You might have read about the McCain-Feinstein
Amendment introduced last week—an attempt to prevent a recrudescence of the
torture that began with the Bush/Cheney administration and that was solidified
by Obama’s
decision to “ban” torture via executive order as a matter of policy rather
than prosecute it as a matter of law. Obama’s ban included a requirement that
interrogations would henceforth be limited to the techniques specifically
enumerated in the Army Field Manual. The AFM limitation was
no panacea (and no matter where you stand on McCain-Feinstein, I recommend this
terrific
contrary view from Jeff Kaye in Firedoglake and this one from David Swanson) but
it does seem to have curtailed at least some of the
barbarity of the Bush/Cheney years, and the McCain-Feinstein amendment
would codify that requirement into a law.
(I’ve said it many times before, but still I want to pause
here to note that one
president has no more power to prohibit what’s already illegal than another
president has to permit it, and Obama purporting to “ban” torture is about
as coherent a notion as Obama purporting to ban murder, arson, embezzlement, or
rape. The constitution provides that the president “shall take care that the
laws be faithfully executed,” and Obama’s failure to do so despite the
requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and other laws by
which the United States is bound is a violation of that oath.)
Laws that demonstrably will not be enforced are de facto no
longer laws (imagine if the government decided to “look
forward, not backward” regarding bank robberies, for example), and so the
Bush/Obama one-two punch presented a conundrum to anyone opposed to torture:
how do you advocate against something that’s already criminal but that the
government has insidiously turned into a mere matter of policy? A terrific
organization called Human Rights
First has adopted a two-prong approach: decrease the political attraction
of torture by educating the public about how torture
is ineffective, contrary to the values America claims to champion, and
detrimental to national security; and re-introduce the possibility of
prosecution for torture by helping to pass
new laws that would be more difficult for unscrupulous lawyers to turn into
mockeries.
I’m proud to have been part of both these efforts, each of
which has involved an extraordinary
collection of former generals, admirals, CIA case officers, law enforcement
officers, and interrogation professionals who between them have hundreds of
years of relevant experience. And coinciding with the introduction of the McCain-Feinstein
amendment, last week we were in DC meeting with various senators and staff we
thought might be amenable to our message.
I confess it was a little surreal and dispiriting at times
to realize we were trying to persuade American legislators that torture is a
bad idea. I mean, that’s a pretty remedial level of lobbying. What’s next—You know, Senator, it occurs to me the
government really shouldn’t conduct syphilis experiments on
unsuspecting patients? You’d just think that in 2015, we’d be past that
level of inhumanity and could focus on more advanced topics. And yet.
Anyway, I can’t imagine anyone but the most hardened
ideologue or cynical politician spending time with this group and coming away
still believing that torture is in any way a good idea for America, and my
sense is that we might have changed a few minds. There’s something inherently
awkward about insisting on believing something based on absolutely no relevant
experience when a roomful of people with hundreds of years of experience in
that thing is telling you the opposite.
It’s worth pausing to emphasize that point: The world’s most experienced and
accomplished intelligence, military, and law enforcement interrogators all
agree that torture is ineffective, contrary to the values America claims to
champion, and detrimental to our national security. It’s not just that the
actual experts don’t need torture to be available; they don’t want it to be available.
Conversely, the people most enthusiastic about torture—Dick
and Liz Cheney; Mark Thiessen; John Yoo, to name just a few—have no
interrogation experience at all. It’s not a coincidence that these people tend
to argue for torture in the form of clichés—take
the gloves off, do whatever it takes, get tough on terrorists—because the
chief function of a cliché is to provide a comforting substitute for actual thought.
But it’s also interesting that the clichés in question tend to focus on tactics
rather than objectives, because a focus on tactics rather than results is one
of the defining features of an amateur.
Professionals focus on the results they want, and dispassionately
select the techniques most likely to achieve those results. Amateurs focus on
the techniques they want to use because the techniques themselves are the
source of their gratification. So it’s telling that the people who most want to
torture aren’t, judging by their own rhetoric, primarily interested in
actionable intelligence. They’re primarily interested in torture. And the
people most interested in actionable intelligence are the ones least interested
in torture.
To put it another way: you don’t have to be Sun Tsu to know
that you don’t win a fight by doing what feels
best to you; you win by doing what is
worst for your enemy.
John Oliver got a lot of this right last night on Last Week
Tonight. The
15-minute clip is, as usual with Oliver, both hilarious and far more
informative than most mainstream coverage. Its primary shortcoming, I think, is
its failure to mention that torture was already illegal on 9/11; that in
ordering torture, Bush and Cheney were committing criminal acts; and that in
failing to prosecute the officials who ordered torture, Obama has violated his
oath of office. A little more discussion of Appendix M of the Army Field Manual
would have been great, too, because even if McCain-Feinstein passes, the fight
against torture will have to go on.
Amateurs think tactics; professionals think strategy. In
this regard, as part of our efforts, former navy
general counsel Alberto Mora was part of a panel in which he pointed out
that torture was a profoundly tactical
decision. Whatever it might have accomplished in any individual instance (and the
evidence suggests it accomplished nothing useful at all), it cost us the
cooperation of our allies who refused to go along with torture and of local
populations who became understandably reluctant to inform lest they deliver up
a neighbor into barbarity. It’s worth remembering that Nazi soldiers fled the
Soviet advance from the east, hoping to be captured by American forces
advancing from the west because of America’s reputation for humane treatment of
captives (and the Soviet army’s reputation for brutality). Imagine the
intelligence boon we achieved because German soldiers wanted us to capture them. Now imagine if our
reputation had instead been for brutality, and those German soldiers had decided
they’d best flee in the other direction.
Along these lines, I also spent time with Torin
Nelson, a former soldier who has conducted and supervised thousands of
interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo. It was sobering to
hear him describe how nearly every jihadist he interrogated cited Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo as the causes that impelled them to pick up arms. Former Air
Force interrogator Matthew Alexander, also a member of the Human Rights First
group, has made similar points, arguing that torture
is probably responsible for more Americans killed than 9/11 itself.
If you’re relatively new to this topic, here are a few posts
I’ve written over the years addressing the various torture apologist arguments:
It’s interesting to see how the “facts” apologists used to
cite have all been overtaken by evidence. And yet the apologists continue to
agitate for a return to what Dick Cheney’s “dark side.” I hope the work I was
honored to be part of last week will make that prospect more difficult.