The Occasional Dissident

“If even a stopped clock is right twice a day, this could be Cheney’s time.”
- Richard Cohen (“What if Cheney’s Right?” Washington Post, May 12, 2009)

Dear citizens, let us engage in a thought experiment.  And, I beg you to allow it only to be a thought experiment, for the consequences of engaging in this in real life, with real people, can only be bad.  We prefer bad things do not happen.  All we wish to do is to determine whether torture is effective.

Imagine you live in a pleasant and safe home.  You have families living to your left and to your right.  All of you are good friends.  Invite your friends over for this experiment.  During your discussions, you have heard members of one family argue that torture works and is therefore justified, especially in the confusion and fear that followed the attacks by al Qaeda in 2001.  You ask this family to stand on one side of your living room and to play the role of torturers and their supporters in this test.  The other family is less sure that any potential result from torture would justify violating the law and their morals and their humanity.  Place them on the opposite side of the room, and take one of them, perhaps a male teenager, and place him in a chair in the center of the room.

Hand that young man a piece of paper and ask him to fold it up and place it in his pocket after he has read the instructions it contains.  Those instructions read as follows.

You are playing the role of an Islamic terrorist.  You have been captured by the U.S. government.  (Your “captors” will not be allowed to hurt or even touch you in this exercise.)  You and your group are planning to attack the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., with hand grenades.  The attack can and almost certainly will go forward without you.  You must not reveal your information or cooperate in any way with your interrogators for at least five minutes to allow your comrades to get into position for the attack.  Admit your information freely after that.  It will be too late to stop them at that point.  Your next challenge is to end the questioning by your captors within fifteen minutes.  Do whatever is required to get them to stop.

Pick the three largest males of the other family and advise them that they will be playing the role of torturers.  They will NOT be allowed to come within one foot of the “terrorist” and will NOT be permitted to touch him under any circumstance.  Brief the three, out of earshot of their target, that intelligence has confirmed an attack in Washington, D.C., is almost certain to happen that day.  They have only fifteen minutes to determine from their captive where the attack will take place.  Reports have come in stating that the attack is likely to occur around the White House, the Capitol, or at the base of the Washington Monument.  Alert them that the terrorist in their captivity has refused to cooperate and is likely to lie about the location of the attack to divert our efforts so that his co-conspirators are more likely to succeed.  Start the clock.

Dear citizens, we can imagine the scene.  Three males are aggressively questioning and cajoling and perhaps even screaming at a lone, younger and smaller male.  We can see their frustration grow over the first five minutes while he refuses to answer their questions.  Perhaps he smiles at them.  The clock is ticking and lives hang in the balance.  Finally, the terrorist opens his mouth and speaks.  LIES!!  He is lying!  How clever!  The Islamic militant is presenting the seemingly likely target of a Jewish memorial to lead the interrogators away from the real targets—symbols of American power and heritage.  They would be foolish to accept this canard.  It took him five minutes to concoct this fable.  And, time is slipping away!  People are going to die!  Chasing false leads only means certain bloodshed!  Press harder!

We know you are lying.  Where is the attack going to take place?  Tell us now!  We know you want to attack an American symbol.  Which one?  Are you trying to kill the President?!

The questioning will continue, with increasing volume and becoming more frantic with each passing minute, until the “terrorist” hits upon an answer that satisfies the interrogators.  The questioners, our “torturers,” will not relent until they get what they are willing to accept as the truth.  Once their subject admits “White House” or “Capitol” or “Washington Monument,” they will stop.  They have succeeded.  Congratulate them for getting the vitally important answer within that critical fifteen-minute period and lead the applause of their family members.

Send the “terrorist” back to his family.  After they have had a chance to welcome him and console him for the tough experience he has just endured, ask him for the piece of paper.  Read it aloud to both families.

Again, do this only as a thought experiment as the family of the “terrorist” in a real exercise may harbor anger toward the other family for the treatment delivered to their son and brother, despite the event’s fictitious nature.  Some are apt to feel the questioning was overly aggressive.  The haranguing, shouting, insulting—even this families can perceive as torture.  And, they can desire revenge.  Please consider this experiment in thought alone…and in detail.

Dear citizens, wittingly or otherwise, Richard Cohen has provided the precise answer to the dominating question of this moment: Does torture work?  Sure.  No.  If the torturer believes it is two o’clock (to borrow from Cohen), and the torturer’s victim admits it is two o’clock, and it is, in truth, two o’clock, and the answer arrives in time to allow the torturer’s side to act effectively, then torture has worked.  If, however, the torturer believes it is two o’clock, but the torturer’s victim resolutely insists it is three-fifteen, and it is, in truth, two o’clock, torture has failed.  If the torturer believes it is two o’clock, and the torturer’s victim admits it is two o’clock, but in truth, it is three-fifteen, then torture again fails.  Tragically, if the torturer believes it is two o’clock, but his victim insists it is three-fifteen, and it is, in truth, three-fifteen, torture has failed despite itself.  Torture can work only when the torturer accurately suspects the truth and his victim admits the truth in time for him to act.  All other combinations of torturer belief, victim admission, and actual truth lead to failure.  Torture fails because the bias of the torturer, a belief in the information available through torture, taints the process like a stopped clock insisting the correct hour is two o’clock.

Dear citizens, compressed time—the fabled and never extant “24” scenario—increases the likelihood of complete failure.  Recall the scenario.  We KNOW an attack is coming, and we have in our hands a person who KNOWS where or when or both.  This is, of course, our thought experiment.  Admittedly, our test is contrived, but so is the “24” scenario.  It is the stuff of Hollywood and only Hollywood.  So, what of the real world?  What of the claims by Dick Cheney and others that torture “worked”?  Cheney’s claim is unproven, and Senator Russ Feingold asserted today (May 13th) that he has seen the memoranda the former Vice President vows will prove torture worked.  Senator Feingold stated that nothing he has seen, including those documents, makes the case for torture’s effectiveness. Can we not conceive of a real-world moment when we must torture rather than lawfully interrogate to save lives?  No.  Torture cannot be trusted to save lives.

Whom would we torture between the alert on August 7, 2001, warning us that al Qaeda wanted to attack the United States, and the actual attack on September 11th?  No one.  We simply did not have enough information gathered and evaluated to lead even to the aggressive lawful questioning of Zacharias Moussaoui.  The warning was so lacking in specifics, to hear the Bush administration members tell it, that they did nothing in response.  Clearly, we had in place the administration and the operators willing and able to torture.  A year later, in August 2002, they were engaged in subjecting Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein) to eighty-three rides on the water board.  In March 2003, Khalid Shaik Mohammed was started on his one hundred and eighty-three turns at drowning.  To what end?  The torturers and their advocates and their facilitators in the Bush administration and elsewhere cannot claim their “enhanced interrogation techniques” stopped either the October 2002 or the October 2005 bombings in Bali, Indonesia.  “Walling” their victims did not allow them to prevent the November 2003 attack in Istanbul, Turkey.  Sleep deprivation and stress positions failed to halt the March 11, 2004, train bombing in Madrid, Spain.  None of the unlawful torture techniques, waterboarding included, were effective in keeping London safe on July 7, 2005.  We must ask, if the “24” scenario did not occur in any of these instances, if torture failed so completely to prevent the loss of lives again and again, what value does it have?  It has none.

Some will argue that this test and these examples prove that torture is unreliable, that it offers no guarantees.  But, that, too, is wrong.

Torture has many victims.  There are the obvious victims.  We have seen their pictures from Abu Ghraib.  We have seen John McCain returning from North Vietnam.  Countless other images show these victims beaten and bent, broken and dead.  Other victims, however, may look wholly unaffected.  Go look in a mirror.  You are fine, are you not?  Yet, you and I and our country are all diminished by the depraved acts committed by the last administration.  We, too, are torturers.  Luckily for us, our effects are secondary.  We are not directly deprived of our humanity as some have been.  Imagine the person who, in our name, for America and for freedom, twisted a towel around the neck of a detainee in order to slam his head and body against a wall.  Imagine the persons who designed and built a plastic collar to make “walling” more effective.  Imagine the people who delivered incessant “insult slaps” and the people who held down a human being and filled his throat with water.  I am not expressing sympathy with the “terrorists” as some may imagine.  My sympathy is with the Americans who have lost some of the irreplaceable substance that makes us human.  My sympathy is with those who have been severely diminished, made brutish by following the unlawful orders of their superiors, the monsters who advocated and falsely justified this immoral and unlawful regime.  I am sympathetic because, in truth, a guarantee does come with torture.  The dehumanization, the defamation of torture’s perpetrators, its promoters, its permissives—their condemnation—not their salvation—this, and this alone, is what torture guarantees.

- Alan Howe, May 2009