First, in taking this position in defense of the use of torture, Cheney and his allies are essentially saying that the ends justify the means, that it is OK to break decades of US and international law in the name of national security. Al-Qaeda also believe that their ends justify their brutal and lawless behavior. If we adopt the same reasoning as the terrorists we profess to oppose in choosing tactics, exactly what is it that separates us from them? I would concede that water-boarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" differ from filmed beheadings and mass murder. However, the difference is not one of category but one of degree. Both advocate the lawless use terror to achieve their goals.
Second, experts in the fields of interrogation and counter-terrorism are far from convinced that Cheney's claims that "torture worked" are valid. FBI Director Robert Mueller has publicly disputed Cheney's claim that the use of torture has been responsible for the prevention of attacks on the US. Former Bush State Department lawyer and 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow thinks the gains from coercive techniques are mixed at best.
To the extent that the methods are more than just a way of debasing an enemy, their added value is in breaking people quickly, with the downsides including unreliability. That is one reason the methods of torment do not stack up well against proved alternatives that rely on patience and skill.
Zelikow has also had first-hand experience in the State Department with the negative effect that the use of such techniques has had on US diplomatic efforts.
There is another variable in the intelligence equation: the help you lose because your friends start keeping their distance. When I worked at the State Department, some of America’s best European allies found it increasingly difficult to assist us in counterterrorism because they feared becoming complicit in a program their governments abhorred. This was not a hypothetical concern.
Ali Soufan, described by Zelikow as one of the more impressive US interrogators encountered by the 9/11 Commission, took issue with Cheney's claims in The New York Times.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.
I am willing to bet that Mueller, Zelikow and Soufan each know more about these issues than Cheney, Scarborough or any of the other defenders of torture will ever know.
UPDATE: Former Bush administration Homeland Security official Frances Townsend admitted on CNN that the CIA documents released this week do not show torture was effective at gaining crucial intelligence as Dick Cheney said they would (h/t Andrew Sullivan).
It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.
Andrew adds a terrific post on what it all means. The New York Times provides an excellent editorial.
--Ballard Burgher
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