It’s not a simple matter, not at all. It’s so complicated that it’s what the Europeans call “transversal,” it cuts across established political and ideological lines. Haven’t you been surprised to find presumed righties rejecting aggressive interrogation and presumed lefties accepting it?
One of my gurus in things military is David Galula, a French officer who fought in Algeria and then went to Harvard to write one of the classics on counterinsurgency. Before going to Algeria, he hated torture and vowed to do everything he could to end the practice. He never lost his hatred of it — for what it did to the victims and also what it did to the practitioners — but slowly, reluctantly, he was compelled to admit that it sometimes works. This was a terrible realization. It’s one of the things that makes torture such a horrible question. You can be against it, as Galula was, and as I am, and still admit that maybe there are times…
I have written against torture, on the grounds that a man will do and say many things in order to stop the pain. He will often invent information that he thinks will make you stop. I think that’s intuitively obvious, and it seriously undermines the case for torture, as for methods that may fall short of someone’s definition of “torture” but still inflict physical and/or psychological pain.
On the other hand, sometimes it works. I have met professional interrogators who are adamant that torture is never necessary. They say that a skilled interrogator, or team of interrogators, can do the job. It may take a while, but they will get there. I believe them. And I wish we could close the discussion there. Except there’s the Jack Bauer scenario, a WMD is set to kill lots and lots of us, and you’ve got a prisoner who knows the whole story. He refuses to discuss it. At all. Interrogation is a non-starter. Now what?
Torture might work, and might work fast enough to save a lot of lives. Or not. I don’t know the details of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarding, which is sometimes presented as if it were a quick fix, and sometimes as if he had to be repeatedly subjected to it, and even so it took quite a while until he coughed up the precious information that led us to his co-conspirators. As it turned out, we had more time than we feared. Maybe a good interrogator could have broken down his resistance in an acceptable time frame. If so, would our moral universe be better if we hadn’t put him on a board and made him fear we were going to drown him? Yes, I think so.
But suppose you don’t have the time, and suppose lives — the lives of your people — are on the line. Do you try torture?
Call it by its proper name: it’s evil (even though our “torture methods” don’t begin to compare with those commonly used by our enemies. Not remotely. There are degrees of evil, after all). Are you willing to, as Machiavelli put it so elegantly but typically brutally, “enter into evil”? He insisted that there will inevitably be times when leaders, if they want to prevail, must be willing to do it. He has rules — do it fast, do it all at once, exit evil as quickly as you can — but you will have done an evil thing and you will have tarnished your soul. And the national soul as well.
Machiavelli believes in Christian virtue and he believes every man should strive to live a virtuous life. “Entering into evil” is the opposite, and yet … and yet, there will be those moments when it is necessary if you are to prevail.
The ‘salt the earth’ command isn’t in the book of Samuel. You may remember it wrong or it may be in a midrash.
Being a grown up sucks sometimes. You have to make real-world decisions. When we were kids, we could walk away from the ballgame saying ‘I don’t want to play’
We cannot walk away from this war, if only because the battlefield goes wherever we go. We cannot ignore this war, because our enemies go wherever we go.
We have to decide whether we want to win this war, or simply survive it. If we want to win, well, we have to be offensive about it. If we want to survive it, defense may be enough.
One thing is certain, we will have to ‘enter into evil’ if we want to win. Better for our souls if we have the initiative, decide what needs to be done, do it and try to live with ourselves afterward, because we will be alive.
I observed a very long time ago that all of mankind’s efforts to take the brutality out of warfare, or to prevent warfare, do nothing but postpone the inevitable and exponentially raise the butcher’s bill.
It’s time to run the Jolly Roger up the flagpole as a warning to our enemies that we can, and will, play by the same rules that they do – in other words, no rules that they will ever be capable of discovering.
Buen post Miguel Ledeen,como tu lo dices,no es materia simple.
Fighting crime nad fighting jihadi terrorism are not the same thing. Our laws are based in that most of the crime is unique so there is no need to hurry catching the criminal. But teerrorists, speciallly indicraiminate terrorists want to kill as most of your people, those people you are swarn to protect, they can. Now you have aterrorist in your hands, you have ten times more proof than needed to estyablish he is a terrorist. He knows of a plot to blow up a maternity. What do you do?
I would use spell check on my report of the harsh interrogation. (nails driven into the femur and an electical current passed between)
It’s not just torture, what about ”civilian” casualties in asymetric warfare? You have terrorist organizations using human shields, setting up missiles next to schools, hospitals, in civilian neighborhoods (often with the approval of the residents). What do you do?
All of the BS rhetoric & ”lofty” principles mean nothing if you lose.
By being kind to the wicked, you are doing evil to the good. That’s not justice. I would add that it is a moral imperative to save innocent lives, at any cost. Are the lives of an enemy worth more than our lives?
Specifically, I am referring to Gaza & S. Lebanon, possibly Syria, Iran, & who knows, maybe Egypt.
Survival makes it’s own morality – there is no morality in letting your enemies kill you.
Is waterboarding torture? Many say yes. I do not think so; never been waterboarded and I do not want to try it. But I think I am safe in assuming that just about everyone, about to be subject to interrogation techniques and given the choice, would rather have them administered by Americans than by our enemies. Some of our own troops willingly submit to waterboarding as part of their training. In this country, at least in the past, I am aware of fraternity initiations that were harsher than waterboarding. Is waterboarding torture? Is putting womens underwear on a captured terrorist’s head torture? Would calling said terrorist an unkind name, would that be considered torture?
I am not making light of the discussion. These questions and the dilemma M.L. lays out should be debated. Indeed it is necessary if we are to live in a moral society.
What disturbs me in this discussion is the implied moral equivalancy between what our enemies do and what we do. Sawing someones head off is linked to waterboarding by use of the common term, “torture”. To me, this is insane.
Black Bart is mostly right.
First of all, just calling something “torture” doesn’t make it so. If we’re going to put waterboarding on the same semantic (never mind legal or moral) par with real torture, then words have no meaning anymore and we’re all reduced to yelling and shouting past each other. (Which itself sounds like torture to me, but nevermind…)
I would say that waterboarding comes close to torture, but, given that it causes no actual physical pain (just acute discomfort and psychological panic) or lasting physical harm, it stops apreciably short of it.
And waterboarding is the most extreme of all the “enhanced interrogation techniques” which have now been proscribed by the Obama regime. All the rest of them — sleep deprivation, threats, belly slaps, cold and heat, uncomfortable positions etc., have gotten insanely lumped into this absurd “torture” debate, so that we are now reduced to our current pitiable “I say, Al Hadji, would you mind awfully ceasing and desisting doing whatever it is you’re doing with that IED long enough to give us your name rank and serial number? We’d be tremendously grateful if you would…” “interrogation” regime — except that our enemies these days have no rank or serial numbers and (as recent revelations concerning the real name of OBL’s couriers have shown), even getting a prisoner’s correct name is likely to get you into hot legal water with Grand Inquisitor Holder.
Instead of arguing about our non-use of “torture”, we ought to be debating the catastrophic fact that we have allowed ourselves to unilaterally disarm, so that we find ourselves in a deadly war in which the acquisition of good intelligence is more crucial even than in any previous war — and yet we have absolutely no workable, functioning meaningful prisoner interrogation program worthy of the name.
We’re nuts.
To me, this post came across as refreshingly serious. So many pundits weigh-in with “absolutely not!!!” or “it’s just the right thing to do!!!” — it’s well past time that a sensible accounting of costs and benefits are presented.
“Be willing to pay a price on the battlefield on those (rare) occasions when torture would have worked faster and saved some lives.”
Yes, yes, lets go to war and yet “be willing to pay the price” of our moral preening by paying in the currency of the lives and limbs of our soldiers.
And you think that’s moral? And lets for a moment consider your conflation of terms. What is torture?
-Is it desecrating a Koran?
-Is it placing an insect in a cell with a prisoner?
-Is it showing pictures of naked females?
-Is it inflicting discomfort? (No mattress, no blanket, or no clothes)
-Is torture the same as humiliation?
-Is torture scaring the prisoner by using a barking dog?
-Is it preventing sleep?
-Is it not providing Halal meals?
All of the above have been deemed “torture” by the high minded left.
And you fall into their trap! You don’t want to define torture, and you don’t want to draw a line. But you are reluctantly convinced that killing people with drones and accepting collateral damage, rather than taking them prisoner and harshly interrogating them, is worse than torture. But only just barely.
If you can’t make a distinction between killing a child to make a parent talk, rape rooms, electric shock to body parts, the tearing of muscles and tendons, the breaking of bones, pressure hoses and anal cavities, beatings, tooth extractions, etc. from water boarding then you are not just lost, you are morally bankrupt.
Do you think that drone attacks don’t leave scores of wounded behind, along with the confirmed kills? Don’t you think that permanently maiming some one for life, even if the goal is the death of a high value target, is the very definition of torture?
By your way of thinking, it is morally preferable to leave scores of dead and any number blind amputees in your wake rather than use water boarding, which leaves no permanent, physical damage. As long it is our soldiers being killed and wounded.
But it becomes morally necessary to water board if drone attacks result in the infliction of similar wounds on those civilians providing support to enemy fighters.
So, not just morally bankrupt, but trying to go deeper into debt, and take us with you.
“To torture or not to torture” often seems to me to be a question complicated beyond imagining…except for those instances when it appears too simple to require more than a moment’s thought.
The Jack Bauer / many-innocent-lives-on-the-line scenario can be used to justify anything. It’s what philosophers call a teleological defense: the results are used a posteriori to defend the method used to reach them, But such a defense ought to require affirmation — proof submitted by the defendant — of all the following:
– The method did indeed produce the desired results;
– The results were enough better than the consequences of inaction to constitute a prima facie practical justification of the method;
– No other method, available to the defendant at the time of the torture-or-don’t-torture decision and easily and promptly discoverable by a reasonably intelligent man on the scene, would have produced equal or better results.
The requirement for such an affirmative defense would put the matter in the hands of a jury, much as would a claim of justifiable homicide in a murder trial. And really, shouldn’t it be that way? Stripped of his reasons for having done so, the defendant would have admitted to having committed one or more heinous felonies. It ought to be required of him to convince twelve of his peers that there was no other way to save the lives of persons quite as innocent as they.
So: Try Jack Bauer. Let him present whatever evidence he can that his tactical decisions and actions were unavoidable in the quest for a greater justice. And let a jury decide.
It has been done by the French in Algeria and it worked. For teh lives aved think in the Philippeville massacre, in bombs in school busses, in whooting at meery_go-dolls, in boms in cafes.
Militarily the French had won but DE Gaulle wanted to get rid of Algeria.
Gratias amigo !
sympathetic these FLN fighters :
http://mauvaisegraine.rmc.fr/r5779/Terrorisme-FLN/2/
we didn’t made so many victims like FLN pretended, but FLN underwrote theirs
http://necrometrics.com/20c300k.htm#Algeria
“It is permitted in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.” — FDR
Dr. Mark Moyar’s first book “Phoenix and the Birds of Prey” has a very good documented account of interrogation techniques that were effective during the duration of the programe in Vietnam. This well documented tome runs contrary to popular fiction about methodes used. What I walked away with is the strong feeling that those professionals know that their “Goal” is usefull intelegance not what ever they want to hear to stop the pain. They have well developed, by now, proceduers to achieve this. They know when and if they need to get tough and mostly its bluster. We have waterboarded more of our own soldiers than we have suspected terrorists. I put my trust in our professionals, honestly I’m a Mold Maker not an intel specialist.
Your memtal anguish is inspiring. Well, at least admirable, I suppose. Not really. Just mind games to assuage your conscience. Abstractions. An impending terrorist attack that might kill thousands, somewhere, sometime is one thing. How about an imminent attack that directly threatens your family, here and now? Can you feel those moral restraints loosening a bit? The technical arguements vis a vis the efficacy of torture in obtaining reliable information is one thing; the moral posturing is so much blather. And than there’s the question of what exactly qualifies as torture; flaming spikes under fingernails, electrodes attached to genitials, branding irons etc qualify. Water boarding? Perhaps, perhaps not. Sleep deprivation, playing loud music, humiliation, dramatic threats, feigned executions,etc, don’t.
And then there is the nature of our enemy. I beleive that the most reasonable approach is summed up in FETEKE; find em, torutre em , kill em. And since the dearly dispatched pass go and collect 72 virgins, consider their elimination an act of virtue.
When it comes time to answer the question, “What will it take to completely defeat terrorism?” Mr. Ledeen’s response promises to be a real winner.
“Are there times when we should torture?” then becomes “Are we ready to eradicate an entire race from Earth?”
That by the way is the question that must be answered now; not whether to torture or not.
Summarily, the entirety of the argument presented within this article graphically illustrates the enormous hypocrisy of what America has become, in that the logic and reasoning calls upon the Scriptures and Laws of the same God that our nation threw out like so much trash beginning in the mid 1950s.
Today, to display or not publicly display the Ten Commandments is as perplexing to our society as whether or not to sprinkle water on some guy’s nose that just used a razor blade to slit the throat of your sister/mother/daughter so that the sight of the blood gushing from her body freezes everyone that sees it with fear.
That there would be any hesitation to torturing terrorists is absurd and disgusting.
I certainly do not favor of ‘eradicating an entire race from earth’, although some greenies might consider it a strategy to reduce global warming. The world’s estimated Muslim population is @ 2.2 billion. Let’s assume, conservatively, that roughly 10% have been radicalized. Surely that is an underestimation. Nevertheless, we could start by eradicating this group, and then step back and reassess the situation. Stalin, the love child of the radical left once pointed out that one person’s death was a tragedy; 1,000,000 ws a statistic.
Re: carla
How do we tell the good black peppercorn seeds from the bad ones..?
What percentage of the 2.2 billion Muslims in the world do the 19 Muslims that reigned living hell upon our country on September 11th, 2001 represent?
And if only 10 percent of the Muslims in the world are radicalized, why have less than 1 percent of 1 percent, or less spoken out against their own “radical” Muslims..?
You’re right. We’ll have to do the whole lot. I was just trying to be moderate.
In, case you didn’t notice Islam is not a race but an ideology. I certainly favor doing what is needed so even in Arabia mosques are burned and the name of Muhammad spit upon: denazification didn’t imply extermination of the German race.
On 9/9/02, Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Aahron Barak gave a lecture at the Center for Jewish History which included this topic. The talk was “Israel as a Democractic and Jewish State” – pure brilliance. Sometimes, he says, one must make a moral decision regardless of the law. If use of torture to extract info or data will prevent loss of life, it may be justified, but still illegal under our norms of law. He’d rather save lives and pay the legal price later, if that will be the case. So would I.
Therefore, choose life.
If you are happy to be tortured if you lose the war then go ahead. What goes around comes around. “Do not be decived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows that he will also reap.” (Galations 6:7) But don’t forget who you are toturing… “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of theses my brethren, you did it to me.” (Mathew 25:40)
I agree that torture is evil. I don’t agree that waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding was used to obtain life saving information. It was not used to inflict pain. No doubt waterboarding scares the sh*t, and the truth, out of people. The fright is transitory and there is no permanent damage.
As I understand it, waterboarding was used on the architect of 9/11 only after traditional interrogation techniques failed. In my opinion to have not waterboarded KSM would have been a dereliction of duty. The lives of innocents took priority over his comfort.
bin Laden was shot in the head while unarmed because to have arrested him would driven home the utter hypocrisy of the Obama Administration’s approach to this war – which they refuse to call a war. They call it An Overseas Contingency Operation – where the permissibility of murder is contingent on the President sleeping on it for 16 hours and the political consequences of giving or not giving the kill order.
By their own standards Obama should be dragged before the International Court of Justice (and Left Wingnut Hypocrisy).
The use of physical and psychological torture is effective. Many (mostly on the left) claim that torture doesn’t work because the torturee will say anything (lie) to get the pain to stop.
Yes, they will, but that’s not the end of the interrogation. When the toturee provides some information, the pain stops. The person is then told that his information will be vetted and thoroughly reviewed. He is told that if the information is found to be false or misleading, the torture will begin anew with even more pain.
It’s that last part that the left conveniently leaves out.
http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/torture.html written in 1982 and still going strong.
That was a very good essay. Too many people cannot or will not distinguish between torture to obtain a confession and very harsh techniques used to gain information needed to save lives. There is also a big difference between the sadistic torture of a Saddam and an AQ terrorist and the reluctant use of techniques to outpsych such scum. I respect people who seriously question how far we can go, but I have no respect for people who seem incapable of trying to understand the situation we are in. I have no respect for people who think the US is responsible for saving them from all moral problems.
I don’t know this discussion about getting info has lived under the torture narrative because of waterboarding. We did it to 3 really bad guys. Not to mention well over a 1000 special ops and a few journalists wanting to know. I wonder if “torture” would have seriously been discussed had we a Democrat administration approving the same tactics during the Bush years. For anyone to have a problem with what we did, in my opinion has a problem understanding what real torture is and, the meaning of saving masses of innocent lives as opposed to an altruistic ideal for democracy. Isn’t it time for some people to get over themselves?
Why all this squeemishness about torture? We hesitate and search or souls for combatants who have declared themselves our enemies? That’s right, if we just put them on Oprah, they will tell everything. Talk is the answer, we just need to talk more.
B-S. For the people who want groups dead in large numbers, talk is not the answer, it’s a waste of time. War is hell. It should be. I have no problem with any step taken that brought us “the pacer”.
So living one’s life in fear of the next incoming rocket or mortar, ready to rush for nearest shelter, is not torture for the inhabitants of Sderot and other Israeli towns?
What is the difference in terms of psychological torture between the PTSD suffered by hundreds of Israelis living near the Gaza border and that suffered by waterboarding? A progressive’s definition of victim?
The film “Dirty Harry” solved this conundrum a long time ago.
What you do is shoot a guy in the leg and then stomp on the wound with cowboy boots.
Then, the WMD’s pop out of the ground.
Unless you’re one of those pansies addicted to law and order.
Yuk!
Typical of a libbie, James May confuses Hollywood fiction with real life. “Dirty Harry” was a fictional character in a movie. KSM was a murdering terrorist with information the USA needed.
Bin Laden is dead now, thanks the policies and procedures enacted during the Bush administration and continued by the Obama regime.
And your problem with that is . . . ?
Really? I thought it was a documentary about your insane mother.
If so, would our moral universe be better if we hadn’t put (KSM) on a board and made him fear we were going to drown him? Yes, I think so.
My moral universe says no holds are barred on such a mass slaughterer of human beings…the guy who bragged about killing Daniel Pearl.
…our “torture methods” don’t begin to compare with those commonly used by our enemies. Not remotely.
Not to mention some of our friends. Egypt…Poland…even France.
Other countries have avoided the handwringing when it comes to choice of methods of extracting information.
KSM and the other 4 or so head honchos at Guantanamo asked years ago for “martyrdom”.
But Eric Holder and other legalistic idiots have been feeding off of this crowd for a long time. Now that’s torture.
It is of course valid that any individual bear witness to their own confrontation with the prospect of using torture. Of course, these personal beliefs and feelings have nothing to do with actual torture. If actual torture were the idealized thing of one’s concerns, reservations, rejections and etc. that would be one thing, but it isn’t.
Remember, we are talking about torture as part of interrogation. This is not torture for the sake of torture. The Japanese had a torture in WWII – they would fill a man’s stomach with raw rice and pour water in. I will go no further in this description I point it out as a fact.
This is not to incite us to abandoned our standards. It is to acknowledge that our standards that are interfering with our actions and their effectiveness.
Paton was right when he told his soldiers that re German soldiers they would know what to do. That is a wide statement, and I am afraid that even Mr. Leeden doesn’t see it. Torture is not a thing unto itself – it is not gratuitous, it is part and parcel of knowing what to do when you meet your enemy.
It is this issue that these discussions of torture lack. In war (and only in war) there is nothing special about torture. This is not to say that there are no questions of right and wrong. It is to say that the same standards of right and wrong that apply in war, apply to torture.
Another issue is this – can we, should we, and to what degree control our men and women in battle and its aftermath? I for one trust our soldiers that I will let them decide what to do.
Michael, as a person with a conscience, you have given your mind a terrible task. You have asked it to wrestle with itself, hoping to be pinned to the mat with a declared victor.
But this match has no victors. There ARE those who will deceive themselves and others, believing there is a final answer.
For many, this is but a subset of much larger questions.
1)When you have an enemy who does not play by your rules of humanity, do you adjust yours down to meet his?
2)If your enemy will torture, maim, rape, defile and dismember you, what should you do with them when you capture them?
3)If your enemy will target civilians, innocents, women, children, babies and intentionally murder, maim, rape, defile and torture them…what shackles would you put on yourself before you try to stop your enemy?
4)If your enemy will use his own women and children, babies and innocents as shields in front of himself and then fires against you…when he is shooting at you, your innocents, your wife, children, babies…do you protect HIS innocents instead of yours?
5)If you are looking for “fairness”, Michael…you must play a game where ALL players agree on the same rules. Your enemy doesn’t give a damn about your innocents. He has suspended ALL rules and that makes the game tilted in his favor. Because ANY rule you have that impedes you, makes you hesitate, shackles you…gives him an edge.
6)If you decide that YOUR morality can never sink to the level of HIS morality…he will do anything and everything to you and yours…you have agreed to unilaterally give him an advantage.
7)And then, and only then…do you start to evaluate when, how and why you will remove your own shackles from yourself…and only when the advantage you have given to him is too great a burden to bear.
Now, let’s examine “torture” in light of the above.
First, let’s define it. Putting someone in sustained agonizing pain or taking away their ability to breathe until they reasonably believe they are dying, probably qualifies.
Second, how imminent is the threat that your enemy poses, such that you consider taking off your own shackles to prevent it?
Third, how strong is your evidence that your captured enemy has the information that you need, or are you willing to wade through all the captured who know little or nothing, to get out the nuggets of information you need?
Fourth, does the actionable information help you save lives?
Fifth, when all the events have played out and you look back…would you make the exact same decision again? (not knowing what you know at the end, but did you REASONABLY believe, and did you act on that belief properly)
In the final analysis, Michael…I believe the vast, vast, vast majority of people would have a place where they would take off their own shackles.
Those that don’t…and are vociferous and hostile about you doing so…they are most likely your enemies as well, guilt-tripping you because they want you to lose.
well said bleachers. yes, i am forever wrestling with myself, quite right. good comments help. tks.
Good private opening. But you list 5 conditions. Too many tests, to much thinking. And how ca you really know these things. Torture, since it has a goal, will, in reality, behave like any other through of opportunity. Wising, hoping, testing, seeming reasonable. You standards I do not believe comport with reality.
Assumption will always play a role in everything we do, torture as well.
War is a crime, it has no morality within it’s prosecution, only in the imperatives of those who decide to do it – that ends when they say “go”.
Once it starts, it’s Pandora’s Box. It wakes you up and shoots you in the face.
We should husband our oil, suck theirs dry and leave ‘em to fight over the dregs.
No money no fight no rules. If we keep them out of America which we show no signs of doing.
CF,
For Number 1 the answer is YES!
…If your enemies are doing these things to your civilian population, it is perfectly reasonable to lower yourself to “their” standards WITH THE EXECUTORS OF THOSE DEEDS WHEN THEY ARE CAPTURED…not simple retaliation against “some of theirs”.
Terrorists shoot, torture, slit the throats of helpless unarmed children…we shoot helpless unarmed terrorists after capture, BECAUSE THEY SHOT THE CHILDREN…
See? Not quite the same thing, is it?
We are not “the same” as them, as long as we dont intentionally murder innocent children.
That is a fine but important distinction that often gets overlooked when discussing “lowering” ourselves to their level..
Understand this fact, and the rest of your query will self-calibrate as the circumstances arise.
We do not “torture”, we punish.
The Manson Gang tortured.
Child rapist Torture.
Putting a (released!) child molesters balls into a vice, and twisting the handle, because we have the blood of a missing neighborhood child along with HIS semen, on a towel we found in the park, is NOT torture.
Were PUNISHING him, for not telling us where she is.
We KNOW he knows, and he thinks he can play…
Part of the effectiveness of such “punishment” is whatever knowledge the subject has of your “limitations”. If they KNOW you cant (and wont) simply lop off their fingers and testicles, and eventually KILL them, they have an incentive to resist. And they try to play the system.
But my experience is, most shitheads DO understand “Justice”. They know what they’ve done, and what they REALLY deserve for it. But they also know most admin. procedures (lawsuits, arrests, interrogations, trials, sentencing etc.) DO NOT deliver justice. They know that its just bullshit-theater, busy-work for lawyers, cops and judges. They know their victims are getting screwed no matter WHAT, so as long as the “interrogator” is part of that machine (and its limitations), they have nothing to fear.
But when the paperwork goes “Bye-Bye” and the rubber hoses come out, NOW they realize they’re actually gonna pay whats JUST and FAIR for what they’ve done.
Justice has come, and she dont take layaway payments.
So, to avoid PAYING the price they KNOW they owe, they finally start to talk.
But taste the sting, and they gotta BELIEVE you were going…
All. The. Way.
HALF of all we knew about finding OBL was obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques. Why don’t they call it torture? Because it isn’t. Combining the knowledge of centuries of real torture and psychology allows us the understandings to develop the methods of what does work.
Freedom isn’t free, folks. Do what is necessary in combating evil to survive or die – That is reality, deal with it.
Mr Ledeen, thanks for sharing your angst with us, displaying your moral creds, & nobility. Three scummers are waterboarded and you insist on putting your noble heart on display, possibly to shame the unenlightened. In days of yore you needn’t waterboard an non-uniformed, irregular caught on the battlefield. You could and did shoot them out of hand. Times have changed and now some of us feel compelled to put their hearts on public display in order to advertise their humanity and thoughtfulness, to advertise themselves.
It matters not what options are used, some may work on certain individuals, some may not. Waterboarding, ah torture, is one technique in a bag of techniques, it works, it saves lives as in information on attacks on the West Coast. If innocent life is at stake that is the greater issue, even if it confounds your ego.
that’s what I wrote, johnt. but remember that some options work some of the time, it’s not that “they work.” that would make the problem less vexing, because at least there is a certain certainty…
making it difficult to breathe and scaring a subject is not the same thing as drilling joints.
people need to take the stance that our soldiers/citizens lives are more important to us then anyone else.
the luxury of time can only be afforded if everyone elses time pieces are stopped (just made that up btw) meaning while we pontificate real people die.
Perhaps the Venetian solution is best.
When the executive (Doge+Collegio) of the Venetian Republic wanted a quick and/or secret decision on the legality of what they wanted to do, they turned not to the Senate but to “the 10″ (i Dieci), a sort of secret supreme court.
(Source: Samuel Finer, History of Government from the Earliest Times.)
That left room for some pretty brutal practices, but as long as the executive and the 10 remained separate, there was some degree of checks+balances.
The Venetian Republic was one of the longest lived political institutions in human history, and probably THE longest lived constitutional state.
Machiavelli, Guicciardini, John Adams, and Samuel Finer were fans.
A related question: I vaguely remember reading that, when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped their first Russian, the KGB kidnapped the families of the terrorists and used some unspecified methods on them, leading to the following results:
the Russian was immediately released; and there was no more terrorism aimed at Soviet citizens until the invasion of Afghanistan.
This is all what (I think that) I know, and if anybody can provide more details, I’d be grateful.
Torture is an extreme. Let’s shift the discussion to painless techniques for preventing terrorism that are contra to liberal fashion and political correctness.
During the war against the Moros in the Philipines, the tactic was adopted of burying Moros in pigskins to prevent them from getting into the hedonist garden of sensual delights that is Muslim heaven. The question arises: If sexually frustrated Muslim suicide bombers believe they’re buying their way into a heaven of willing virgins, is it permissible to wrap the remains of suicide bombers in pigskins or better yet, to feed them to pigs?
Such a tactic, videotaped and widely disseminated, might well bring suicide bombing to a screeching halt but would inevitably bring liberals in the West to frothing at the mouth and chewing on the rug. Should we care?
Most of what passes for morality in the contemporary world is nothing more than self-gratifying liberal fashion. If innocent lives are at stake, not to torture those hiding information that could prevent tragedy is plainly a sin equal to direct collusion in their crime. Mercy to the wicked is cruelty to the innocent.
“It’s hard to establish limits once you’ve accepted the suspension of the normal moral code.”
The same moral code, only applied to an abnormal situation — abnormal meaning here a terrorist threat or attack, unless we got so used to it, we dhimmily accept paying terrorists our quota in lives and mourning.
People who have voluntarily decided to kill, maim, or rape the innocent and/or defenseless, have given up their “right” to be treated as human beings.
They are nothing more than dangerous animals, and must be treated as such.
This is a very difficult point.
Some of the answers in the comments are formally correct (waterboarding in fact is NOT “torture”, it is rather the use of fear of torture, in which we successfully convince the subject that we could drown him like a rat), but they miss the point of the column, that is an exploration of the border between the necessities of the fight against a monstrous enemy and the call of morality.
The point of the column is: we could find ourselves in the need of ACTUALLY extracting decisive information from a prisoner whose silence threatens the lives of thousands, perhaps millions of innocents.
As you guys know from my blog, my answer can only be: let us pray God that we don’t find ourselves in that necessity.
But I probably disagree with Machiavelli either ! It’s not MY fault if YOU kidnap my wife and I make you die in three thousand years of pain, it is YOUR fault. There is no “entering into evil” there.
EVIL is responsible of ALL the consequences, direct and indirect, of its actions.
We must be firm on this.
Clear thinking is needed, but once we are REALLY forced by evil to do terrible things, evil will carry the consequences of what evil does.
I apologize for the bold and the preaching tone…
Waterboarding’s torture; you have to be a goofball to think otherwise.
If you got caught doing it to your kids what do you think you’d be charged with:
neo-torture, pseudo torture, almost-but-not-quite-torture, torture 2.0, semantic pedantry, quasi-torture, ersatz torture, fake torture, trompe l’oeil torture, sham torture, unofficial torture, counterfeit torture, sham torture, repro torture, informal torture, torture fraud, quack torture, humbug torture, imitation torture, dummy torture, knock-off torture, pirated torture, snake-oil torture, placebo torture, imaginary torture, dream torture, fantasy torture, mythical torture, fanciful torture, chimerical torture, hypothetical torture, phony torture, theoretical torture, imaginary torture, bogus torture, fraudulent torture, synthetic torture, spurious torture, artificial torture, feigned torture, simulated torture, insincere torture, unauthentic torture, tort torture?
Which?
If torture is bad then certainly assassination of an unarmed combatant is bad too. But what if OBL had a suicide vest under his clothes? He said he would not be taken alive. Similarly a terrorist may be armed with knowledge of plans and contacts. We know their intent is to kill innocent civilians. Maybe the solution is to say, if you want to operate this way, we will too. We may look crazy but that does not mean we are.
When, in the course of human events, an implacable foe takes to the field of combat, without the benefit of country, uniform or other methods of differentiation. That foe is called a terrorist. The cause of the terrorist is Muslim supremacy. When GWB declared a ‘war on terror’, that was the first fatal mistake. We cannot fight a war on a tactic.
Torture is what Islam, not Islamism, inflicts on the globe.
Islam is a murderous ideology, no different then Naziism.
The goals are identical – to extirpate Jews worldwide and to enslave all
free peoples.
To even speak about torture in the same breath as water-boarding shows our moral decline. Ask the victims in the Muslim prisons what torture is – ask Danny Pearl.
Ask the jumpers from the WTC.
Talk to your friend and mentor JJA.
It’s difficult to write rationally on this subject.
If Someone Comes to Kill You, Rise Up and Kill Him First
http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?b=838459&c=ijITI2PHKoG&ct=1052867
When the Muslim enemy decided on a sneak attack it was no different then Pearl Harbor – with one exception, we refuse to name the enemy and indeed pander to it.
G-d protect us from our own stupidity.
F47
I agree with your take on matters.
But remember that 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are different as night and day.
With deference to all survivors, and recognition of the tragedy, we must remember that Pearl Harbor, sneaky and un-called for as it was, was still an “appropriatly” conducted military act of war.
As such, it was a lot more “honorable” than anything the Islamists do.
It was carried out by Uniformed Armed Forces…flying aircraft emblazoned with with their National Insignia…from naval ships flying their National Flag…ordered to do so by a ruling political body that would acknowledge, and be prepared to face the consequences, of such an overt act.
The raid was carried out against significant “legitimate” military targets, targets that were manned by armed, trained professional “enemy” forces, that represented a significant Military Threat to their Military designs in the region.
As such, there is really no “fault” on the part of THE PARTICIPANTS of the Pearl Harbor attack (pilots, bomdardiers, gunners) for it being planned and carried out in secrecy, without warning. Such is the accepted norm of Tactical Military Operations.
I understand the treachery of Pearl Harbor.
I’m not excusing the Japanese for it.
But 9/11 was MUCH MORE despicable than that “day of Infamy”, by several orders of magnitude.
What Islamists have done was so low and cowardly, it deserves MORE final retaliation than we visited upon the Japanese in August 1945.
By several orders of magnitude.
This is one of the few adult discussions among a free people who must confront evil as a society. Americans have been fed lies, and nonsense by their leaders, and it has resulted in our current absurdities. One aspect is the treatment of prisoners taken in war. When Nancy Pelosi demands harsher treatment of prisoners during top secret briefing from the CIA, but when her San Francisco anti war constituency learns of water boarding, she publicly excoriates President Bush on the exact tactics she promotes in private, America suffers. When our Supreme Court extends, for the first time in human history, the right of Habeas corpus to war prisoners, it shackles our military. And when our President states that torture was used by his prior Administration, does not prosecute any official for crimes, but uses the fruits of their efforts to achieve a central victory, we question his word. When the media creates an urban myth that one prisoner was water boarded 183 times, but never corrects the record when the man admits to the Red Cross that he was lying, can any one believe a news broadcaster? And finally, not to be picky, it would be ducky if our Congress performed their most basic responsibility and declared war on nations we bomb, and furthermore established budgets for this activity.
Perhaps, after all falsehoods are corrected, we could have an adult debate on the proper intelligence techniques, used, within and outside of our nation, during war. Are they the same for the FBI, DoD, and CIA? When is legal killing authorized? In Pakistan? In Ohio? When is collateral killing acceptable? When can we tickle a meanie’s foot, and at what point would a left wing doctor define this as torture? Like so many political words, torture has a billion meanings, and thus none. This is purposeful. People make a living from the ambiguity.
It is not easy to define in broad terms what is appropriate and what is not appropriate in circumstances such as confront the United States in responding to such tactics as the 9/11 killings, the killings by the Army major on an Army base in Texas and other killings of innocent people without forwarning. The United States is confronted by terrorists vowed to inflict loss of life on American citizens at the expense of their own lives.
The problem is that if we adopt the same tactics in response, the question then becomes one of degree. Who can outdo the opponent? And so the violence continues and accelerates.
The problem with the killing of bin Laden is that the President of the United States, as commander in chief of the U S Armed Forces, gave the order that he wanted bin Laden’s dead body. Does anyone for a moment think that there will not be an attempt at reprisal, with the result that more innocent American lives will be taken?
I am a Marine Corps veteran of WWII with extensive combat experience in the Pacific. I had no problem fighting an enemy, who was identifiable by his uniform, part of the armed forces of a nation which struck at Pearl Harbor without warning.
The United States is confronted today with an entirely different problem. How we respond to it presents a grave moral question. Are we a nation “under God” with the motto “In God We Trust”? Or do we respond to the terrorist in kind?
I think it is narrow minded to presume that torture must necessarily be about extracting information or punishment. There are other reasons for such behavior.
One is sadism. Sadistic people like hurting other people, regardless of whether there is any moral purpose to inflicting such pain.
Another is to discourage intermarriage. When villagers torture their captives, it tends to solidify villager solidarity against their enemies.
Yet another is to serve as a form of initiation. Street gangs often “beat” recruits into their gang, and the tattoo serves as a reminder of an initiate’s willingness to endure pain to join a group.
Yet, the most important part of torture that is usually overlooked by civilized people is to make the captive scream. In other words, break a man down so that one’s community will see the enemy as no longer a man, but an overgrown boy who screams. This has been very important in tribal societies, for breaking down an enemy through public torture shows children that enemy warriors are not to be feared.
Where torture was endemic, men would devise ceremonies to show their ability to withstand torture. Hence, Okipa and the Sun Dance on the high plains and Flagellant ceremonies in medieval Europe.
Of course, torture can backfire. When early Christians withstood torture with self-discipline and religious faith, they impressed pagans rather than amusing them. I think much of the Christian world’s aversion to torture comes from a realization that torture won’t work upon those who have true religious faith.
Sure. All morals are flexible……if you need it bad enough.
Sigh.
I think torture should be illegal. If an individual feels torture is necessary under whatever circumstances they should be prepared to suffer the consequences of breaking the law.
Individuals may torture but society should never condone it.
Justice isn’t blind. I suspect a real Jack B. situation wouldn’t lead to a conviction or if it did the punishment would be light.
Potential torturers would have to weigh the risk.
it’s amazing what gets prosecuted nowadays. Allen West was prosecuted (by the Army, no less) for shooting off a pistol next to a killer’s head…
["Allen West was prosecuted (by the Army, no less) for shooting off a pistol next to a killer’s head…"]
Correection!
He was prosecuted as the result of social justice idiots whose influences have penetrated even our military of today. Its no wonder that foreign mercenary units have to show up on the battlefields of modern warfare as a means of garnering valuable intel and protecting the lives of our warriors in battle.
Sigh. Here we go again.
None of the people who implemented waterboarding thought it was torture. None of them. And there is a good reason for that — because it does not fit the legal or moral definition of torture. Not one bit.
And people like Ledeen know that. They know that it was not considered torture because it has been explained to them only about 10,000 times. So why the continued dishonesty here?
I hope we all remember that in our time the word torture has been used to, among other horrors to gruesome to describe, cover sleep deprivation. That’s right, sleep deprivation, the mind reels, the stomach turns, the bowels, we better not go there. Time for a “what kind of nation have we become” moment. Where’s my soapbox?
Though the people who used or may still use that sanctimonious howl never, ever really include themselves in that lament.
Then there’s, I don’t know if I can do this, uncomfortable positions. The late Susan Sontag in a NY Times magazine piece [what else?] described the medieval nightmare of being forced to stand with your arms outstretched, assuredly more devilish then being forced to jump from the window of a burning building 99 stories high, or like Daniel Pearl, having your head sawed off by a dull sword.
There is this thing called perspective. If applied to the totality of events, mixed with history, considered in light of other American lives, throw in the total absence of any Geneva Convention applications, and resist the temptation to preen morally on behalf of one’s ego and murderous savages, I think we could find room for these techniques that with deliberate obfuscation and near hysteria are called torture.
They work. I’m sure other things work as well, good, let’s use them all.
And I believe there are a few islamic murderers who could reluctantly confirm they work.
You fight civilized wars against civilized nations, even there there are extremities. We are not fighting those now, are we?
sorry bro, but life is NOT a disney movie. sometimes the good guys have to cheat and alot of thes the bad guys win. we have become fools. we base our interpretations on right and wrong and how things “should be done” based on stories and tv shows. we foolishly believe that if we are nice to our enemy thatthey will see we are not so bad and stop. we foolishly believe that if we play by the rules that we can overcome an enemy who plays by none. news flash IT DOES NOT WORK! we are fightingenemies who do not have the same values as we do. they WILL win if we dont get that. to them we we ‘play fair’ we are weak. by treating obl body with respect we embolden them by acknowlaging that islam is superior. you want to win this war. I can tell you how. Nuke the area and then go in with cleanup and kill all surviving men women and kids. thats it….Now i know im gonna get alot of hatergrams sayingh how brutish i am. well guess what folks if you think for a second that they wont do what i said to us then you are an idiot. they already are. you kill the enemy you take their stuff and you control them! you dont let the enemy and people with alternate agendas control the battle plan. sorry life isnt fair and cuddly. but you are dealing with 7th century mentality with 21st century weapons. you better realize this and get over your hang ups. cuz i garuntee there WILL be another 9-11 type attack, it WILL be worse and when tht happens as far as people like me are concerned all bets and niceties are off and we will line up our enemies bodies minus heads on the bottom of the ocean with that pos OBL.
Excellent article.
Machiavelli was not a believer in Christian virtue in any way shape or form. Are we reading the same guy?
yes we are. i wrote a book about him. and the best biography, “Machiavelli in Hell,” makes it explicit. have a look.
Jewish Law does not state that if survival is at stake anything is acceptible. It is not a Commandment but rather a Jewish legal principle which states that in order to save a life a prohibition may be loosened. For instance it is permissible not to fast on Yom Kippur, if doing so would endanger your life. Furthermore where one of God’s Laws is put into disrepute, the prohibition is NOT loosened but instead it would be expected to uphold the Law even at the cost of martyrdom.
A bit of honesty, please. In the real world, we’re yet to hear of any intelligence that came from KSM that was (a) useful or (b) not already known. Pundits and various administrators try to claim there was some, but it’s never been tested or verified independently.
Any by “useful”, I don’t mean the identity of some guy who ran the taliban’s books or drove bin laden around. I mean intelligence that actually prevented an attack. Just one will do. That’s the benchmark, right? If we’re torturing people for the locations of obscure al quaeda generals, then we’ve moved the goalposts a bit. And if “we can never really know, and I’m ok with that” is the best you can do, you’re a fool. I thought we moved beyond just trusting what the government tells us.
Yes, hypothetically I agree that I can also think up a situation where torture might seem like a good idea and necessary. But you have to assume a whole lot of things that can’t be verified before you start doing it. How do you KNOW the target knows the whole plot? What – you tortured him first to find out if you should torture him? And if he does know the plot, then he knows precisely how long he’s going to have to string you along with false leads anyway. There is no way to know in advance if torture is justified. Except on TV, of course. And what’s the walk-back if it turns out you’ve got the wrong guy? No, really. Because that matters. If “but it’s just really important” is justification for torture, do you guys really want obama to get to decide where the line is? Combine that with “we accept that we can never really know if it helped” and you’ve just written a blank check for torture without public oversight.
In any case, the whole debate about water-boarding is fundamentally dishonest. That was never the real action. The real torture was done in-country at airforce bases and prisons, or in neighboring countries with experience and expertise. The GWOT saw plenty of arabs tortured outside of guantanamo. The great success of the right is to make out that guantanamo was the whole story.
And we can argue here about the niceties and merits all day, but prisoners will still be beaten for information regardless, particularly in out-of-the-way places near the front lines. The hypotheticals don’t really matter. They’re just for when somebody important gets caught doing it.
Come on. A bit of maturity, people.
The United States hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners of war.
When you call different things by the same name you can reach any conclusion you desire. It will take prosecuting every military instructor who waterboarded our aircrew in survival training for me to concede.
Facts matter.
Will you stop validating the liberals’ narrative? Waterboarding is not torture. aggressive interrogation tactics are not torture. and I guarantee you your french friend did more in Algiers. Pruning off body parts or other mutilation of a person is torture. Dropping people whi are bound off buildings is torture. Bamboo under the fingernails is torture.
A divine command is, by definition, not evil. Thus, not only was it not evil for Saul to slay Amalek, it was evil for him to spare the king.
As for torture, well, our soldiers should not torture terrorists, but if they fall into the hands of our allies or independent vigilantes who share intel with us, well, we can not be responsible.
Michael I have always enjoyed and agreed with your posts but this one is poppycock.
My first question is can we zorch prisoners? I’m sure you’d ask what is zorching. So I’m certain you’re not surprised when I ask you for a definitive definition of torture. And I mean definitive so that some poor guy doesn’t find ‘after the fact’ that he has crossed an undefined line and is then turned into a political ham bone thrown to the dogs. I await with breath bated.
“We can’t know in advance what those circumstances will be, and we’re going to have to rely on the wisdom of leaders — and sometimes the wisdom of some fairly low-level military officers — to make good decisions. When they fail, we will punish them.”
And this argument is Son of Poppycock. So the leaders with time aplenty and surrounded by advisors are unable to say, poor immaculate darl’ns, ahead of time what is and what isn’t, but it’s ok to say to some colonel, or hell, sergeant with the clock ticking in his ear, “Though charged with making executive decisions we chose not to, you did, and though in the heat of the moment, you chose wrong and so we will give it to you in the neck.” Gag!
It’s a hard world and our enemies are so evil that they don’t appear to recognize any of what we have come to embrace as human. I will not countenance loosing a war for gentlemanly reasons to the followers of this depraved and wicked philosophy. Shall we defend the survival of our loved ones with all options; yes! Shall we preserve our way of life as superior, whatever the cost; yes! But hold on a second, lets draw this string all the way out. The proposition is always couched as one against the lives of thousands. How about a hundred? How about squad? How about one old drunk on skid row in an ally. Do I really have to answer that question, because I can with certainty, in a microsecond.
It’s a hard world and if you’re a coward and that cowardice might, just might cost someone his life, don’t seek offices or jobs where it is foreseeable that you might have to make difficult decisions.
I am well versed that clever interrogation works best in the vast majority of times but we are speaking her of the extraordinary and in those circumstances Weenies Never Win!
isn’t that what i said?
your “I have come to believe” How long did it take you to come to that
conclusion. It is people like you that will never see the reality of our situation. It will not matter how many Americans die, you and your ilk
will just keep making asinine statements and wringing your hands
God help us
I’m not going to weigh in (because so many others here have done very well on discussing what’s acceptable and what isn’t) on the use of torture.
However, I have a couple things to say about those who dismiss certain practices as somehow not serious.
Sleep deprivation: The Witch-Finder General under Cromwell used this method to extract confessions of witchcraft and pacts with the devil from innocent men and women. Read some of them – Robbins, Dictionary of Witchcraft and Demonology. Or read The Gulag Archipelago. It was called “the conveyor” and it would break anyone. Granted – the confessions extracted were imaginary, because the interegators knew beyond a doubt that what was confessed mattered not a whit, but still.
If you want to know what it’s like, get a group of six or so of your friends to keep you up for 72 hours, questioning you. You don’t know what they want to know, but they do; they will get you to agree to a story that need have nothing to do with reality. Just be sure none of them are really sadists, because after hour 57, they can do things to your mind you will not like.
Uncomfortable positions: Try, just try, standing on your toes for an hour. Just…try it. Again, I get that one from the Gulag Archipelago. I did it, once. It took three weeks for the cramping to finally stop. Or, just for fun, take a round chair and break the canes out. Then sit in it for just an hour. One hour. I had slightly better sense than to try that one out.
Trust me, you will not, ever, dismiss these as only things bleeding hearts might find distasteful. Not ever again.
I’m not saying, given that none of these (except sleep deprivation taken past 94 hours) is permanently harmful, that they are not justifiable methods. I’m just saying, don’t dismiss them as somehow laughable.
My idea of torture is different than that of many, apparently. I did not think the juvenile antics of the guards at the Abu Gareb (sp?) prison were torture but more like the heckling that young men go through when they join a fraternity or some other clubs. At the time I was very sorry that rhe accusers were not just laughed at. They consider themselves so macho, wear masks when they fightm and turned out to be such wimps. I realize that a lot of those “Hell Week” activities are no longer allowed in colleges but I’m sure a lot of the American officers have gone through them. There was an article about SEAL training in the WSJ yesterday. Much of that would be considered torture by some bleeding hearts.
After all, these men are trying to kill us and our society; we aren’t playing dodge ball.
1. My understanding of how waterboarding was used was not in and of itself to elicit new intelligence, but to break down resistance. The questions asked during waterboarding were questions the interrogators already knew the answers to. Only when they were getting straight answers to the questions did the waterboarding end and the true interrogation begin.
2. Beware of the use of the word “torture” in regards to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. As practiced by the CIA, even the most drastic of the EIT’s, waterboarding, does not rise to the level of “severe” pain and emotional trauma as would violate the UN Convention On Torture or the U.S. laws based thereon. It would certainly violate the 8th Amendment, but that is a different and inapplicable standard.
3. As a reminder, EIT’s were developed only after we had found that standard interrogation techniques, effective 90% of the time as found in studies between WWII and Vietnam, were ineffective 90% of the time in dealing with al Qaeda.
4. No one has suggested, from Bush forward, that EIT’s should be of general use. To the contrary, authority to use EIT’s was closely held in the chain of command.
5. With high level detainees whom we have reason to suspect have knowledge of future planned attacks on our nation, whether to use EIT’s is a moral issue with two sides. On one side is the humane treatment of detainees. On the other side is the safety of civilians who said detainee would be happy to slaughter. Only one of those two sides is innocent. In such an instance, I think it would be immoral not to use EIT’s in order to force cooperation with interrogation.
Torture is when you have your enemy in custody and serve them like special guest. By making them special food or they will not eat the food we provided, let them go hungry. Torture is not being able to fully interrogate the prisoners, because we might inflame the muslims. While they will do very grotesque torture, like cutting off heads of our live captured people. Torture is when you are holding back our own people from doing harsh interrogations. Real torture is when not interrogating these people and your wife and kids are killed in a terror attack, while all the politicians and families are well taken care of using our own tax money. Do not preach to me about the moderate mnslims, because I do not see them anywhere!
The “it doesn’t work anyway” comeback of the lefties is simple moral cowardice, a way to duck the question: how rough do you get with the bad guy to stop the ticking nuke?
Of course sheer brutality is very hit or miss, but a psychologically adept use of pain, or the fear of it, could absolutely be made to dovetail with milder techniques.
In days of yore this is perhaps why an enemy was near completely exterminated. To soil the soul as little and as quickly as possible to get it behind them.
waterboarding is not torture…interogation that includes bleeding,burning,electrocution,removal of body parts,etc is torture…speaking from experience here…(waterboarded in ’67)after it was over , we all laughed hysterically…it triggers a primal fear of drowning, a total panic …physcological , temporary and very ,very likley to cause subject to break…not looking for confessions here,just intel…
And be willing to stain your soul. You chose to get into this, after all. That’s part of the price.
Nah, Michael, you are the one choosing to see torturing an evil agent in order to save an innocent person as necessarily producing a “stain” upon your soul. Therefore, so far, that’s only your rule and problem, and not necessarily mine or anyone else’s. And, believe me, I wouldn’t have any problem whatsoever with doing the “Jack Bauer” scenario torture myself, or if “merely” necessary to have a reasonable chance of saving even one innocent person from an evil cadre. Of course, I’d rather have expert advice and administration of the whole process, which we do have! So far.
I fail to see the attraction people such as the Islamofascists and the Ghandian pacifists have to their own overt ethics of Deathworship, especially when they find it so convenient that it’s often others who must die in order to validate their “values”. And others who allegedly must also either accept the “stain” associated with acting to prevent the necessary death or enslavement otherwise coming with the victory of Humanity’s obvious evil agents, and/or be officially punished for such actions [a.k.a. "torture"]. In fact I see the assignment of “stain” and the adminstration of “punishment” for such actions as instead the evil and the “stain”.
One thing lost in all this torture conversation is that waterboading – or any other technique – is not used in a vacuum. For instance, lets say we waterboard KSM and he tells us about guy X. Is he lying? Maybe. Maybe not. So we take another guy we’re holding and interrogate him. He tells us about guy X too. Was he lying? Maybe. But that’s where analysis and follow-up interrogations come into play.
One rule I learned in intel school 25 years still works today: Never trust a single source report.
Imagine it personally. It’s your child or loved one at risk, and you have captive someone who knows something about it. You might wish you knew how to waterboard someone.
We put others in a position of responsibility for our safety, tell them what they can or can’t do to assure our safety, then judge them for it.
I’m grateful we have people who have tried to work out the best possible techniques for impossible situations, and are willing to take on the nightmares that may come with their jobs. No, I don’t think waterboarding is torture.
I’m not going to jump into the is/isn’t torture question, but I like what Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan wrote:
“Consider a war we fought in the past against a brutal enemy that tortured and killed prisoners, executed civilians, and engaged in a number of atrocities. Several American leaders argued that the only way to prevail was to engage in the same kind of tactics, because that was the only thing that the enemy understood or respected (sound familiar?). But other leaders believed that it was not enough to win; they also had to do it in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. That conflict was the Revolutionary War, and the leaders included George Washington and John Adams. If we mean what we say—if we really believe that we’re the good guys, and I hope we do—then this is the time to stand by those principles which our Founding Fathers professed and lived by. That’s what, I hope, makes us the leaders of the free world.”
That to me is a shining example of American Exceptionalism. Somehow there is something wrong with rejecting our principals because we saw something on a fictional television show.
If we are “leaders of the free world” – then why do we have a greater proportion of our people in prison than do other nations in the “free world”?
And why did we allow a president to be elected, and to remain in office, who flouts the US Constitution at every turn?
Exactly where are we “leading” everybody, if indeed we are?
Obviously we have more criminals in America. Why else would they be behind bars? Law abiding citizens don’t just end up in prison.
Perhaps if we changed our judicial system to solve this problem, say by executing drug users as in China or hacking off appendages for theft as in certain Muslim countries, maybe we’d have better stats.
However I think that goes against what we as a country stand for.
No one is saying it’s “enough” to win. I’m saying it’s obvious that in order for a Nation to even have values, as opposed to being exterminated or enslaved, it must win! It must win in order to exist! And who is saying that the point of torture is to obtain the enemy’s respect? No, the point is to obtain informatiion toward the end of winning, or to save innocents. To “torture” for these purposes is in fact an ethical obligation! You have it completely reversed!
Again, I’m mystified by some people’s fascination with the “ethic” of Deathworship, that is, when the death of someone is necessary to the ultimate validation of their “values” – of course, usually the death of someone else!
And once again, Lefty, what you say are “our” principles are actually only “your” principles, which I have no obligation to “not reject” and furthermore see as the truly evil “ethic”, not my principles – which include the right to exist and the mandate to save others from the evil agents you instead would allow to exert their vile will upon the rest of us. You’ve got it reversed.
If only the people acting so as to protect you, using the means you decry as violating and destroying your “values”, could exclude you from any beneficial effect to you derived via these means, then hopefully that would perhaps be instructive to you. After all, it’s your “ethic”: you don’t even want them to do it in the first place. So why should you be unhappy with not receiving the benefit the others would?
Mr. Ledeen….Glad to see you comming around to some reality!
Protecting a nation and its peoples is a daunting task. Todays generations seemingly haven’t a clue what ‘torture’ is and have been indoctrinated by the social justice folks of the world who have redefined what torture is. By their subjective definition every parent is guilty of torture as is every person who plays on the vulnerablity of anothers emotions be it physical threat, intimidation of many means or purely uses of words. War to defend a nation and its people is a very, very messy business with quite different rules in spite of all the social justice definitions granted by the UN and Geneva Conventions.
In real wars, involving direct national defense, whose life or quality of life would you value more…a combatant or operative prisoner of war who might have information that could or would save the lives of the men in your company, battalion, regiment or even the people of your nation….or your men and the people of your nation?
Interrogation in war is all about ‘breaking points’ and innovative techniques to achieve those breaking points short of maiming, starvation and denial of medical attention to illness or injury. Of the many, many thousands of our nations warriors who were captured and ‘suffered’ at the hand of the enemies, you never hear or heard from them complaining as they were well trained and understood the perils of war and capture….unlike the McCain of today who advocates for the social justice folks.
If one has never been charged with the responsiblity of the lives of men and the nations people, they probably should shut up and stay on the porch in their rocking chairs!
Did you finally wake up Mike ? Waterboarding is nothing compared to torture,but does work.
I agree with George W. Bush’s position. We should not torture. We will not torture. But we will think clearly and carefully about what is torture. This last step is necessary.
Yes, we do demand moral conduct of ourselves. OK, got that.
If any of us had to defend a child from a suicide bomber, I think we would act morally to do whatever was needed.
Most of us are lucky to live far away from all that. Therefore, and with all respect to Dr. Ledeen, all this agonizing strikes me as a little bit self-indulgent.
I have mentioned on a couple of different blogs in years past that if your regime over-agonizes over the taking and treatment of prisoners, the guys that actually take the prisoners will take less of them as the cost-benefit analysis skews off into the distance.
This administration is apparently sufficiently self-aware to realize that their policies regarding illegal combatants are so incoherent that their only workable option is to whack jihadi kingpins from on high. I’d say that they’re treating them as de-facto outlaws in the traditional sense of the word. Which would be a good thing except that these very same hypocrites would’ve been all over the previous administration for doing what this administration seems to think is a good day’s work when they do it.
I appreciate the reasoned debate, but check out the evidence in favor of the traditional methods, during the height of the Iraq War compared to the weak claims of success for EIT. Also, when will we be rewriting the Geneva Conventions and Reagan’s International Convention on Torture and the Military Hand book to reflect these new legalities?
Why does the support of EIT also come with so much deception? Look how the lying liars are saying waterboarding led to the capture of OBL: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/9115724-hannitys-gangster-ethics-americans-should-torture
It?s actually a nice and helpful piece of information. I?m glad that you just shared this useful information with us. Please keep us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.