Trickery and Subterfuge


Here's an interesting piece from The Sunday Times in which Adrian Wooldridge  argues that trickery and subterfuge are much more successful techniques for getting information out of suspected terrorists, than exposing them to torture.

Now I agree with that and I suspect that most people would support a credible policy that is capable of dealing with modern day terrorist tactics without resorting to measures which are so controversial and divisive.

Not that this means treating terrorists with kid gloves; after all Osama bin Laden was not even interrogated never mind tortured when he was shot and killed while trying to evade justice for his many crimes, which killed thousands of innocent civilians.

Dick Cheney is wrong about torture, but for all the right reasons
By Adrian Wooldridge - The Sunday Times

Since the Senate committee published its torture report last Tuesday, Washington has been engaged in a full-scale civil war, which has pitted Democrats against Republicans and the CIA against liberal institutions such as The New York Times. Republicans angrily accused the Democrats (who are about to lose their majority in the Senate) of playing politics with national security. The CIA’s boss, John Brennan, defended his operatives as unsung heroes who make difficult decisions in conditions of great uncertainty.

But the most interesting battle is not partisan or institutional but philosophical: the battle between soft hearts, who think that torture is an offence against fundamental moral principles, and the hard heads, who think that it is justified if it saves lives. The soft hearts say that good people don’t torture, full stop. The hard heads say that that is self-indulgent pap.

The soft hearts were in the ascendancy last week because the report’s revelations were appalling. Prisoners were subjected to “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration”. Waterboarding was far more common than the CIA had previously admitted and consisted of “near drownings”. One detainee died of hypothermia after being shackled to a concrete floor by an incompetent and unsupervised junior officer. This may not be the worst of it: a good deal of the 500-page report remains redacted.

No wonder many Republicans have tried to change the subject by arguing that the Democrats are simply playing politics. And no wonder potential Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential election have chosen to keep quiet.

A few hard heads have had the courage to speak out. Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president and the hardest of all hard heads, said the report was “full of crap”. The administration did what it needed to do to defend America. Enhanced interrogation produced “actionable intelligence” that helped to prevent future terrorist outrages and find Osama bin Laden.

John Yoo, a former lawyer for the justice department, pointed out that al-Qaeda is a new kind of enemy: one that disguises itself as civilians and launches surprise attacks. All terrorists target the innocent to make their point. But al-Qaeda admits no limit to their numbers and the heinous methods it will use to kill them.

Is this distinction between hard heads and soft hearts correct? The torture report poked some holes in it. On the basis of a detailed study of 20 cases, the report argues that enhanced interrogation played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders or finding bin Laden.

But the more I reflected on the report, the more it struck me that conventional wisdom is upside down. Hard heads such as Cheney were motivated by a mixture of outrage over what happened on September 11 and fear of something worse: Cheney’s friends have repeatedly argued that 9/11 changed him fundamentally and transformed a measured figure into a warrior. But there is also a hard-headed case against torture.

The classic hard-headed argument in favour of torture — the ticking timebomb — is less convincing than it sounds. Imagine that a nuclear bomb has been placed in the heart of London and you have half an hour to extract the necessary information from a jihadist before the device goes off. Will he really give you the right information as you apply the electrodes? Or will he waste your time by giving the wrong leads and then rejoice as you are all blown to smithereens?

The CIA has generally found that trickery and subterfuge are more effective than torture. And even if torture produces short-term gains, it does so at the expense of long-term achievements.

For all its miscalculations, the Bush administration got one big thing right: the West is engaged in a “war on terror”, or, to unpack that much-maligned phrase, a war on radical Islamist groupings across the world that are willing to inflict any damage they can against the infidel. This is a war that will last for years. It is a war that is global. And it is a war that is being fought for the highest stakes — radical Islamists would be delighted if they could invent a chemical that would kill all non-believers in unspeakable agony.

Public opinion has been so thoroughly focused on the CIA report that the revelation that last month alone jihadists killed more than 5,000 people passed almost without comment.

It is precisely because the stakes in this war are so high that we should avoid using torture. The war is fought on the home front: you have to keep the people on your side in a world where patience is limited and the enemy can disappear for long periods of time. Torture divides serious people and gives succour to the frivolous looking for an excuse to argue that “we” are not so wonderful and “they” are merely misunderstood.

The war is also fought on a global scale: you need to have the enthusiastic support of your allies if you are to pursue the terrorists to their hiding holes. Torture destroys those alliances. The British government will find it harder to defend its instinctive Atlanticism when leftwingers argue that America is engaged in torture. And the difficulties Tony Blair had in defending his government’s actions after 9/11 have got bigger still.

Torture weakens the institutions that are at the heart of the war on terror: the secret services that fight in the shadows but are nevertheless subject to democratic scrutiny. The most interesting thing about the terrorism report is what it reveals about the internal state of the CIA. Torture took a toll on morale: in August 2002 some officers in a black facility in Thailand found torture so harrowing that they petitioned for a transfer. It created internal divisions: in January 2003 the CIA’s chief of interrogations sent an email to colleagues saying that “enhanced interrogation” was a wreck “waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens”. It forced the agency to engage in endless lies and cover-ups — not just to Congress but even to the more sympathetic Bush White House.

The report will make this damage more serious still as the CIA wastes energy on defending itself and struggles to hire high-quality recruits. Democracies that have given in to the use of torture — Britain in the Cyprus emergency in the 1950s, the French in the Algerian War and the Americans in Vietnam — have always come to regret it deeply not just because they lost the moral high ground but also because torture has a peculiarly corrosive effect on democratic institutions.

It is easy for people who take the war on terror seriously to dismiss the terrorism report as a charade. The Democrats who are baying for the CIA’s blood this week were as one in demanding tough action in the wake of 9/11. They will be as one in condemning the CIA for negligence if jihadists mount another attack on the West.

But this temptation should be resisted: the West must do what it can to ensure that the dubious decisions taken in the wake of 9/11 are not repeated — for hard-headed reasons rather than soft-hearted ones. Eschewing torture is not just the right thing to do morally. It is the right thing strategically as well.

Adrian Wooldridge is The Economist’s management editor and Schumpeter columnist. Dominic Lawson is away

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