish through legal opinion that they were not carrying out torture, and the fact that the Big O now says it was torture does not, in my view, invalidate the earlier opinion, it merely demonstrates that we now have a sub-prime Jimmy Carter in the White House. Be that as it may, the fact is that we are still fighting men who are unlawful combatants, who do not have the protection of the Geneva Conventions, and who routinely torture and murder anyone unfortunate enough to become their prisoner. In the circumstances I think the Guantanamo detainees were treated better than they had any right to expect, and I only hope that the USA can get through the coming nightmare of weakness and vacillation which the (please God one term) Obama presidency will bring.
vimothy,
I don’t think we’re making any progress here. The definition cited lets you define torture however you want (“severe” could mean anything) and you simply assert that the treatment of abu Zubaydeh passes this test. If I say it wasn’t torture because it wasn’t “severe”, how do you use this definition to decide? It gives no meaningful criteria.
And that’s the problem with this whole debate. Everybody has their own definition, which is to them quite obvious and unarguable, and then find it incomprehensible when other people don’t automatically accept it. That’s why international treaties are careful not to define it, and why the US government felt it necessary for their own peace of mind to call in the lawyers to try to draw a clearer line. It’s an attempt doomed to failure, because there is no line.
You are entitled to your definition, like the people who have classed underpants on the head to be torture are. I’m not saying that you (or they) are necessarily wrong, I’m only saying that the lines you’re all drawing are arbitrary ones, drawn from your own personal perspectives.
And just as there are people to one side of you, counting exposure to ladies underwear as the most terrible torment, to be outlawed by international treaty, so there are people to the other side, who see being roughed up a bit as a normal part of life, who distinguish an assault to be something less than torture, and draw that line much further across.
But they still draw the line, unlike those for who there are no lines. People like abu Zubaydeh.
The nature of Abu Zubaydeh is irrelevant to the issue under debate. The example of underpants is a straw man.
I don’t think that any reasonable person could fail to define Zubaydeh’s treatment as “severe” (again, you are referred to the transcript, and not to take the techniques in turn and in hypothetical non-threatening examples, but to take them as a regime of treatment designed to break the prisoner’s will). And indeed, quite a consensus exists at present.
You failed to provide an alternative definition of torture. Please do so. Perhaps you might draw our attention to some examples of activities that you agree are actually torture and explain why. Furthermore, the very notion that the acceptability of clean torture techniques hinges upon the definition of torture is itself morally bankrupt. They are what they are. Of course, you are free to engage in whatever rationalisation makes you feel better.
And I take that you feel that these techniques are fair game when used on our own troops and when used on suspected criminals?
I don’t think any reasonable person could fail to define the placing of underpants on the head as “severe”. Certainly, if it is done as part of a regimen to break a prisoner’s will. Quite a consensus exists at present – sufficient to get it into the national media, anyway.
Why is that different to your argument?
In asking for an alternative definition, you are missing my point. I’m not saying that my definition is more correct than yours. I’m saying that all such definitions are to some degree a matter of opinion. My opinion may be no more correct than yours is, but yours is not necessarily any more correct than that of the US government’s lawyers. We all agree about the extremes – slowing burning all of someone’s skin off is torture and poking them with a comfy cushion is not – but in the middle we don’t all agree.
If we were to have assurance that the other side would limit themselves to these techniques if they captured our troops, I would consider that a vast improvement over the current state of affairs, and be very pleased indeed.
But your idea that there should be some sort of reciprocal correspondence between how we treat them and how they treat us is the basis of the Geneva Conventions, a framework that the other side specifically rejects. It’s not about how we would want or expect our own people to be treated, it’s about how we choose to behave even when the other side reject such thinking and are going to abuse our people whatever we do.
The question is, if slowly sawing the heads off our troops and then sending us the video is considered fair game, can your idea of justifying limits because of an expectation of reciprocal standards possibly be valid?
Wouldn’t you have to apply that principle to the Islamists, too?
(By the way, did you notice my comment at April 19, 2009 12:18 AM? It might give you a better idea of my actual views on this.)
Stating that the definition of torture is arbitrary is mundane: the definitions of all words are arbitrary. What we agree on is what torture means. And everybody, save a small legal team working for the US Administration searching for a way to justify certain techniques and now facing possible prosecution for war crimes, agrees.
I note that in the past, the US government had no problem defining waterboarding as torture. Indeed, it prosecuted Japanese war criminals for waterboarding US troops after WWII (the punishment was 15 years hard labour).
Above all, the argument that the “harsh interrogation techniques” do not constitute “torture” (under some, yes, torturous and innovative construction of the word) does not provide moral (or even legal) justification for them. All the arguments provide is the opportunity to engage in a little self-satisfied rhetoric: “We do not torture. We are not savages.”
But we do tie prisoners naked to chairs and leave them in freezing cold solitary for weeks at a time. “Yes, but we could do stuff that’s even worse.” In fact, we do. “Yes, but the people we’re doing it to, they’re the real savages: that’s why we’re doing it.” Not to gather intelligence? “Uh, that too.”
I don’t work for the US administration on a small legal team. I suspect, neither do most of the other people you disagree with here. So how can your first paragraph possibly be correct?
Reciprocity (or lack thereof) is neither moral nor legal justification for torture (or “harsh interrogation techniques”, as you’d prefer). We are torturing prisoners because they won’t recognise the GC is not a defence.
The reason that we should not torture is that it is immoral regardless of circumstance, that it is operationally useless, that it degrades institutions that practice it, that it is impossible to regulate, and that it feeds opposition.
It was you that brought reciprocity up. I simply pointed out that if you applied that same reasoning to the other side, that since Al Qaida evidently considers real torture to be fair game, that they ought to think the same when it’s their own side that have been captured. I agree that your reciprocity argument was invalid – indeed that was my point.
I agree absolutely that we should not torture, and have said that all along.
But I sense that you’re starting to get wound up by the argument, so I’m going to take a break. It’s been quite an interesting debate, so my thanks.
“Furthermore, the very notion that the acceptability of clean torture techniques hinges upon the definition of torture is itself morally bankrupt.” * * * “They are what they are. What we agree on is what torture means.”
So torture is to vimothy as obscenity was to Justice Potter Stewart: he can’t define it but knows it when he sees it. Sorry, but that doesn’t work for me. You can’t dodge the fact; definition is the crux of the issue.
Pa Annoyed has it exactly right. There is a continuum of actions stretching from tickling with feathers to the Iron Maiden, and where each of us draws the line is highly individualistic. We’re not going to agree, and it’s pointless to think otherwise. The only thing “morally bankrupt” is the failure to clearly articulate where you believe that line to be (and, by necessary implication, to accept that anything and everything up to that line is not torture). Just as it is disingenuous, at best, to deny that rational, principled people can draw the line at a place different than you do.
I was talking about legal opinion, not blog commentators. Though historically, waterboarding was popularly known as “water torture” (practised as far back as the Spanish Inquisition). I suspect that disagreement here stems more from an ideologically driven desire to provide post-hoc justification for a set of highly dubious interrogation techniques than from any sincere ontological considerations about the nature of torture.
I would further say that the fact that you raise the principal of reciprocity as justification (and not the value of the techniques to intelligence gathering) reinforces my suspicion. In fact, I wasn’t advancing an argument using the principal of reciprocity when I asked if these techniques should be fair game for other prisoners (the ban on torture is non-reciprocal in any case). I was trying to find out if you are consistent in your advocacy of the techniques, i.e. if you are happy for them to be used on other, non-AQ, prisoners.
Arguing about the definition of torture is almost beside the point, which is that these techniques are patently illegal, to say nothing of being totally immoral and strategically counter-productive.
I don’t think that I am getting wound up, but fair enough if you don’t want to continue the argument. All due respect, etc.
So torture is to vimothy as obscenity was to Justice Potter Stewart: he can’t define it but knows it when he sees it.
I have already defined it, via a treaty that the US signed over 20 years ago. (It seems that Bush’s legal team agreed that the techniques were torture as defined by UNCAT, which is why they attempted to change the legal definition of torture in the MCA). PA Annoyed was the commentator who could not define torture.
The crux of the issue is not definition, which is a semantic argument for the lawyers, but whether the techniques are morally justifiable, operationally useful and strategically wise. I think the answer is no in every case, regardless of whether you call them torture, “harsh interrogation techniques”, a rolicking good time for all, or anything else.
Why would you assume it was ideologically driven? Do you know what my ideology is?
I think the problem may be that you’re arguing against what you think my argument and motivation are, rather than what I’m saying. And at risk of being misled by the justifications of the opposing ideology.
I haven’t attempted to justify it on the grounds of reciprocity – I’ve only pointed out that such an argument, whether based on reciprocity or consistency, would necessarily fall down if applied in the same way to Al Qaida’s policy on torture and expectations about their own treatment. Nor have I justified it on the grounds of intelligence gathering. In fact, I have specifically criticised its role in intelligence, and even directed your attention to the comment where I did so, but it seems you didn’t read it.
In fact, I haven’t attempted to justify it at all.
All I’ve said is that it’s a matter of opinion and debate where the line should be, and all Obama has done is to move the line a bit. There are arguments possible in favour of such techniques, and that people can hold them honestly, for rational reasons. Equally, there are people who would draw the line at even milder treatment than I think you would. I’m saying that Bush and Co agreed with you on the principle – that there are things we shouldn’t and won’t do – they only differed on where the line was to be drawn, (which was something on which I deliberately hadn’t commented). I therefore think claims that Bush authorised ‘torture’ and now Obama has rescinded it are themselves ideologically driven.
You are aware, I assume, that a lot of people hated Bush, and would love to find some sort of excuse to prosecute him for something?
As for whether they’re moral, useful, or wise, I suspect that many of the claims against them there are ideologically driven too. Without commenting in any way on whether the usefulness or wisdom is sufficient, it seems highly unlikely that coercion never works, and such claims about its total uselessness are highly suspicious.
In the same way, is shooting Jihadis moral, tactically useful, or strategically wise? While the Jihadis I’m sure would like you to think that it isn’t, the military still seem to believe that it is.
Anyway, good debate. I’m sure we’ll have another one soon.
No worries.
I’m sure that shooting Jihadis can be moral, and tactically and strategically useful depending on context, and even a positive public good.
The claim that torture never works is a bit of a straw man, I feel. The claim is that torture produces certain responses, stemming from the fact that even if you don’t know, you still have to talk: lots of false positives.
This fact, the in-efficacy of torture for intelligence gathering, is extensively documented by Rejali. WWII era fascists in Japan even described torture in one of their field manuals as “the clumsiest possible method of gathering intelligence”.
Torture has other affects, institutionally and socially. More personally, I suppose, it poisons the very idea that we have functional difference from terrorists and fundamentalist militants. If GWOT is about competing ways of dealing with the world, I want to be on the side that respects human rights, doesn’t torture prisoners, and obeys the law. We fight war according to the laws of war, or the very legitimacy of our fight is lessoned.
The US is a signatory to UNCAT under a commonly agreed upon definition of torture. This obviously prohibited the techniques in question — and this opinion was shared by the Bush admin, who felt moved to change the definition in the Military Commissions Act. So I don’t think it’s correct to say, Obama has moved the line a bit. Obama will honour is treaty obligations (and please popular opinion) and put the line back where it was in the first place.
Torture is morally wrong. These techniques constitute “torture”, where torture is severe physical pain that makes the prisoner think that they will die. But even if they do not constitute torture, they are still wrong as individual practices, not efficacious WRT to intelligence gathering in general, and a massive strategic error.
Damn that last paragraph got all chopped up. It should read:
“Torture is morally wrong. These techniques constitute torture. But even if they do not constitute “torture”, where torture perhaps is severe physical pain that makes the prisoner think that they will die, they are still wrong as individual practices, not efficacious WRT to intelligence gathering in general, and a massive strategic error.”
Vimothy, the waterboarding that our troops underwent at the hands of the Japanese, was MUCH MORE SEVERE THAN THAT PRACTISED ON AQ. IN WWII, waterbaording techniques consisted of using a funnel in the prisoner’s mouth to greatly distend the stomach with large quantities of water-in effect, causing great long-lasting pain and sometimes rupture of the stomach.