Torture: As Futile as It Is Brutal

The first and starkest set of images was the incessantly replayed video of the airliners striking the twin towers in New York City on Sept. 11, and, later, the towers’ eerie, slow-motion collapse. The second set, coming 2 1/2 years later, was the digital snapshots of half a dozen American soldiers in the midst of a disconcertingly casual, almost frat-house scene of maltreatment of Iraqi detainees at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

In the intervening months, America has transitioned through the illusion of empire to the harsh reality of a nation struggling to regain its equilibrium, perhaps its self-respect. The roiling debate of the moment centers on the permissibility and legitimacy of torture as a tool of interrogation. An almost overlooked subset of the argument is whether there is any utility in the use of torture to extract information.

The debate began almost as a parlor game on the heels of Sept. 11, when emotions were running at their highest. It included input from quarters normally as widely divergent as President Bush and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The White House set the tone by dismissing the Geneva Convention as too “quaint” to apply to the new paradigm of America’s war on terrorism. That position was later modified, but barely, grudgingly and too late. Dershowitz’s contribution was his suggestion that torture might be acceptable in cases of the “ticking bomb” scenario, but with the tidy proviso that some sort of “torture warrant” first be obtained -- a pretty tortured concept in itself.

When the Pentagon launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan less than a month after Sept. 11, the American public and the media were not put off by the first images of how we handled prisoners -- hooded and shackled detainees being loaded aboard flights to Guantanamo, where cages had been hastily constructed for their detention. From the outset, the administration made it clear that the captives would have no legal rights. When stories surfaced that we were handing over selected detainees to “friendly intelligence services” in the Middle East that might be more aggressive in asking questions, there were virtually no challenges. Not even the tales, some of them pretty high on the apocryphal scale, of CIA “ghost houses” in secret locations around the globe raised the national eyebrows in those early months of the Afghanistan war, though overseas rumblings of disapproval grew. The American public was viewed by the U.S. command structure as passively approving whatever measures were needed to avenge Sept. 11 and protect the country from further outrages. It was assumed that the CIA and military intelligence had plenty of experience in interrogation and would manage their task competently.

But there was no basis for that assumption. With the exception of a handful of FBI veterans who had carried out painstaking and fruitful interrogations beginning a decade ago, no one in the U.S. government had any experience in the kind of interrogation problems we would face in Afghanistan (and later in Iraq). The last war during which large-scale interrogation occurred was Vietnam, hardly a precedent-setting experience. So America’s new cadre of interrogators -- a mixed bag of military and civilian intelligence retreads -- arrived in Afghanistan with old manuals and new ideas. America went to audibles, calling the plays from the Afghan line of scrimmage.

A team of FBI agents sent to Afghanistan at the end of 2002 to handle so-called “high-value” detainees found itself immediately at loggerheads with the U.S. military and the CIA. The agents counseled patience in the interrogations but eventually lost out to those demanding quicker results using tougher measures. The gloves were off, and the ticking-bomb scenario was codified in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Questions about interrogation techniques in Afghanistan might have been raised when U.S. networks broadcast the first video footage of the CIA interrogation of the American Talib, John Walker Lindh, recorded just before the prison uprising at Qala-i-Jangi prison in northern Afghanistan in December 2001. It was not that the treatment of Lindh was unacceptable; it wasn’t. It was that it was amateur. In the video, we see Lindh sitting cross-legged on a blanket spread on the dirt in the center of the prison compound, his CIA interrogator standing over him. Some 20 yards away, a few dozen captured Talibs, some of them still carrying grenades hidden under their clothes, are hunkered down, sullenly watching and listening. A foreign television crew, inexplicably, is filming the event, capturing even the audio of the adventure. Surely, Andy Sipowicz might have done it differently.

But shortly after this moment is captured, the Taliban detainees rush the CIA interrogator, kill him and set off the infamous Qala-i-Jangi revolt. The subject is changed irretrievably from a flawed interrogation to a cable news drama of the first American killed in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Eighteen months later, on the new front line in the war on terrorism -- Iraq -- new pressures were added to the interrogation mix. As each of the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war lost credibility, new pressures were placed on the interrogators in Iraq: Find the weapons of mass destruction and the brains behind the unexpected and growing insurgency. Added to the mix of military and CIA interrogators was a new group of civilian contractors whose chain of command is even more shadowy than that of the CIA and military spooks.

A year after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. detention centers in Iraq multiplied, and the Abu Ghraib prison filled to capacity. Then the system broke down. With no one effectively in charge of the interrogators, every detainee became a “high-value” subject, and, with the level of violence against the U.S. occupation growing, every intelligence question became a “ticking bomb” case. Though it is difficult to imagine what kind of a mind would turn a high-value detainee over to Pfc. Lynndie England for “softening up,” that seems to have been the result of the command chaos at Abu Ghraib.

The congressional hearings now underway will uncover who knew what and when in the command structures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as investigators seek to lay the responsibility -- not just by court-martialing a few reservists and guardsmen -- they need to spend time on the question of whether torture really produces high-quality information. If they examine it, they will find that, ultimately, the purpose of torture mutates into nothing more than the infliction of pain. Just to be fair, though, they might call in the key seniors from the Pentagon and CIA and ask them under oath to share any “high-value” intelligence obtained through the Abu Ghraib techniques. If the answers don’t satisfy the likes of Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) of the Senate Armed Services Committee, maybe a next step will be to find some new seniors for the Pentagon and CIA.