Prior to the surge, multinational forces operated under another assumption about the “causes” of the insurgency and insurgency recruitment - that the very presence of US troops incited hostility and that handing over authority to Iraqis as quickly as possible was more important than establishing security. That turned out to be a simplistic abstraction that looked good on paper and sounded good in anti-war agitprop, b8ut arguably did a lot more harm than good.
one could argue that it took the iraqis four years of horror to realize that the US is a lesser evil. this realization may also have been delayed by gitmo and abu ghraib.
btw, here's your EIT-abu ghraib connection:
"We didn't kill them... We just did what we were told to soften them up for interrogation, and we were told to do anything short of killing them." - Lynndie England, scapegoat.
Yet once again you fully conflate detainee treatment, in particular Abu Ghraib, with interrogation.
as far as the insurgents/foreign fighters are concerned, there's little distinction between the two. so i'm not differentiating here either. as you can see, the rest of my questions focus on interrogation methods.
The scene of distant bombardiers dropping highly but imperfectly accurate bombs on distant enemies and unfortunate bystanders in distant lands for half-forgotten, but connected reasons seem hardly to register as a moral issue compared to the dramatic identification with a man whose faced is plunged over and over in water, inducing feelings of panic, fear, and shame, but little or no serious damage to him.
how can you say that? the widespread moral objection to the barbarism of dresden and hiroshima ensures that they will not happen again, inshallah. as a result of this objection, we now have laser guided bombs and the like, which enable governments to wage extended war in the age of real time war coverage. no civilized government is considering firebombing cities anymore.
Being able to sympathize with KSM and AZ, but not their their direct and indirect victims, or with the people tasked with protecting their victims, does not represent some noble moral exercise. It’s a primitive, highly selective version of morality,
your frequent lapses into wingnut talk discredit your sincerity. your suggestion that we sympathize with terrorists is deeply offensive. we believe that by upholding our standards, we are in fact protecting America's security in the long-term.
let me throw a few questions at you that may help us better understand each other's position:
what is your position on the allegedly significant number of insurgent/AQI fighters who were driven to fight the US by our widely-publicized treatment of our prisoners? would you venture a guess how this affected US casualties and the our overall success in iraq and af-pak?
if we implemented the rather permissive interrogation policy you recommend for so-called high value prisoners, what measures would you take to protect the innocent? how do we ensure that interrogators don't look for information based on false assumptions (particularly in light of our notoriously error-prone intelligence services)?
how do you avoid an appalling scenario, where gov't officials push for information that would serve their political interests or justify their actions (e.g. we know saddam and osama were good pals, and we know this guy has the details)?
isn't it wrong to apply techniques that "shock the conscience" of many, to seek information that we're not sure it exists at all?
does your recommended policy address the possible personal motivations of interrogators, including an inflated sense of self-importance (as in "the future of humanity is in my hands" - maybe so, maybe not) or righteous vengeance ("the guy deserves this anyway")?
would you use techniques that "shock the conscience" of many with the aim of gathering data not directly related to an impending, major attack, but is considered to be "potentially useful"?
is a system possible that can reliably match the value of information we seek to extract to the severity of interrogation techniques we use for that purpose? in our culture, isn't such a system a prerequisite to even considering the use of techniques that "shock the conscience" of many?
One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. ... I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration.
"These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe that they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.” – Umberto Eco
I’ve given my views as to a preferable policy going forward. I have you to hear a response from you on it, sesqui, though maybe I missed it amidst all the rest.
CK MacLeod on April 25, 2009 at 3:09 PM
first of all, we should not do anything that can be widely interpreted as torture. torture itself must not be defined by a set of disallowed methods, because there's a million ways to torment someone.
terrorists wanted by the US should be handed over to the FBI after capture. the FBI has decades of experience in prosecuting organized crime and excellent intel on al qaeda as well. those captured on the battlefield should be interrogated by military officers following the guidelines of the army field manual.
anyone captured with a weapon or who is a suspected combatant for any party should be accorded POW status. it's a globalized world where state borders matter less than they used to. governments matter less. we need to have modern standards.
our prisoner treatment should be exemplary. we should allow the red cross greater access and let them make public as much of their reports as possible.
As a former senior military interrogator, it’s deeply troubling to me after reading the recently released torture memos that we doubted our ability to win the battle of wits in the interrogation booth and resorted to torturing and abusing prisoners....
The fact that Osama bin Laden is still alive is proof that waterboarding does not work. The more important fact, however, is that our policy of torture and abuse has cost us American lives.
As a senior interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than three hundred interrogations and monitored more than one thousand. I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Our policy of torture and abuse is Al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool. These same insurgents have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of our troops in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi civilians. Torture and abuse are counterproductive in the long term and, ultimately, cost us more lives than they save.
Again, we get into the conflating with detainee treatment problem, as well as retrospective judgment of unnamed administrators and policymakers, as opposed to the more fundamental moral, theoretical, and foward-looking policy questions regarding interrogation methods.
i'm interested in an overall policy that provides humane treatment to all. what evidence is available suggests that both the potentially illegal interrogation techniques used on high value prisoners and the abuses detailed in the red cross report are results of specific administration policies. if not through direct orders, than conveyed in ambiguous (?) characterizations like "geneva is so vague you're only in fault he dies." (which a few of them did.)
the reasoning that led to this is what i'm essentially objecting to.
Crime and war are separate issues and terrorism is a category of war.
at what point do you consider mexican drug lords worthy of torturing?
terrorism doesn't realistically seek to wrest power from our government. they're trying to inflict damage on us here to achieve their goals abroad.
and again, we have not proven that EITs and methods known around the world (i have to be careful of your sensibilities) as torture are in fact more successful on the long run against terrorism. methods-widely-seen-as-torture might lead to a tactical victory, but i believe it's harmful to our long-term strategic interests.
You have very precisely not responded to my argument at all. I argued that we have to argue each case individually and you create some strawmen silliness about torture and drunk driving.
i meant that "whatever it takes" is only true in a "to the best of our abilities," not as in "we're ready to discard any of the values that make us different to vanquish the terrorists."
when you say i'm conflating issues you're evading addressing any of the points that i brought up. if a fair assumption can be made that information gained through pain is not worth the price, the burden of proof is on the promoters of pain- or severe distress-causing methods to justify it. so far, nothing suggests that they worked when all else would have failed, or that any interrogation expert ever suggested they would work effectively au lieu other, more humane methods.
whether i'm trying to suggest that our treatment of suspected terrorists is wrong on a moral basis, or on a practical one, you refuse to give any answer that would advance the discussion.
They can’t, in their official roles, come on HotAir and say, "I’d go medieval on Abu Zubaydah’s a$$ if I thought it was the only way to save a city... - then they are putting themselves outside the law of the land, which has, in my view short-sightedly and dishonestly, spread-eagled us on a transnational table, and tied us down with all-encompassing ambiguity.
you're killing me. look, i'd be tormented by the thought that i had to torture someone, and i'd feel guilty even if something greater than me was "saved" in the process. you attack me because i have the temerity to be intellectually honest.
there's no ambiguity here. we must have a zero tolerance policy for torture, and we don't want any overzealous interrogator or guard to assume that he or she is free to do anything to a prisoner if the gravity of the danger is sufficient.
i'm all for defining publicly what methods constitute torture. i'm not so insecure to worry about our enemies knowing where we draw the line. i'm happy with people around the world knowing what we won't do, even if our prisoners will use this to their advantage.
even if its hard to reach a consensus what counts as torture, we know the SERE instruction involves techniques from intelligence agencies we consider to have broken international law by using these very methods. we have prosecuted japanese officers for waterboarding - and we didn't take into account their culture or any other mitigating factors. since we applied the same methods (prove, if you can, that they were different), so if you want to argue that because we're using them, they're not torture anymore, the burden of proof is on you again.
before lapsing back into attempts to shock and torment us with fragmentary narratives of “torture”
unfortunately this is the only way to make you consider what we have done to those people. please read the red cross report. they don't have a reason to lie or exaggerate. have you, honestly?
let me ask you something. the one thing that struck me most in your post was how you feel threatened by us ever expanding the definition of torture. where do you get this from? is it just the conservative paranoia that they live under the left's increasing oppression? i feel a lot of your antipathy toward our arguments comes from this.
The scenarios where we argue torture are those in which our fear of the enemy is quite rational.
if we waterboarded everyone for DUI, we could soon reduce the number of American citizens dying a violent death each year by thousands. if we tortured every drug dealer, we could reduce drug-related violent deaths significantly as well. if we waterboarded everyone who owns a gun, crime would stop.
the war on terror doesn't meet the "whatever it takes" level, i'm sorry.
what it takes is that you need to overcome your irrational fear of the enemy. more torture doesn't mean more success. we don't have to take revenge on them in the interrogation room either. we'll win the "war" by not torturing.
i sort of feel addressed here. i'm not going to make the moral argument anymore, because it's pointless.
the problem with this debate is that it focuses too much on an unlikely, hypothetical, TV show-inspired scenario where you don't have the option to take the time and use traditional methods. i have little doubt that cheney's memos will not reveal anything comparable.
in any other situations, where the information might be extremely important, but not as urgent, the unreliability of what the subjects will say under extreme physical and mental pain - torture - simply outweigh all the associated costs. whatever we learn from the memos, there's little chance they'll conclusively prove that traditional methods would not have been effective.
the more expert or otherwise informed opinions surface, including tonight's BREAKING NEWS according to msnbc, and others, convinces me more and more that EITs were uncalled for, needlessly and irresponsibly applied, often in pursuit of false leads. soon we'll learn much more about this, and i'm afraid that what we're going to find out will be to nobody's liking.
remember the surge. what won us the tactical victory was not just more troops, but also a different approach. iraqis would be treated better, deals would be cut with insurgents and generally the goal was to protect the population. it was successful because finally we began to treat the iraqis as normal human beings - no more hadithas. american commanders began to learn arabic as they spread out to smaller outposts, living among the people, showing a human face. that's how al qaeda lost iraq. nobody mistreated anyone without reprimand under petraeus, wonder why.
whatever you think, for most of the world, and especially the arab world, the interrogation methods and conditions of the our prisoners are seen as torture. and when it's about its implications abroad, that's what matters, so there's no point debating it. and it goes against the entire mindset of the surge, and what really made it work. strategically, it's a grave mistake, it cannot be kept secret for long, and it's incredibly damaging our long-term interests. it's time that we stop giving scumbags around the world legitimate reasons to demonize us. it's time to return to being the shining city on the hill again. (i hope this doesn't remind you of dostoyevsky. he's good but in a different way.)
so let's disabuse ourselves of these sophomoric imaginary scenarios where you're lucky enough to just have somebody in your hands who happens to have the key info to stop some horrible, horrible impending event. i'll send you a self-flagellating postcard if it happens and somebody has to go all jack bauer on the dude to stop the annihilation of manhattan topeka, KS.
as for whether it's torture, CK (Sir MacLeod?), i linked several quotes about the effects of their treatment on some of the prisoners. for example, we've clearly turned padilla into an anthropomorph lettuce, "docile as piece of furniture," according to his guards, over the years. nothing he's ever said can be used at court against anyone because he suffers from extreme PTSD combined with the effects of years of solitary confinement (expert's words, not mine). to every normal person, he shows the signs of having gone through extended periods of severe mental and physical pain.
and the polls you cite - they're meaningless when it's a moral issue. in 1967, 72% of Americans opposed interracial marriage.
also, thanks for exposing my most intemperate comments, bastard ;)
one could argue that it took the iraqis four years of horror to realize that the US is a lesser evil. this realization may also have been delayed by gitmo and abu ghraib.
btw, here's your EIT-abu ghraib connection:
as far as the insurgents/foreign fighters are concerned, there's little distinction between the two. so i'm not differentiating here either. as you can see, the rest of my questions focus on interrogation methods.
how can you say that? the widespread moral objection to the barbarism of dresden and hiroshima ensures that they will not happen again, inshallah. as a result of this objection, we now have laser guided bombs and the like, which enable governments to wage extended war in the age of real time war coverage. no civilized government is considering firebombing cities anymore.
your frequent lapses into wingnut talk discredit your sincerity. your suggestion that we sympathize with terrorists is deeply offensive. we believe that by upholding our standards, we are in fact protecting America's security in the long-term.
let me throw a few questions at you that may help us better understand each other's position:
what is your position on the allegedly significant number of insurgent/AQI fighters who were driven to fight the US by our widely-publicized treatment of our prisoners? would you venture a guess how this affected US casualties and the our overall success in iraq and af-pak?
if we implemented the rather permissive interrogation policy you recommend for so-called high value prisoners, what measures would you take to protect the innocent? how do we ensure that interrogators don't look for information based on false assumptions (particularly in light of our notoriously error-prone intelligence services)?
how do you avoid an appalling scenario, where gov't officials push for information that would serve their political interests or justify their actions (e.g. we know saddam and osama were good pals, and we know this guy has the details)?
isn't it wrong to apply techniques that "shock the conscience" of many, to seek information that we're not sure it exists at all?
does your recommended policy address the possible personal motivations of interrogators, including an inflated sense of self-importance (as in "the future of humanity is in my hands" - maybe so, maybe not) or righteous vengeance ("the guy deserves this anyway")?
would you use techniques that "shock the conscience" of many with the aim of gathering data not directly related to an impending, major attack, but is considered to be "potentially useful"?
is a system possible that can reliably match the value of information we seek to extract to the severity of interrogation techniques we use for that purpose? in our culture, isn't such a system a prerequisite to even considering the use of techniques that "shock the conscience" of many?
strangelet on April 28, 2009 at 6:54 AM
larison answers manzi:
and an approving one to boot.
dude, if'd known you'd make us popular, i would've used proper syntax and grammar.
"These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe that they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.” – Umberto Eco
first of all, we should not do anything that can be widely interpreted as torture. torture itself must not be defined by a set of disallowed methods, because there's a million ways to torment someone.
terrorists wanted by the US should be handed over to the FBI after capture. the FBI has decades of experience in prosecuting organized crime and excellent intel on al qaeda as well. those captured on the battlefield should be interrogated by military officers following the guidelines of the army field manual.
anyone captured with a weapon or who is a suspected combatant for any party should be accorded POW status. it's a globalized world where state borders matter less than they used to. governments matter less. we need to have modern standards.
our prisoner treatment should be exemplary. we should allow the red cross greater access and let them make public as much of their reports as possible.
oy veh:
Torture’s Rendition
by Matthew Alexander
As a former senior military interrogator, it’s deeply troubling to me after reading the recently released torture memos that we doubted our ability to win the battle of wits in the interrogation booth and resorted to torturing and abusing prisoners....
The fact that Osama bin Laden is still alive is proof that waterboarding does not work. The more important fact, however, is that our policy of torture and abuse has cost us American lives.
As a senior interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than three hundred interrogations and monitored more than one thousand. I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Our policy of torture and abuse is Al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool. These same insurgents have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of our troops in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi civilians. Torture and abuse are counterproductive in the long term and, ultimately, cost us more lives than they save.
The more important argument, however, is the moral one.
“in fault if he dies"
i'm interested in an overall policy that provides humane treatment to all. what evidence is available suggests that both the potentially illegal interrogation techniques used on high value prisoners and the abuses detailed in the red cross report are results of specific administration policies. if not through direct orders, than conveyed in ambiguous (?) characterizations like "geneva is so vague you're only in fault he dies." (which a few of them did.)
the reasoning that led to this is what i'm essentially objecting to.
at what point do you consider mexican drug lords worthy of torturing?
terrorism doesn't realistically seek to wrest power from our government. they're trying to inflict damage on us here to achieve their goals abroad.
and again, we have not proven that EITs and methods known around the world (i have to be careful of your sensibilities) as torture are in fact more successful on the long run against terrorism. methods-widely-seen-as-torture might lead to a tactical victory, but i believe it's harmful to our long-term strategic interests.
i meant that "whatever it takes" is only true in a "to the best of our abilities," not as in "we're ready to discard any of the values that make us different to vanquish the terrorists."
CK MacLeod on April 24, 2009 at 11:22 PM
when you say i'm conflating issues you're evading addressing any of the points that i brought up. if a fair assumption can be made that information gained through pain is not worth the price, the burden of proof is on the promoters of pain- or severe distress-causing methods to justify it. so far, nothing suggests that they worked when all else would have failed, or that any interrogation expert ever suggested they would work effectively au lieu other, more humane methods.
whether i'm trying to suggest that our treatment of suspected terrorists is wrong on a moral basis, or on a practical one, you refuse to give any answer that would advance the discussion.
you're killing me. look, i'd be tormented by the thought that i had to torture someone, and i'd feel guilty even if something greater than me was "saved" in the process. you attack me because i have the temerity to be intellectually honest.
there's no ambiguity here. we must have a zero tolerance policy for torture, and we don't want any overzealous interrogator or guard to assume that he or she is free to do anything to a prisoner if the gravity of the danger is sufficient.
i'm all for defining publicly what methods constitute torture. i'm not so insecure to worry about our enemies knowing where we draw the line. i'm happy with people around the world knowing what we won't do, even if our prisoners will use this to their advantage.
even if its hard to reach a consensus what counts as torture, we know the SERE instruction involves techniques from intelligence agencies we consider to have broken international law by using these very methods. we have prosecuted japanese officers for waterboarding - and we didn't take into account their culture or any other mitigating factors. since we applied the same methods (prove, if you can, that they were different), so if you want to argue that because we're using them, they're not torture anymore, the burden of proof is on you again.
unfortunately this is the only way to make you consider what we have done to those people. please read the red cross report. they don't have a reason to lie or exaggerate. have you, honestly?
let me ask you something. the one thing that struck me most in your post was how you feel threatened by us ever expanding the definition of torture. where do you get this from? is it just the conservative paranoia that they live under the left's increasing oppression? i feel a lot of your antipathy toward our arguments comes from this.
if we waterboarded everyone for DUI, we could soon reduce the number of American citizens dying a violent death each year by thousands. if we tortured every drug dealer, we could reduce drug-related violent deaths significantly as well.
if we waterboarded everyone who owns a gun, crime would stop.the war on terror doesn't meet the "whatever it takes" level, i'm sorry.
what it takes is that you need to overcome your irrational fear of the enemy. more torture doesn't mean more success. we don't have to take revenge on them in the interrogation room either. we'll win the "war" by not torturing.
i sort of feel addressed here. i'm not going to make the moral argument anymore, because it's pointless.
the problem with this debate is that it focuses too much on an unlikely, hypothetical, TV show-inspired scenario where you don't have the option to take the time and use traditional methods. i have little doubt that cheney's memos will not reveal anything comparable.
in any other situations, where the information might be extremely important, but not as urgent, the unreliability of what the subjects will say under extreme physical and mental pain - torture - simply outweigh all the associated costs. whatever we learn from the memos, there's little chance they'll conclusively prove that traditional methods would not have been effective.
the more expert or otherwise informed opinions surface, including tonight's BREAKING NEWS according to msnbc, and others, convinces me more and more that EITs were uncalled for, needlessly and irresponsibly applied, often in pursuit of false leads. soon we'll learn much more about this, and i'm afraid that what we're going to find out will be to nobody's liking.
remember the surge. what won us the tactical victory was not just more troops, but also a different approach. iraqis would be treated better, deals would be cut with insurgents and generally the goal was to protect the population. it was successful because finally we began to treat the iraqis as normal human beings - no more hadithas. american commanders began to learn arabic as they spread out to smaller outposts, living among the people, showing a human face. that's how al qaeda lost iraq. nobody mistreated anyone without reprimand under petraeus, wonder why.
whatever you think, for most of the world, and especially the arab world, the interrogation methods and conditions of the our prisoners are seen as torture. and when it's about its implications abroad, that's what matters, so there's no point debating it. and it goes against the entire mindset of the surge, and what really made it work. strategically, it's a grave mistake, it cannot be kept secret for long, and it's incredibly damaging our long-term interests. it's time that we stop giving scumbags around the world legitimate reasons to demonize us. it's time to return to being the shining city on the hill again. (i hope this doesn't remind you of dostoyevsky. he's good but in a different way.)
so let's disabuse ourselves of these sophomoric imaginary scenarios where you're lucky enough to just have somebody in your hands who happens to have the key info to stop some horrible, horrible impending event. i'll send you a self-flagellating postcard if it happens and somebody has to go all jack bauer on the dude to stop the annihilation of
manhattantopeka, KS.as for whether it's torture, CK (Sir MacLeod?), i linked several quotes about the effects of their treatment on some of the prisoners. for example, we've clearly turned padilla into an anthropomorph lettuce, "docile as piece of furniture," according to his guards, over the years. nothing he's ever said can be used at court against anyone because he suffers from extreme PTSD combined with the effects of years of solitary confinement (expert's words, not mine). to every normal person, he shows the signs of having gone through extended periods of severe mental and physical pain.
and the polls you cite - they're meaningless when it's a moral issue. in 1967, 72% of Americans opposed interracial marriage.
also, thanks for exposing my most intemperate comments, bastard ;)