By: Ryan Prior
The recent U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan has reignited the furor over the Bush Administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
President Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey penned a recent Wall Street Journal editorial defending the use of waterboarding and other techniques used on detainees. The heart of his argument lies in his statement that Khalid Sheik Mohammed “broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” This vital piece of evidence set in place a series of events that led to bin Laden’s death last month. It is occurrences like this, Mukasey argues, that form the utilitarian justification for torture.
On the other hand, Senator John McCain of Arizona gave a lengthy speech on the Senate floor and penned an opposing article in the Washington Post, disputing Mukasey’s claims and arguing for the place of morality in our interrogation policy. In his op-ed, McCain attempts to set the record straight, citing information he personally received from CIA director Leon Panetta. McCain writes, “the trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.”
Mukasey then fired back that McCain was wrong on a number of facts, and the two have continued a back and forth debate. The precise details of when, how, and by whom the name of bin Laden’s courier was discovered start becoming mind-numbing, as various Bush apologists and critics have their own reason for arguing for and against enhanced interrogation. Without factual testimony from actual interrogators present at Guantanamo Bay, it’s hard to know exactly what happened. The debate reflects its participants’ philosophies more than its facts.
And on philosophy is where I think McCain’s most apt perception is articulated, when he writes, “ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”
The debate is, in essence, tactics vs. strategy. We can choose Mukasey’s harsh tactics or McCain’s lofty morality. Do we choose to defend ourselves or to be ourselves? In all fairness, both have a point. If you get yourself in a mess, you have to defend yourself. The prudent question is, then, how do we avoid messes, and what does our torture policy have to do with it?
My GPR colleague, Sami Jarjour, writes this week about the history of American policy in the Middle East not living up to classical American ideals. The central problem he writes about, our support for Middle Eastern dictatorships guilty of human rights violations, resembles the same problem bin Laden gave to CNN’s Peter Bergen in 1998 when he declared war on the U.S. Angry about American “occupation” of holy Muslim lands, bin Laden had famously issued a fatwa, or judgment, instructing Muslims to kill Americans.
McCain is right when he argues for a more moral interrogation policy, but he completely misses the larger point on why. Sure it has something to do with gaining better treatment for our POWs in future wars, as he argued on the Senate floor, but it has a lot more to do with preventing these wars from happening in the first place.
Matthew Alexander, the lead military interrogator in Iraq, and the man responsible for developing the intelligence that would eventually bring down the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, summed up this argument succinctly in a TV interview with Jon Stewart, “Torture does not save us lives. It costs us lives.” He estimated that a chilling 90% of those he interrogated were fighters who had come to Iraq because they were angry about American human rights violations like torture. He said that when previously tortured prisoners were brought to him for interrogation, establishing report was increasingly difficult, and stated, “the same values that make you a good interrogator are the same values that make you a good American.”
In a more total moral economy, we should halt at those who would pride ourselves on preventing attacks on American soil, on preventing another 9/11. It misses the larger point. Bin Laden’s fatwa states, “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” The goal is not to hurt America, it is to hurt Americans and it can happen in any country in any fashion. And that is a crucial point.
If we are to believe Alexander’s point that an overwhelming majority of combatants came to Iraq outraged about human rights violations like torture, then the inevitable conclusion is that the very tool many advocates believe keeps Americans safe is the very same tool that endangers Americans. Torture therefore begets the reason for more torture.
