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The evil of torture should be clear to anyone with a functioning conscience, but far too many observers have managed to convince themselves that torture in a struggle against evil is acceptable. I don't think any argument will convince them otherwise. The human brain is a powerful rationalizer.
But the stupidity of torture may be another matter.
"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."
The author of that passage -- published this past Sunday in the Washington Post -- is Matthew Alexander, a retired air force officer who worked as a senior interrogator in Iraq at the height of the insurgency. It was Alexander's team that tracked down Al Qaeda's psychopathic leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- and they did it the way smart interrogators have always done it.
"I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi."
In 2003, I travelled to Egypt, Turkey, and Uzbekistan to study torture. I expected it to be brutal and depressing. It was. But I wasn't expecting to discover that torture is the preferred method of the lazy and stupid.
In Egypt, the police routinely respond to crimes by going to the scene and sweeping up everyone they can get their hands on. These people are taken back to the station, beaten mercilessly, and ordered to give up more names of people who may or may not be involved. Those named are then arrested, beaten, and ordered to give up names. Eventually, the police decide, almost arbitrarily, that someone or other is guilty and that person confesses after an extra stiff dose of "investigation."
This is not the most efficient investigative method, at least not if one is concerned with accurately identifying the guilty parties. In a case that came to light around the time I was in Egypt, a young woman went missing. The police did their thing and the father of the woman duly confessed to murdering her. Then the daughter showed up and asked what all the fuss was about.
As tough-talkers like to say, torture really does work. Even a vicious terrorist will inevitably break down and talk. You want to hear about the plot? Sure. He'll tell you all about it. He'll also tell you about how he kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, framed the Rosenbergs, and shot JFK. And that's a problem.
The torturer may want to hear only the truth but the victim isn't interested in telling the truth. He wants to say whatever will convince the torturer to stop. Those two categories seldom overlap completely. In many cases, they may not overlap at all.
So the torturer will get reams of information and no way of knowing what is true and what is a lie told by a man desperate to please his tormentors. In Apartheid South Africa, a mix-up with code names once resulted in a tortured suspect admitting that he murdered himself.
And this is to say nothing of the wider ramifications of torture. Whatever benefits it delivers are purely tactical and short-term. The costs are strategic and lasting. Torture radicalizes opponents and alienates peoples. It destroys the reputation of the torturer. As Matthew Alexander noted, these dynamics ultimately cost the lives of American soldiers in Iraq.
Alexander also demonstrated that the harm done by torture can come in subtler forms.
As a result of switching to more intelligent, less brutal interrogation tactics, "our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond."
Eventually, the brass did realize this and it became the basis for the current relative success in Iraq. But the delay cost thousands upon thousands of lives.
That's the stupidity of torture. And if the evil of torture doesn't convince us to reject torture absolutely, surely that will.
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