A Disconnect on Torture

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., a friend of Larry Johnson’s, is the Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance (www.ACDAlliance.org) and a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer. This article was originally published at the CampainForLiberty.com.

Torture has been universally condemned and banned by both Geneva and United Nations Conventions for good reasons. It is also illegal under US law. It is widely recognized that torture is a line that should not be crossed, that it starts out with sleep deprivation and winds up with torn out fingernails and even death. On a practical level, it only is really good at producing confessions, many of which turn out to be false. It debases and turns sadistic those who carry it out and those who order it. It is a black mark on the government that condones it and it opens the door for other countries to engage in the same or similar practices.

Many governments that have routinely tortured to obtain information have abandoned the practice when they discovered that other approaches actually worked better for extracting information. Israel prohibited torturing Palestinian terrorist suspects in 1999. Even the German Gestapo stopped torturing French resistance captives when it determined that treating prisoners well actually produced more and better intelligence.

Nevertheless, in spite of the historical record, the torture advocates continue to speak out, ignoring ethical and moral considerations and stressing that “torture works.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney has even succeeded in changing the terms of the narrative on torture, which he freely admits was carried out when he was in office though he prefers to describe it as “enhanced interrogation.” He asks the American people to trust him when he says that torture worked and saved thousands of lives. But did it?

If there has been any “lesson learned” from the past eight years it is that government officials like Cheney are not to be trusted when they assert something without the support of incontrovertible evidence. Cheney bases his critique of Obama policy on two alleged memos drafted by the CIA that he claims demonstrate that enhanced interrogation of terrorist suspects actually produced information that stopped terrorist attacks. There are two problems with the Cheney memos, even assuming that it can be demonstrated that specific information obtained led to the direct thwarting of a terrorist attack, something that has not yet been demonstrated in any credible way. First, the memos only support a torture policy if they demonstrate that the information obtained could only be obtained by torture and not by other means. Second, any document drafted to support a certain course of action is not by its very nature evidence that the underlying policy was sound. The reports apparently were prepared by the CIA at the request of the White House to validate the program, not critique it. Asking the CIA, which was carrying out the torture, to justify the practice is a bit like asking the fox why he ate all the chickens in the hen house. Did anyone expect Langley to admit that torture had not worked after it had been approved by all of CIA’s senior management at the urging of the White House?

Several prominent former CIA officers have also supported the Cheney point of view. One in particular, Michael Scheuer, who once headed the Bin Laden Task Force, has asserted that if extraordinary rendition is halted there will be a major terrorist attack in the United States within one year. Scheuer has recently written a widely circulated Washington Post Op Ed that asks “Is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?” It is a serious charge, but is Scheuer right? Did he actually see information that came from someone who was tortured that could not have been obtained in another fashion that stopped a terrorist attack? If so, we need to know the details — Who? What? When? Where? Several former intelligence officers who knew Scheuer well claim that he was only an analyst, that he never had any interactions with actual CIA sources and that he was never in any way involved in handling detainees or personally involved in any interrogations. If that is true, how did he obtain his information that enables him to conclude that extraordinary renditions and enhanced interrogations, which almost everyone but Dick Cheney agrees is torture, saved many lives and will save even more lives in the future? Scheuer’s voice gives credibility to the advocates of torture. If he cannot or will not provide the details of interrogations that he knows about first hand and intimately he should stop going around describing himself as an insider who is an expert on the subject of extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation.

It might be argued that Scheuer, like Cheney, lets his agenda drive him. His enthusiasm for torture of alleged terrorists is perhaps related to his embrace of a clash of civilizations concept that would make Samuel Huntington blush. In Imperial Hubris he wrote “Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and Irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field, fertilizer plants and grain mills–all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes… As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-minded is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America’s only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.” Scheurer is surely right about failed policies towards the Islamic world, but much of what he writes is high minded fear-mongering that is really his own opinion and should be regarded as such, not expert testimony.

Another recent fan of torture is British author Andrew Roberts in “How Torture Helped Win World War II.” He asserts that the Normandy Invasion succeeded because nineteen Nazi spies were coerced into reporting false information to the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. How does he know that? He doesn’t. He admits that “full firsthand details of the enhanced interrogation techniques have not emerged, either from the British or the German side.” Roberts assumes the men were tortured, that the torture was successful, and that it resulted in the men’s changing sides to help the British. He provides zero evidence that that is what took place.

Americans who believe in the US constitution, with its promise of a rule of law, protection of individual rights, and due process should shun torture. That a number of leading figures are currently parading around and defending the practice is perhaps a measure of the sorry state of morality and ethics in our time. When the Cheneys, Scheuers, and Roberts of this world argue that torture works and saves lives they should be challenged hard because many Americans will believe that what they say is true and some will accept that the infliction of pain somehow should have a place in our judicial system. Torture is an unmitigated wrong, both morally and practically, and it is time that the American media and public rally against the merchants of fear who have been promoting it.