One of the reasons why the torture debate has been has been
difficult for me over the past few years is that is that so much
of it has been argued in the theoretical realm. On one side, you
have those who believe that techniques such as waterboarding are
torture and should not be used under any circumstances, while on
the other side you have people who may or may not say that
waterboarding is torture, but either way don't have a problem
using such techniques to extract information from terror suspects
to prevent future attacks. I fall somewhere in between in the
sense that I'd prefer that we never used waterboarding, sleep
deprivation, or other techniques that I do believe are torture,
but if waterboarding a high-level terrorist such as KSM, who was
the mastermind behind 9/11, could save thousands of innocent
lives, I'm for it.
The question for me then becomes, does such a situation exist in
real life, or is it just a cartoonish scenario that only plays
out on '24'? Do we get actionable intelligence from using such
techniques, or will a detainee eventually say anything just to
get his interrogator to stop, resulting in intelligence that
isn't credible? Since my judgment ultimately hinges on the
practical aspects of the debate, it's been difficult for me to
form an opinion when I only have access to a small amount of the
information that those in charge of our national security had
when making the decisions they did.
However, mounting evidence now shows that these techniques were
used much more widely over a much longer period than we were led
to believe. If waterboarding needed to be used on KSM 183
times in a month – a far cry from the lone 90-second session
previously reported – the technique wasn't as instantly effective
as it has been made out to be, and clearly it wasn't being
performed in a single use, last resort type of way.
Even putting the moral debate aside, in practical terms, the
torture issue has been a public relations disaster for the U.S.
It has also helped undermine support for the "War on Terror" by
tarnishing it in many people's minds as an unnecessarily dirty
enterprise. While I don't think that America should ever
sacrifice its national security purely for PR reasons, perception
is certainly worth taking into account, especially if it's true
that using these techniques doesn’t actually make us any safer.
Yesterday, Dick Cheney,
called for the release of documents showing that the
government obtained good information from the sessions. And
in the Washington Post today, former Bush aide Marc
Thiessen
argues, citing the recently released memos, that the efforts
yielded actionable intelligence that prevented terrorist attacks.
Specifically, the intelligence helped stop an a potential attack
on the Library Tower in Los Angeles (the tallest building on the
West Coast).
At this point, since one part of the story is out there already,
I agree that it's necessary to release the rest. Then, instead of
having a debate in which opponents of the interrogation policies
accuse the other side of being callous, and proponents of using
these techniques accuse the other side of being pansies, we can
have an informed discussion about the practical impact of those
policies on our national security.
