Not to seem like I’m picking on Joe, but I’ll point out a few things in connection with his post below on whether waterboarding “worked” and helped us find Osama bin Laden.
1. Michael Mukasey, former attorney general, has said that John McCain is wrong about the efficacy of waterboarding in the hunt for bin Laden. See his statement here.
2. Of course the question of its efficacy has nothing to do with whether the technique was lawful, and whether it was lawful does not wholly answer the question of its morality. I take it that those who describe waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) as “torture” are taking it as given that the techniques are immoral, and perhaps unlawful too. But people who are not convinced that waterboarding is torture are not liable to be moved by repeated accusations that they must regard torture as morally licit. So far that has been the trend of argument among most of the critics of EIT in this renewed debate.
3. Clarity in this debate is not achieved by collapsing the very substantial difference between waterboarding as practiced by our CIA, and the actions of Japanese tormentors of Allied prisoners in WWII, which led to war crimes charges. This red herring is, I’m sorry to say, used by my friend Jeff Jacoby, who relies on an inflammatory op-ed from four years ago.
4. It is not entirely irrelevant to this discussion to note that waterboarding was used for a considerable time in the training regimen of U.S. armed forces, specifically the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course used for special forces and others. The United States military is not in the habit of subjecting its own troops to torture.
It seems to me that responsible debate has to begin with observations like these. For my part, I have yet to experience any moral pangs over the waterboarding of three unlawful enemy combatants. But others are welcome to theirs, and free to try to induce such pangs in me. I don’t promise them much hope of success.
May 13th, 2011 | 11:31 am
Thank God for a voice of reason at “First Thoughts” – - you’d think that three cases of waterboarding were the equivalent of the Holocaust.
May 13th, 2011 | 11:33 am
I’ve never understood observation 4; if it is at all valid, it at least must be in light of these equally relevant counter-points:
1. The experience of soldiers in a friendly training environment is nothing like the experience of prisoners in a hostile “interrogation” environment. The former is voluntary, the latter is not. The psychological differences between a volunteer and a captive being involuntarily subjected to these treatments is not comparable in any way.
2. Torture is not just a matter of the kind of technique, but the degree. Making someone stand for an hour is not torture, but for days is. Torture is often sold with infeasible “ticking time-bomb” situations, but in practice KSM was waterboarded hundreds of times over the course of months. I highly doubt that SERE trainees were subjected to that degree of waterboarding.
The question I’d like answered by torture proponents is the following. Let’s put aside the definition of torture and whether something is or is not. Instead, let’s apply the Golden Rule: are our enemies morally permitted to use our techniques on our soldiers? If so, well, I suppose we are at an impasse. If yes, how do you go about justifying that kind of moral relativism?
I’ve never gotten one of my conservative friends to answer that question.
May 13th, 2011 | 11:43 am
“3. Clarity in this debate is not achieved by collapsing the very substantial difference between waterboarding as practiced by our CIA, and the actions of Japanese tormentors of Allied prisoners in WWII, which led to war crimes charges. This red herring is, I’m sorry to say, used by my friend Jeff Jacoby, who relies on inflammatory op-ed from four years ago.”
Why doesn’t this bring clarity? Conduct employed by our enemies in a prior war was deemed inhumane and illegal, and a violation of the standards of universal human dignity. Conduct employed by the CIA recently is similar in many respects. If you have a cogent argument for why the differences between the two make the former bad and the latter OK, then make that argument. But asserting that the two are not comparable does not make it so.
4. It is not entirely irrelevant to this discussion to note that waterboarding was used for a considerable time in the training regimen of U.S. armed forces, specifically the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course used for special forces and others. The United States military is not in the habit of subjecting its own troops to torture.
Yes, it is entirely irrelevant. A man has sex with his wife. This is wholesome good and normal. A rapist imposes sex on a victim. This is degenerate, evil and abnormal. The issue of consent matters. When our own troops voluntarily submit to certain experiences as part of a training regimine to help them endure the evil and abusive treatment of potential captors, they do so with full consent and their sacrifice is laudable. But prisoners don’t consent to the same treatment. We don’t condone beating prisoners, and yet our soldiers train in hand to hand combat techniques that cause them to hit one another. So what?
May 13th, 2011 | 12:00 pm
In this video, a man that was tortured is asked, regarding the confusion of his countrymen, “What would you say to them, professor?”
“To stop torturing their fellow man. It is a shame and a dishonor.”
May 13th, 2011 | 12:09 pm
“The United States military is not in the habit of subjecting its own troops to torture.”
As a former soldier, I’m not so sure I agree with this statement as it is presented above. Yes, the U.S. military is not in the habit of torturing its own troops, but the purpose of SERE training is, in fact, to expose trainees to experiences that they would probably encounter while in the custody of an enemy who, most likely, would expose them to “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Like every other type of training in the military, the purpose is to familiarize the trainees to conditions that mirror, as closely as possible, the “real thing”. That is why Ranger school, for example, withholds food and sleep from trainees. That is why live-ammunition is shot over soldiers practicing their low-crawl at Basic Training. For soldiers at a high-risk of enemy capture (Special Forces, certain pilots, etc), we apply this same principle. So SERE does, actually, expose them to situations that are unsavory and ugly.
A couple of anecdotes: 1) A show on the Discovery Channel about SERE reported that Army psychologists conducted a study that measured stress hormones in SERE trainees and compared their levels to the levels of people on other “high-stress” situations (sky-diving, etc). They concluded that the stress hormones were so high, that an over-whelming majority of SERE trainees actually became temporarily sterile. The stress shut down their sperm production.
2) My friend who went through SERE training once told me that that training was so intense that he would prefer to die rather than get captured by the enemy. Because of the classified nature of the training, he couldn’t elaborate. But he was absolutely serious. I can’t imagine that anything but “torture” would induce this attitude in him.
I suggest we not be naive as to what our own military does to our own soldiers. It’s ugly, yet necessary to give our forces the best chance at survival if they do ever get captured.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
sd — well said, especially regarding the former point. I have yet to hear anyone make a sound argument for how what we are doing is different from the actions that we not so long ago charged as war crimes, other than that we are the ones doing it. I’m reminded of the statement attributed to Supreme Court Justice Brennan about the role of the court: “We are not final because we are infallible; we are infallible because we are final.” Defense of waterboarding seems to assume “we do not do it because it is just, it is just because we do it.”
Finally, it is worth noting what Mukasey does not say: namely, that “EIT” — God Bless Euphemism — procured the information that led to Bin Laden’s courier’s correct nickname. Rather, he implies that fact while only saying that (a) KSM broke under waterboarding and (b) KSM revealed the nickname.
This fits with the narrative that I have seen elsewhere: that after hundreds of waterboarding sessions, KSM was interrogated using traditional means and that during those traditional sessions he revealed the nickname. Thus, those opposed to EIT can cite its ineffectiveness while someone like Mukasey can point out that at one point KSM refused questioning, then he was waterboarded, and then he didn’t refust anymore. And he can make the subjective judgment that the waterboarding therefore “broke” him.
I guess the deeper issue in all this, though, is that regardless of its effectiveness, “breaking” someone seems like exactly how to describe something that is inimical to human dignity and to the exercise of free will.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:30 pm
Matthew,
Good post. Your #2 (“the question of its efficacy has nothing to do with whether the technique was lawful, and whether it was lawful does not wholly answer the question of its morality”) was exactly the comment I made to Joe Carter’s excellent post.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Matt, If one of our soldiers deliberately kills, or creates the plan to kill, 3000 innocent civilians in our “enemy’s” population and has knowledge of the whereabouts and plans of others who were involved in that incident and are very likely planning further atrocities, then YES they have a right to torture him.
May 13th, 2011 | 12:40 pm
[...] agree with you, Matt, that there are several questions surrounding this issue that, while disturbing, are disputable. [...]
May 13th, 2011 | 12:42 pm
By the way, Matt, given: a) the extreme unlikelihood of the scenario in my comment above and b) the fact that the US government itself would take care of the SOB in question if it did occur, your hypothetical is rather dumb. If the conservatives you interact with can’t answer it, you might want try to get to know smarter conservatives.
May 13th, 2011 | 1:15 pm
Fred –
After a trial, right?
May 13th, 2011 | 1:35 pm
I find it thoroughly disgusting that some people think it’s OK to torture another human being. If, after second thought, they stand by these claims then the terrorists have truly won. They have debased humanity in the ‘free world’ to uncaring animals.
May 13th, 2011 | 2:39 pm
I didn’t remember where any jihadists have declared that “debas[ing] humanity in the ‘Free World’ ” was one of their goals, surely a prerequisite to their having “won.” It certainly doesn’t rank with “establishing a caliphate” or “killing all the Jews.”
Seriously, airy-fairy talk like that is just ear candy for the consumption of Western thinkers. A war is a battle to survive, not an upholding of “our” (which “us” BTW) self-image.
May 13th, 2011 | 3:53 pm
Ray, The “soldier” would be an enemy combatant, not a criminal. If he (as Al Qaeda does) also fought in civilian clothes, hid behind human shields, and targeted civilians, he would be an illegal combatant and not even entitled to the protections of the Geneva convention. If he also publicly bragged about his role in the murder in my scenario, there would be even less need for any kind of trial.
Vast Conspiritor, At last, a voice of reason on this thread.
May 13th, 2011 | 10:17 pm
Fred, Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions:
Very few ‘detainees’ have actually been captured in the act. Hardly any, in fact. Most were turned over for reward money by others, according to the reports I’ve seen.
Should that count as “doubt… as to whether persons… belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4″?
May 14th, 2011 | 4:12 pm
[...] Torture Didn’t Lead Us to Bin Laden – Matthew J. Franck, First Things [...]
May 16th, 2011 | 6:41 pm
As one who has been to SERE school, the arguement that we volunteered for it and therefore we can not do it to others who have not, is false. As soon as enemies of this country picked up rifles and or planned attacks against us, they then have volunteered for the same treatment. The fact that waterboarding was used on three individuals in order to save the lives of others or find UBL does not keep me awake at night. Whether they were waterboarded once or a hundred times also is of no importance. They needed to ensure that these people were “broken”, for lack of a better term, in order to ensure that information obtained in follow-on interrogations/interviews were valid.
May 17th, 2011 | 6:50 am
I guess this means that Matthew Franck disagrees with Joe Carter’s repeated claim that the decades-long use of waterboarding in US military training (e.g., SERE school) was “torture.”
Is such training harsh? Yes. Is it “torture”? Preposterous!
I suspect that Joe feels compelled to defend the indefensible (that the US regularly tortured its own soldiers) because he knows the argument that follows from the denial that such training was torture. If it were conceded that some applications of waterboarding are “not-torture,” this might well mean that some instances of the use of waterboarding against some terrorists, in some instances are also “not-torture.” It would also mean that the debate is not shut-down at the outset by fiat. And it means we should try to have an informed and intelligent debate about what makes some techniques merely “harsh” and permissible rather than “torture” and impermissible.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:16 pm
Simple question is for those that say we can get the same or better information from terrorist using the Obama method versus Bush need to show proof. This is not some college debate, but involves the lives of maybe an entire city like NY. Time is probably going to be a critical factor. Can the non waterboarding team get the intel as quickly as those using the other method? When Obama method Lawyers the terrorist up and the terrorist and his new pal say they do not want to talk, what happens then?
When NYC is hit with terror attack under this new program, who will take the responsibility for the deaths? We know Obama will throw others under the bus. He is only directly involved after seeing something is a success and then it was all Barry. So should Obama be impeached for not interrogating the terrorist to stop the attack? I think so and would expect the families of those killed to be very upset and demanding blood.
And if torture never works, why has it been used all over the world, in all cultures, for thousands of years? Terrorist are not in uniform and should be viewed as we would a nazi out of uniform trying to kill US citizens in the states. What did we do to those guys again? What did we do to protect the USA to Japanese and German Americans during WWII? Yes, decades later, the PC crowd appolgized, but no one then was complaining or worried about it. Same with dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. Most who know WWII in depth support both actions.
And now our leader Barry has very quietly signed an exec order to do what…care to guess?
Obama Admin Quietly Ends Immigrant Registration Program That Targeted Men From Muslim Countries:
The U.S. government has ended a controversial counterterrorism program created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that required men living in the U.S. who came from mostly Muslim countries to register with federal authorities.
Called NSEERS — National Security Entry-Exit Registration System — the program required registration, interviews and fingerprinting of male visitors 16 and older from Muslim nations as well as North Korea.
The program targeted men entering the country as well as more than 80,000 men already in the U.S., about 1,000 of them from metro Detroit. Nearly 13,800 residents were further investigated, and 2,870 were later deported.
The Department of Homeland Security quietly ended the program through a notice buried on its Web site on April 28.
May 17th, 2011 | 11:26 pm
Greta Can the non waterboarding team get the intel as quickly as those using the other method?
Whoever said that waterboarding was a quick method to get information? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded over an entire month and never gave us useful information.
As torture-apologist Marc Thiessen admits, KSM mocked his CIA interrogators during his March 2003 waterboarding sessions by using his fingers to tick off the number of seconds he would be subjected to near drowning.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/05/16/2219880/bush-aide-says-ksm-counted-off.html#ixzz1MfemyHeO
Just like special forces operators in the military, terrorists are often trained to endure torture.
May 18th, 2011 | 8:17 am
Greta –
And if astrology never works, why has it been used all over the world, in all cultures, for thousands of years?
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