Conservatives on torture

[mmcirvin]

Via Yglesias: Vladimir Bukovsky on what torture does, not just to its victims, but to the people who do it and to their intelligence organizations, using the example of the Soviet experience: in short, it drives out good investigators, breaks the rest and turns the whole place into a pointless "playground for sadists", regardless of the logical appeal of ticking-bomb hypotheticals.

Via The Poor Man: John Cole on the uselessness of the "moderate" Republican compromise bill. Let's just say the White House didn't particularly cave, and this might be worth remembering the next time John McCain does his maverick-voice-of-conscience act.

Both of these guys are, I am given to understand, fairly politically conservative and would probably agree with me on little else. I think we all look forward to the day when I can oppose them again.

Comments

Stalin vs us

[indyresolve.livejournal.com]

John Cole is right that the bill doesn't change much, especially since outlawing certain techniques by name and description only invites the invention of others. But Bukovsky's article is most of a history lesson than a meaningful warning to our society, and he is dead wrong in his guess about what is happening in the ranks of US intelligence.

Without getting into a long discussion on the merits and drawbacks of interrogation techniques that run a spectrum of coerciveness in situations of highly resistent subjects with critical and time-sensitive information, it's useful to point out that, unlike Stalin, we have almost no interest in extracting confessions - and it is this interest that generates most of the tragic effects that Bukovsky describes so well in his article.

At any rate the assertion that what happened in the Soviet intelligence system and society under Stalin is applicable in our case is something I do not believe is accurate at all, and the argument that "if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already." is absurd rhetoric. Well, not absurd if you believe that we are engaged with the terrorists in a war about the nature of our interrogation methods, where we want them to be mild, and they want them severe, and - hooray, victory, allah akhbar, the terrorists defeated us and have won the right to harsh interrogation should they be captured. Nonsense.

In addition, US intelligence officers (outside the FBI anyway) are significantly less concerned with conducting prosecutions of subjects (which confessions assist, even if false), and just throwing a lot of people in jail, then they are with obtaining verifiable and actionable information directly related to protecting national security.

Often, it's actually helpful when questioning a subject to purposefully avoid touching on any personally incriminating information to persuade him to give up his conspirators in his hope that his captors dont have reason to believe he is personally guilty of anything substantial. This is why when an interrogation process hits the point of marginal returns and custody is transferred that intelligence officers give law enforcement officers practically nothing of value for a prosecution (to much frustration and infighting) even when it's clear that the subject was personally involved.

Look, I'm no proponent of torture, even in those "24/Jack Bauer" situations that are so popular in debate of it, and I abhor brutality even when some extreme circumstance makes it seem necessary. But making false assertions about the reality of how our system works and crazy comparisons to 1984 and life under Stalin just aren't very helpful, IMHO, to the discussion.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

unlike Stalin, we have almost no interest in extracting confessions - and it is this interest that generates most of the tragic effects that Bukovsky describes so well in his article.


The stated aims of US intelligence interrogators are as you describe, but I am by no means convinced that this precludes the consequences Bukovsky describes; I think the progression from actionable intelligence to pure sadism is already operating in our armed services.

Back when Alberto Gonzales was up for confirmation for Attorney General, an item of contention was the 2002 "torture memo" he wrote at the Office of Legal Counsel, supporting the use of these techniques by the CIA overseas (an early inkling of the CIA's black prison network, before the big Dana Priest expose). Marty Lederman made the point (http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/01/understanding-olc-torture-memos-coda.html") that although the memo was technically limited to the legality of CIA overseas operations and did not authorize the Army to torture anyone, it appeared within an institutional culture of actively seeking out legal ways to abuse prisoners rather than trying to prevent it from happening, something that probably contributed to abuses at Guantanamo.

At the completely degenerate end, there's Abu Ghraib and the soldiers in Afghanistan who would routinely "fuck a PUC (http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905/2.htm)" (beat up a prisoner) just to blow off steam. No doubt this kind of thing goes back to the invention of warfare, and there was an effort to imply that these abuses were the independent actions of low-level bad apples; but it's a natural consequence of the same culture, the idea that September 11th means we have to get tough now so anything goes, whether or not it makes any sense at all.

Bukovsky is basically making a slippery-slope argument, and to just assert a slippery slope with no evidence of a mechanism is a fallacy. But I think the mechanism is already operating.


The "battle is already lost" rhetoric, to my mind, has nothing to do with terrorists winning but is talking about existential threats to the United States. Unlike the Axis during World War II, unlike the USSR during the Cold War, it is extremely unlikely that Islamist terrorism presents a direct existential threat to the US; terrorists armed with nukes or plague germs could do a lot of damage, perhaps demolish entire cities, but not actually destroy or conquer the country. The existential threat would come in the form of the American response, what the US would do to itself as the result of a large attack. In that light, responses that cut at the heart of American constitutional government are a grave concern.

Slippery slope?

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

I think Milgram and Zimbardo demonstrated pretty well that it's not so much slippery as precipitous. And how closely do we really want to test where that edge is?

Re: Slippery slope?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The discussion reminds me a bit of rabbinic law, how a lot of, for instance, the kosher dietary restrictions are "fences" put in place to keep the really important laws from being broken. The basic constitutional rights that can seem silly to cops, prosecutors and interrogators, that make you jump through hoops even when you're obviously taking down a bad guy, are the fences around completely apeshit abuses. A lot of what's going on now is that people are going around saying, "well, maybe it'd be OK to do this particular thing if it's really really necessary," and another fence goes down.

Habeas corpus is pretty much the prime example of a fence, really. I think it's a pity that the Constitution even mentioned the possibility of lifting it in cases of war or insurrection, because of what we're seeing now, the ability to define an endless war situation and use that to dance around habeas.