tdaxp

[tdaxp note: My thanks to Eddie of Hidden Unities for accepting an opportunity to guest blog on this site. Eddie's introduction immediately follows this note. Below the fold you will find his 10 Questions on Torture.]

Due to my past writings on the subject, I can’t and wouldn’t want to hide the fact that I view waterboarding as torture. Further, Pres. Bush and those in his administration, the military and the intelligence community who engaged in the illegal authorization and implementation of enhanced interrogation techniques, torture, whatever you want to call it, are clearly war criminals. No official is above and beyond the Constitution, no one can claim the law does not apply to them and in particular, the American government has no business ever denying the most basic of Constitutional rights to American citizens (Jose Padilla), no matter how heinous their supposed crimes. Such actions weaken the strongest asset we have as a nation and civilization; namely our superior legal system and traditions. That’s the real reason why we’re so successful as a society in business, education and the opportunity to pursue and achieve a better life.

Nevertheless, unlike the President and his advisers, I can place my personal feelings aside for the good of the nation and suggest a course of action that can resolve much of this contentious issue.

The debate over enhanced interrogation techniques has continued in a variety of forums, of which the Small Wars Journal is certainly not a latecomer to. Malcolm Nance, a highly experienced SERE school master instructor, weighed in with a powerfully descriptive yet overly emotional and sentimental post on the SWJ blog. The sheer gravitas of his professional experience made certain that his opinion would be widely read and discussed in the blogosphere, with everyone from Dan of TDAXP to Abu Muqawama commenting.

Yet emotions, opinions and feelings must stay out of this debate. Nothing less than the future of our rule of law rests on our ability to view this dangerous world we live in as dispassionately and factually as possible. That means the information must be made available to make the hard calls on the issue and not be based on ideological rants from a minuscule minority of lawyers (John Yoo, David Addington) or the Pollyannaish views of another minority who believe that terrorists are little different from enemy soldiers in their tactics and grand strategy.

Educated and informed members of our civil society must ask a momentous series of questions of our lead practitioners and experts with vast experience in counter-terrorism, Constitutional law, law enforcement, intelligence-gathering, interrogation and warfare.

Such a gathering of the minds could occur under a commission brought to order by the President-elect in November 2008. They would be tasked with surveying all the evidence, facts and informed testimony available about the usage of enhanced interrogation techniques throughout modern history to include the post 9/11 era.

My suggestions for the co-chairs of the commission are none other than Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to include additional representation from Sen. John Warner and Sen. Bob Kerrey, two retired four-star military officers, two retired senior intelligence officials, two former heads of the NCIS and Army CID as well as former FBI director Louis Freeh and two highly respected Constitutional scholars.

They would first need to answer a qualifying question that would prevent needless research and wasted time:

Until the past presidential term, were any of the enhanced interrogation tactics currently utilized by the USG considered torture by a serious majority of criminal prosecutors, lawmakers and historians?

After disqualifying any tactics that are clearly legal though perhaps counterproductive or just politically incorrect, they would need to determine the answers to the 10 pressing questions the use of enhanced interrogation techniques has brought to the fore:

Upfront: Malcom Nance's bio is incredible. Whatever else is the case, he clearly knows what he is talking about. My criticism is not against his knowledge, but rather the way he presents his argument in "Waterboarding is torture... period," an article posted in the Small Wars Journal. For instance:

Yet, once captive I believe that the better angels of our nature and our nation’s core values would eventually convince any terrorist that they indeed have erred in their murderous ways.

makes no sense as a logical argument. Among other things, it implies either that no unrepentant terrorists have died in US custody or else implies a requirement for infinite life.

Well, that said, of course it is not a logical argument. It's a rhetorical argument. It's meant to sound good and feel good and subvert reason with intuition. Even though Nance's argument is on Small Wars Journal, it thus reads more like a political tract that an objective analysis of a technique.

Nance's three bulleted points likewise work better as bromides than as lemas:

Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period

No logical argument for this is given -- merely it is asserted several times that arguments against it exist.

Second:

Waterboarding is not a simulation.

What follows is a semantic distinction between two virtual phenomenons: the simulated nd the controlled. I'm not sure how such a distinction is relevent, nor does Nance provide any cypher to help those who are not initiated.

Third:

If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives.

This is an empirical question and probably demonstrably false, as the set of survey respondents who who support waterboarding on enemy captives is probably distinct from those that support such a technique on "any future American captives." But again, in fairness to Nance, reason, logic, and facts do not concern his claim: Only the sound of the words does.

Alternatively, one might interpret Nance to be saying that we should seek a policy of reciprocity with regards to treatment of detainees with al Qaeda. However, he appears to reject this notion:

We must now double our efforts to prepare for its inevitable and uncontrolled use of by our future enemies.

I have no idea why criticisms of torture are so poor. My guess is that those who get the public ear achieve resonance on something other than logical validity of argument, while others have a hard time translating their first hand knowledge into such an argument.

(Many thanks to Eddie of Hidden Unities for passing on this link.)

Michael Devlin, who would also be a murderer if the child hadn't talked him out of it -- who kidnapped a boy for four years -- agreed to a plea deal which will, theoretically, send him to jail for the rest of his life.

The obvious question, as this is notionally a death sentence, is why the state wishes the execution to take decades instead of a much shorter amount of time. In other words, why not just kill him?

One explanation, supported by Senator John Kerry and others, is that we should torture people. That is, ending lives is too merciful and that the schadenfreude Twe get from imprisoning (subjecting to prison rape, etc.) Michael is reward enough. [Senator Kerry grants, though, that terrorists should have the mercy of death as quickly as possible. ]

Another is that we should be as merciful to Michael Devlin as we are to, say, a dog we really hated. So we shouldn't allow him normal peer interaction, the ability to move about, etc., but we should not put him down, either.

I, opposed to punishment and torture, I reject both notions. Too much is influenced by both environment and genetics to believe that individuals are rational agents who think things out in any coherent manner. Or at least, such thinking is too far removed from action and observed physical evidence to allow men to know the hearts of others. Rather, our "justice" system should be based on discipline (teaching) and deterrence (making sure something doesn't happen again), while minimizing suffering.

The questions should then be?

How can we teach Michael Devlin not to do this again?
Or, failing that, how can we guarantee that Michael Devlin will not do this again?
Whatever our approach, how may we do this without torturous punishment?

(Thanks for Mark of ZenPundit for an email which inspired this post.)

Eddie of Hidden Unities of kind enough to recently share his thoughts with torture with several other bloggers and myself through email . He also, graciously, allowed me to respond to them through my blog. So, with thanks to Eddie, let's begin:

The anti-torture crowd is patiently waiting for any solid evidence [methods such as torture] work.

Indeed, and I'm patiently waiting for any solid evidence that ternary trees speed up the performance of object-relational databases.

By beginning his critique on torture with a critique on efficacy, Eddie puts his weakest foot forward. There surely is a moral case against torture, as there is a moral case against war. By framing his whole debate in "it just doesn't work," though, he opens his theory for disproof.

Such a strategy is dangerous on many levels. It would suddenly allow all many of ghastly tortures if they can be shown to work, in any way. Additionally the use of rhetoric to argue fact debases the opponent of torture. A fact is true or not, and a fact as technical as "does torture provide any military benefit" should not hang on who can reference pop culture better.

Thus far, there has been no such [evidence that torture works].

Eddie concludes, that when reporting success with Technique X is a felony, a lack of reported success with Technique X shows that said technique does not work.

The anti-torture crowd, by criminalizing the technique, effectively end any systematic investigation into its utility. As it is, the only people to know whether it works or not are medium- to high- level decision makers who have little interest in political debates.

Eddie of Hidden Unities recently emailed me the text of "The Ploy" by Mark Bowden. My reply back to him mainly concerned, the subtile, which is The inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle—without resorting to torture—and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq. The title's odd in that it is both boring and inflammatory.

The boredom first. I can imagine an article subtitled The inside story of how programmers at Microsoft Corporation released SQL Server 2008 on time -- and without using hash tables. Such an article might be worth while to a specialist in the field who is cogniscant of the limitations of hash tables, and believes he may well come across a project in the future were he would do well to avoid tabular hash technology. The article would of course be useless to a general interest reader, and indeed would be properly ignored by anyone who didn't have a special interest in SQL Server, Microsoft, or has tables.

Now, the inflammation. Imagine an article subtitled The inside story story of how the United States Army Air Force broke the ability of Tokyo to resist -- without resorting to nuclear weapons -- and hunted the Empire's man in Japan. Such an article would be madening because it minimizes terrible harm that was done to human beings.

Nuclear war is not bad because it involves the fission of uranium or plutonium. Nuclear war is bad because it kills people.

Similarly, torture (or "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity") is not bad because it is done "obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person" or "with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." Torture is bad because it hurts people.

Other things hurt people too. Putting people in prison hurts people, and their families, for extended periods of time, too. But where are those who want to abolish jails? Or those who say that this or that person did not commit a crime, and yet was not imprisoned?

The self-congratulatory subtitle of the article minimizes out the pain and death, as if it is somehow less evil or less awful to kill as long as people weren't hurt beforehand.

Torture may or may not be wise in this or that situation. I don't claim the expertise that such a decision would require. But the current stylish condemnation of torture is crazy, as it pretends that torture is somehow worse than all the other acts of violence, state and non-state -- that exist in our world

"Confusion Over Whereabouts of S. Korean POW 'Deported' by China," Digital Chosunilbo, http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200501/200501270023.html, 27 January 2005 (from One Free Korea).

A South Korean prisoner, held for half a century in North Korea, is sent back to hell

Seoul on Thursday expressed regret after Beijing said it had extradited to North Korea a 72-year-old South Korean prisoner of war, Han Man-taek, who was arrested by the Chinese police late last year while seeking to escape to South Korea. It is the first time that China deported a South Korean POW who fled North Korea back to the Stalinist country.

Korean authorities said the Chinese government had promised to cooperate in sending South Korean POWs to the South but failed to return Han because it returned him to the North under Chinese domestic law before Seoul made its request for cooperation on Dec. 30.

I posted my thoughts on this over at OFK

I wonder how much of the timing was purposeful by Seoul? And if Beijing interpreted ROK's quiet as a go-ahead to ship him back to the DPRK.

South Korea is an ally in the Global War on Terror, because it may be a major fource against disconnectness in east Asia. After North Korea falls, they will spend a fortune picking up the pieces. But one shudders with "allies" like this.