Interesting Argument

November 7, 2007
5:51 AM CST

Via Reader Mike H, I see that over at SmallWarsJournal, a former SERE instructor has broken the rules and talked about waterboarding from the point of view of an expert—and comes to two conclusions:

  1. It’s torture; and
  2. the United States shouldn’t be doing it.
(See the article for the full story, and read the first forty or so comments for an opposite perspective.)

Let me try and frame the whole torture debate before I add my thoughts and opinions. There are a few basic positions to the argument, both pro and con, namely:

  1. Torture, no matter what form or justification, is wrong. Usually, the Nuremberg argument is used as proof, ie. that Nazi Germans were tried, found guilty and executed by the Western Allies for using torture, and therefore the precedent is that any torture is unjustifiable, no matter the motivation, the intent nor the torturer.
  2. By employing torture, we become the same as our enemies.
  3. Torture doesn’t work, and therefore its practice is abhorrent—a form of sadism or even psyops or punishment, not a means to elicit information.
  4. Torture may often be used, either mistakenly or maliciously, against innocent people.
  5. By giving the State the “right” to torture, those same methods may one day be used against anyone considered an “enemy” of the State, even its own citizens.
  6. The Geneva Convention specifically forbids torture, and so does our own Constitution (by the forbidding of “cruel an unusual” punishment in the Eighth Amendment).
  7. Conversely, the Geneva Convention applies only to enemy combatants in uniform, and we never signed the thing anyway; and the Eighth Amendment has nothing to do with warfare: it’s a prohibition of torture in criminal matters (note the mention of bail and fines in the Eighth, neither of which has anything to do with warfare).
  8. There may be times when torture is justified (the “ticking bomb” scenario), when information is needed either quickly or because of the importance thereof.
  9. Using torture against our enemies means that they will feel “justified” in using torture against those whom they themselves capture.
  10. Torture brutalizes the torturer as much as it harms the victim.
  11. There are less horrible forms of interrogation (eg. sleep deprivation or confinement) than torture (eg. waterboarding or electrocution) which produce the same results.
  12. Our enemies (that would be the people who are videotaping the death by decapitation of our journalists) are already using torture on us, when we are captured.
  13. We are not Nazis; we are the United States, and we should be a shining example of propriety and honor to the world—and using torture makes us lose that standing.
I think those are pretty much the salient points; all others are subsets thereof.

Let me get a few of my own thoughts out of the way first.

Torture is abhorrent; it’s so horrible that I would advocate its use against terrorists, just for making us have to have this debate. I’m not going to claim expertise in its practice, but without going into details, I’ve witnessed its use, and I’ve met victims of torture before. In both cases, I only managed to get rid of the nightmares with an ocean of booze, and some still trouble me to this day. (I will probably have one tonight, just by having discussed this topic now, by the way.)

Torture works. Not all the time, and if not applied “properly”, it may yield either nonsense or incorrect information. ("Did Ismail plant the bomb?” can yield a wrongful confession, as the victim will say anything to end the ordeal. “Who planted the bomb?” while still potentially risky, is more likely to yield the correct answer.) But there’s an old rule of torture: everyone breaks, eventually. If it never worked, no one would ever use it, except as a non-interrogatory activity like punishment or psyops. (I would forbid its use under any circumstances other than interrogation, but that’s never been an issue with our use of torture anyway.)

I am as squeamish as anyone, and probably more than most, at the thought that America has created a group of people trained to torture others. Regardless of whether it’s the Armed Forces, the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, or any of the Alphabet Agencies: I’m not happy about it.

At the same time, however, I know the enemy—once again, I’ve seen his face, albeit in another time and another place, and I realize that sometimes, you may have to get your hands dirty, just to gain the slightest advantage or prevent future harm from befalling you.

You see, the real difference is a basic one: either you treat terrorism as an act of war, or as a criminal enterprise. If it’s the latter, then you have to wait for he terrorist to strike first—the very nature of law enforcement is post facto detection and punishment—whereas warfare not only allows for preemptive action, but in some cases mandates it for survival.

The thing about terrorism is that it’s both criminal and warfare. It is of course war by other means, where one side is hopelessly inferior to the other in conventional terms; but it is waged not on a predetermined battlefield by recognizable combatants. To the terrorists, the whole world is their battlefield, and secrecy, stealth and barbaric violence are (to them) legitimate armes de guerre, and anyone not supporting them is a valid target.

It is war fought without any rules, let alone the hoary old Geneva Convention. The question really then becomes: if the other side is practicing unrestricted warfare, can we afford not to—or, by way of argument, should we refuse to fight in that way, regardless of the harm inflicted on us, so that we may remain at least morally undisturbed?

I dunno: ask someone who lost a close relative on 9/11/2001.

The central question of the day: is waterboarding torture? Of course it is. Let’s not put any panties on that pork chop, and try to pussyfoot our way around the topic by applying some nonsensical “apparent harm” criterion onto this grisly issue. Have you ever breathed in some water, or food, and felt the panic when you couldn’t draw breath? Fine; now imagine that going on for hours, or days. It’s torture, and let’s not mess around with lawyerly evasions.

I am, by the way, untouched by the heartfelt moans of people who think that waterboarding is unbelievably cruel and inhumane. Fine: substitute scropolamine, sodium pentathol or similar “truth-telling” pharmaceuticals (which can cause insanity or death, by the way), or beatings through cardboard, or whatever. The famous “sleep deprivation”, or any of the so-called “softer” interrogation methods, can also cause temporary or permanent insanity, but it’s not apparent, you see, so somehow that’s better. Ditto dehydration or starvation, which we all know about.

Any violent interrogation method which invades the persona is torture, and the “degree” of cruelty is irrelevant. That’s a non-issue, and I refuse to debate that any further.

I am not much troubled by the “Nuremberg” argument, because the Nuremberg trials were as much about vengeful punishment as about justice. Sure, we gave it a patina of rectitude by making it a legal business (a mistake, by the way: the Nazis should have been tried by a military tribunal). Those sick bastards deserved to be hanged or imprisoned anyway, and I am unclear as to the moral distinction between a soldier shoveling poison gas pellets down a pipe and a hijacker who flies an airliner into a skyscraper. (If by some miracle the hijacker were to survive his attack, is there any sane person who would suggest that he not be executed?)

Here are two quick questions: we would all agree that it would be wrong for some SS thug to torture an American soldier to divulge the American’s unit’s positions. Would the same torture be justified on the Eastern Front to learn the date of an upcoming attack by a Russian partisan detachment on a Wehrmacht field hospital? Sometimes, the issues are not as clear-cut as we’d like them to be.

Here’s one which is clear-cut. A common argument against the use of torture is that Saddam Hussein used it, and therefore we can’t. But context, as they say, is everything. Hussein used torture promiscuously, mostly as a weapon, and also on obviously-innocent victims like the children of his enemies—we would use it sparingly, carefully, and only on legitimate suspects for interogation purposes. To conflate those two scenarios is ingenuous to the point of mischief.

As far as I’m concerned, there are only four basic principles to this argument:

1.) Are we truly at war with terrorism, or is this a law-enforcement issue?

-- It’s war. It doesn’t matter that it’s a war fought on no set battlefield, against a foe sometimes unrecognizable as such, who uses weapons which are not “legal” weapons, against people who are not “legitimate” targets. It is precisely because they do this that it’s an act of war, and not a criminal act. It is also a war not being fought under any recognizable rules of engagement by our enemies.

2.) Are terrorists so evil, so beyond any kind of humanity, that they deserve to be fought with any means at our disposal, including torture?

-- Yes. When you are faced with a barbaric foe who ignores all rules of decency and propriety, the only way to win is to fight, temporarily, on the same terms that they do.

3.) Are we capable of maintaining our own humanity if we wage war on them in this way?

-- Yes. As I explained many years ago: some men are going to be brutalized by having to fight in this manner. Men are already being brutalized, by having to shoot and kill Al-Qa’eda combatants, by being shot at or blown up, or by seeing the innocent killed in crossfire. Getting brutalized is a byproduct of war, even one fought against an enemy in uniform on a battlefield. Some men will recover, others will not. It’s sad, terribly sad, but that’s the fact of the matter.

4.) Is this an activity that we should ever put in the hands of the State?

-- Yes. But regretfully so, temporarily, and with the utmost circumspection. You see, it’s because we’re Americans that I believe that we can be trusted to practice barbarities like torture in extreme situations such as the one we find ourselves in now, with so many lives at stake. We can be trusted because we are terrified by it, and will insist on it being used sparingly, with much circumspection, and always with the option to end it if it is abused. Some torturers will abuse it—it’s sadly in the human condition that this occasionally happens—and the abusers will be promptly punished. I have to believe that, just as I have to believe that both our system of justice and our sense of propriety and fairness will provide the ultimate safeguards for us.

If I didn’t believe that, then we would be no better than our enemies.


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