In defense of waterboarding
Posted on 12/31/2007 1:59:29 PM PST by Libertarianize the GOP
The Point | In defense of waterboarding
By Mark Bowden No one should be prosecuted for waterboarding Abu Zubaydah.
> Several investigations are under way to find out who ordered the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, apparently an effort to cover up evidence of torture. Leaving aside for a moment the wisdom of destroying the tapes, I'd like to take a look at what was allegedly done to Zubaydah, and why.
> When captured in Pakistan in 2002, Zubaydah was one of the world's most notorious terrorists. The 31-year-old Saudi had compiled in his young life 37 different aliases and was under a sentence of death in Jordan for a failed plot to blow up two hotels jammed with American and Israeli tourists. The evidence was not hearsay: Zubaydah was overheard on the phone planning the attacks, which were then thwarted. He was a key planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was thought to be field commander of the attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole, and was involved in planning a score of other terror attacks, successful and unsuccessful. He was considered to be a primary recruiter and manager of al-Qaeda training camps.
> He was, in short, a highly successful, fully engaged, career mass murderer. Think back to those pictures of workers crouched in windows high up in the burning World Trade Center towers, choosing whether to jump to their death or be burned alive. This was in part Abu Zubaydah's handiwork.
> At the time of his capture in 2002, just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was strong reason to believe Zubaydah knew virtually the entire organizational structure and agenda of al-Qaeda around the world. He was supervising ongoing plots to kill hundreds if not thousands of people. He was, for obvious reasons, disinclined to share this knowledge. Subjected briefly to waterboarding - less than a minute, according to published reports - he became cooperative and provided information that, according to the government, resulted in preventing planned attacks and capturing other key al-Qaeda leaders.
> In the six years that have passed since the Manhattan towers collapsed, we have gained (partly through the interrogation of men like Zubaydah) a much clearer understanding of al-Qaeda and the threat it poses. While the chance of further murderous attacks is always with us, it is fair to say few of us feel the same measure of alarm we did then. The diminishment of this threat is at least in part due to the heroic efforts of the CIA, the military, and allies around the world in targeting terrorist cells.
> In the process, the menace of Zubaydah himself has deflated. Today, he is just another little man in a orange jumpsuit at Guantánamo. Our national concern has shifted from stopping him to figuring out what to do with him.
> And to second-guessing what was done to him. Waterboarding is a process by which a detainee is strapped down and forced to ingest and inhale water until he experiences the terror of drowning. It is not torture in the traditional sense of inflicting pain; it inflicts fear, intense, visceral fear, without doing physical harm. It is a method calculated to straddle the definitions of coercion and torture, and as such merely proves that both methods inhabit the same slippery continuum. There is a difference between gouging out a man's eyes and keeping him awake, and waterboarding falls somewhere in between.
> In the unlikely event that Zubaydah knew nothing of value and that every bit of information he divulged was false, it was still reasonable to assume in 2002 that this was not the case. If his interrogators were able to stop one terror attack by waterboarding him, even if they violated international agreements and our national conscience, it was justified. All nations have laws against killing, but all recognize self-defense as a legitimate excuse. I think the waterboarding in this case is directly analogous, except that Zubaydah himself, although he richly deserves it, was neither killed nor permanently harmed.
> I can understand why someone at the CIA ordered the videotapes destroyed. It was both to protect those who did it (more from their own government, I suspect, than from terrorist reprisals) and to prevent the images from ever becoming public. We have seen the disastrous, self-defeating consequences of such pictures, which untethered from context assume a damaging life of their own. Whoever made the call now runs the risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice, a risk I am sure was evaluated before making the choice.
> Here's where the issue gets confusing. No information gained by coercive methods ought to be admissible, ever, in a trial or tribunal. Torture can be used to twist (the word torture literally means "to twist") testimony in any desired direction. The goal of any criminal proceeding is justice, and torture produces only the kind perfected during the Inquisition.
> The goal of an intelligence operation in wartime, on the other hand, is to elicit accurate, timely information to thwart attacks. In this setting, interrogation is a process, one in which a prisoner is rewarded for the truth, and punished for lying. It is designed to save lives and ensure the success of a military operation. Coercive methods are rarely necessary. Most often, prisoners can be induced to cooperate by being nice to them. There are many other interrogation methods proven to be useful that do not require so much as raising one's voice. But there will always be hard cases like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, another mastermind of Sept. 11. With prisoners like these, defiant and dangerous, the only right question to ask is, What works?
> What does work? Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information. If that were so, then this would be a simple issue, and the whole logic of incentive disincentive is false, which defies common sense. In one of the cases I have cited previously, a German police captain was able to crack the defiance of a kidnapper who had buried a child alive simply by threatening torture (the police chief was fired, a price any moral individual would gladly pay). The chief acted on the only moral justification for starting down this road, which is to prevent something worse from happening. If published reports can be believed, this is precisely what happened with Zubaydah.
> People can be coerced into revealing important, truthful information. The German kidnapper did, Zubaydah did, and prisoners have throughout recorded time. What works varies for every individual, but in most cases, what works is fear, fear of imprisonment, fear of discomfort, fear of pain, fear of bad things happening to you, fear of bad things happening to those close to you. Some years ago in Israel, in the course of investigating this subject exhaustively, I interviewed Michael Koubi, a master interrogator who has questioned literally thousands of prisoners in a long career with Shin Bet. He said that the prisoner who resisted noncoercive methods was rare, but in those hard cases, fear usually produced results. Fear works better than pain.
> It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.
> Which is why I say that waterboarding Zubaydah may have been illegal, but it wasn't wrong.
Who would want a president who bases his foreign policy on "world opinion"?
Ofcourse, we need to carefully and narrowely define what we mean by torture, but once so defined, we need to reject it.
Bowden’s point is that torture should remain illegal; but on the extremely rare occasion where it works and can be justified because it will likely save lives, we should not prosecute our intelligence agents for putting America’s best interest first.
If it illegal it is because it is immoral, and it should not be used.
We are allowing circumstances to dictate our morality which is situational ethics and leads to no ethics at all.
Let’s see the terrorists who were waterboarded!
No permanent injury or scars?
Then it’s not “torture”!
Did we obtain information that prevented more attacks?
YES!!!!
End of discussion!
So allowing a few hundred people die because we are afraid of causing an enemy some pain is ethical?
As every day goes by I become more and more surprised the good side won WWII.
The only place I think Mark messed up was where he said:
"It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law."
No, it shouldn't be banned, and no, the admittedly grueling interrogation technique was apparently authorized at the time of Zubaydah's interrogation so therefore nobody broke the law.
Illegal and immoral ought to be closely correlated but they are not identical concepts.
We are allowing circumstances to dictate our morality which is situational ethics and leads to no ethics at all.
Situational ethics does not lead to no ethics as long as you are clear that a specific combination of circumstances leads to a greater good than holding one principle to be more important than all other possibilities. Principles can not be evaluated in a vacuum and must always be judged by the totality of circumstances present. In this case if America's best interest is served through a brief administration of waterboarding to a terrorist in order to obtain information that is more important than the principle that we don't torture then it should be tolerated. We don't make rules that torture is legal because then our agents will likely go too far assuming that they can get away with it. As Lord Acton noted power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If our agents know that they are putting their career and possibly their freedom at risk when the torture a suspect only the courageous agent who is really looking out for America's best interest is likely to actually employ such extreme means to achieve the worth while ends.
Water-boarding:
• We do it to our own troops in training.
• It leaves no permanent physical damage.
• It leaves no permanent mind altering residuals as some chemical methods do.
• There is little risk involved for someone medically fit.
But according to some this is torture. The big “T” word is extrapolated to include anything other than asking politely name and age. Indeed, some even argue that putting someone in the stress position is excessive and torture. It’s not torture. Sam Johnson (R) Texas was tortured; the terrorists captured are unlawful combatants and moreover getting fat and receiving better health care than most uninsured in the US (literally). There is a difference between interrogation and torture. Since these people are unlawful combatants and do not fall under the definition of an uniformed or recognizable combatant force of any kind either by US or UN definition, since they are in many cases nationless (As OBL is as well, his Saudi citizenship was revoked), it’s absurd to think that we would extend the laws of land warfare to these terrorists. This terrorist is not a US citizen. He is not on US soil. He is often not a national of any country, wears no recognizable uniform, is fighting under the flag of no nation, and conducts activities which a soldier would be charged for as a war crime. They could be legally HANGED on the spot, as we did in WWII, as all did in WWII.
But today we take people who should be hanged or shot on the spot, and worry about if it is inappropriate to make them wear an orange suit.
Unbelievable-
In a letter my Representative mentioned a statement by 20 former U.S. Army interrogators saying, “Prisoner/detainee abuse and torture should be avoided at all costs.” I found such words frightening, because it was presented to refute my statement that prisoners/detainees should be subjected to at least the same regimen of treatment as our own troops receive during SERES training, in which every Special Forces trooper does break. On 9/11 we were prepared to shoot down any civilian airliner, which did not land immediately, regardless of assertions by the crew. What an incredible disconnect from reality when we were willing to kill our own citizens, but unwilling to subject terrorists to severe discomfort to prevent abundant murder and destruction. The standard of “at all costs” means 2,000, 10,000, or 100,000 deaths per incident for my Representative, and the people who elected him, did not reach the limit at which we say, “We must protect our nation at all costs.”
Supposedly even McCain’s legislation has a ticking time bomb exemption, but until you have broken someone’s resistance you don’t know whether a chemical, biological or nuclear attack may occur. Does the time bomb begin ticking at the possibility 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 deaths? Evidently for a certain number of individual deaths, we lack the courage to define, we would rather remain within a comforting, self-created moral illusion, while others are brutally slaughtered through application of modern technology invigorated by limitless hatred. Evidently we can all feel morally centered, while an undefined number of other families are ravaged and hollow for the remainder of their lives. Evidently our moral comfort requires sending others into harms way without our support to face “real” moral dilemmas of whether to act aggressively, including resorting to actions some would define as torture, or obey a law which could not survive the extravagant number of murders now obtainable.
“If it illegal it is because it is immoral”
Why is it immoral?
I survived water boarding during military training.
It is extremely uncomfortable and induces extreme panic but it is not torture and its effects are over with a few minutes afterward.
I endorse its use on every one of the enemy conbatants.
Thanks for your kind reply.
Politicians can always seem to find groups of “experts” who have an agenda or who can have their opinions taken out of context to support whatever poisition the politician wants to run on. Remember all those retired generals who kept signing letters against Bush and the war effort a year or two ago?
What you said BUMP!
Every Marine recruit goes through gas chamber training which induces panic and discomfort. I wonder what the scumbag liberal politicians would think about locking a terrorist in a gas chamber with cs gas for 30 seconds?
The cartoon ought to be asking why our intelligence failed, why the INS failed, why airport security failed.
Why is it immoral?
Because cruelty against a helpless person is immoral.
Here is what the Army defines as torture.
By contrast, the Army's Field Manual 34-52, titled "Intelligence Interrogations," sets more restrictive rules. For example, the Army prohibits pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food deprivation. Under mental torture, the Army prohibits mock executions, sleep deprivation and chemically induced psychosis. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html
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