Rich – I’m conflicted about the torture debate, as are many people. But I think Michael Hayden put his finger on one thing that has always bothered me about the anti-torture absolutists. Here’s Hayden:
Most of the people who opposed these techniques want to be able to say, I don’t want my nation doing this — which is a purely honorable position — and they didn’t work anyway.
That back half of the sentence isn’t true. The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work.
The president’s speech, President Bush, in September of ‘06 outlined how one detainee led to another led to another with the use of these techniques.
The honorable position you have to take, if you want us not to do this — and believe me, if the nation says don’t do it, the CIA won’t do it — the honorable position has to be even though these techniques worked, I don’t want you to do that. That takes courage. The other sentence doesn’t.
Hayden and former AG Michael Mukasey laid out this point in more detail here.
I’ve always thought the “it doesn’t work” argument was a red herring. No one has ever advocated harsh interrogations methods — whether they rise to the level of torture or not – that don’t work. No one, to my knowledge, has advocated such measures as a punishment or even to extract confessions. Rather, it has been to glean intelligence. And, with the exception of that Washington Post story that thudded a few weeks ago (see Marc Thiessen here and here), it seems the consensus is that these methods, excessive or not, yielded tangible results.
Admittedly, this has sometimes been confused by the atrocity that was Abu Ghraib, which had nothing to do with CIA interrogations.
I think Hayden has it exactly right when he says that opposition to such treatment is entirely honorable. But hiding behind the “it doesn’t work” canard only distracts from the relevant moral question and burnishes the already high gloss of sanctimony coming from certain quarters.
Update: From a reader:
Mr. Goldberg,
Sorry to quibble, but what a few of our troops did at Abu Ghraib wasn’t an “atrocity.” A disgrace, a fiasco, a public-relations disaster, yes to all those, but not an atrocity. Abu Ghraib under Saddam — that was an atrocity.
Fair point. I was using atrocity in a more colloquial sense.