I haven’t posted at all regarding the torture memos because I’ve been far too angry to write much more than expletives or “seriously?” But here is something poorly reasoned from the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit*: that we need to be able to torture because one day, we might catch Osama, he might tell us that he knows where all of the bombs are, and Obama won’t let us beat him up in order to save American lives….
A response,one that contains no ventings of spleens, after the jump.
The best response to the ticking time bomb scenario ever was penned by Jim Henley. It’s so interesting that the only thing standing between us and information in this scenarios is inflicting pain, and not, say, providing sexual perversion for the amusement of the terrorist who will then in his gratitude tell us all we need to know. Why? Because imagining oneself as the gritty tough hero is fun.
So the best I can do is try for the second-best response. I want to undermine the entire ticking time bomb scenario, because it strikes me as transparently bogus, yet often it is treated seriously even by its opponents. But let’s think it through. Too often, the ticking time bomb scenario looks like a movie script with the important bits blacked out by studio executives worried about spoilers.
INT. TERRORIST HEADQUARTER. TERRORISTS work busily over explosives and fuses. We see, over ALI’S shoulder, a small writing desk with blueprints. There is writing on the blueprint in Arabic. At the top of the blueprint it says [REDACTED.]
ALI
Allahuakbar. I am going for a latte.
EXT. TERRORIST HEADQUARTERS. ALI heads down the street to a STARBUCKS. HERO AGENT manfully captures ALI. FBI AGENTS bust into TERRORIST HEADQUARTERS. One TERRORIST LACKEY escapes, carrying the blueprints.
Thus, when we imagine the ticking time bomb scenario, we imagine we are the HERO AGENT. The HERO AGENT wasn’t in the audience, and the HERO AGENT didn’t see the name over the shoulder. But the HERO AGENT is controlled by the writers, and so he is automatically in the right epistemic position to know exactly what questions to ask. Note, also, that the HERO AGENT is always interrogating TERRORISTS immediately after their capture, before their organization has figured out they have been compromised, and before their information is too old to be useful. The head of the organization always has minute details about on-the-ground operations.**
The real world isn’t a movie script with bits blacked out. Let’s look at the pre-9/11 memo given to President Bush. Note how vague the information is. There are some names. There is talk of attacking the U.S., and the World Trade Center There is talk of using hijacked planes…. to use as leverage in securing the release of political prisoners.
HERO AGENT wouldn’t even be in a position to know that the real plan was to fly planes into buildings. He’d be busy breaking fingers to figure out where the truck bomb in the WTC was going to be placed. *** The ticking time-bomb scenario doesn’t match anything like we’d see in real life. One might as well wonder what CIA’s plans for interrogation are if little gray men from Reticulum show up in search of livers. That should be the response to any time-bomb scenario. But what about the aliens! What will Obama do then?
One suspects that if these clowns wrote murder mysteries, they’d be solved by finding pieces of paper saying whodunit.
The main reason we shouldn’t torture is a moral one. But a good secondary reason is that gathering intelligence isn’t about finding the piece of paper that says whodunit or whogonnadoit.**** It’s about sifting through lots of information, detecting patterns, and listening to as much as possible because this hasn’t been scripted, and there are many possible endings.***** Gaining intelligence is not a case of getting answers to pre-determined questions any more than solving a crime means getting the witness to confess on the stand. It’s figuring out what questions are relevant.
But he’s CIA, Dana. You’re a frowsy academic. Indeed! A frowsy academic capable of reading… the Army Field Manual on Interrogation:
The objective of any interrogation is to obtain the maximun amount of usable information possible in the least amount of time. Each interrogation has a definite purpose: to obtain information to satisfy the assigned requirement which contributes to the successful accomplishment of the supported unit’s mission. The interrogator must keep this purpose firmly in mind as he obtains the information. The objective may be specific, establishing the exact location of a minefield, or it may be general, seeking order of battle (OB) information about a specific echelon of the enemy forces. In either case, the interrogator uses the objective as a basis for planning and conducting the interrogation. He should not concentrate on the objective to the extent that he overlooks or fails to recognize and exploit other valuable information extracted from the source. For example, during an interrogation, he learns of an unknown, highly destructive weapon. Although this information may not be in line with his specific objective, he develops this lead to obtain all possible information concerning this weapon. It is then obvious that the objective of an interrogation can be changed as necessary or desired.
All the pieces matter. Because this isn’t a script.
* You know, were I the guy whose unit failed to capture a seventy-year-old, two meter tall man on kidney dialysis, I wouldn’t be mentioning that as proof of my skills in intelligence gathering.
** It’s movie logic again, the same one that says if you want to know the nuclear codes, kidnap the President. The response to CIA clown’s scenario: bin Laden probably isn’t that great an asset because he’s not going to know the details. And honestly. Waterboarding on KSM starts after he has already been in custody for several months. Is this clown seriously claiming that after the first 124 waterboardings hadn’t worked, that their best hope was another 59 waterboarding sessions? Seriously? No wonder this guy is angry.
*** To put it another way, Jack Bauer has enough information to prevent the attacks before he tortures anyone. And if Jack is asking the wrong question, he’ll get useless information and spend the remaining ten minutes of the hour chasing down a bad lead. Doot. Dit. Doot. Dit.
**** I can’t find the clip from the Wire where Kima’s new homicide colleagues play a practical joke on her by inserting “TIGER DONE IT” into the fist of a corpse at her first investigation. But you get the idea.
***** Curiously, one of the better interrogation techniques (according to a military historian I know) is to let prisoners talk to each other. The human mind is reasonably good at resisting direct questions, but much worse at resisting chit-chat when faced with a reasonably pleasant situation. It’s not that the prisoners will slip and say “the bomb is in the federal building” but that they’ll ask where their compatriots are from, whether they know so-and-so, or whether they were at the city during the last American attack. And the shrewd intelligence operative will listen, and learn that the organization is recruiting from X, and that so-and-so is dead, and that the latest attack plan was succeeding or failing….
The Edge of the American West 
56 comments
May 3, 2009 at 10:00 am
Chris J
The longer this torture “debate” goes on the more I realize it’s impervious to reason. It’s morphed into a theological issue, really. In many ways it always was one.
May 3, 2009 at 10:00 am
dana
That is almost certainly true.
May 3, 2009 at 10:38 am
drip
If torture worked, it would be legal. As it is, we ask people to tell the truth upon pain of eternal damnation and/or incarceration, which is as good as we have been able to come up with. All the rest boils down to sadism (including some of the incarceration.)
I’m with you, though. I usually get too furious when I think about torture to follow my thoughts to their conclusion. When I do, it usually ends with the thought that the debate is about whether the torturer views the potential target as human. If the answer is no, torture is OK. As with so many such issues, “who decides?” is the real question. Torture is really bad, I’m against it and if you’re for it, you better have a new reason because the old ones are all false. I’ll listen, but at some point I may think you as less than human and then, well, then the gloves may come off.
May 3, 2009 at 10:55 am
Ben Alpers
If torture worked, it would be legal.
If torture didn’t work, it wouldn’t be used by so many state and non-state actors.
Of course torture doesn’t work as a way of extracting true information. All the above objections to the ticking-time-bomb fantasy are 100% on the mark.
However, torture can work as part of a strategy of terrorism or oppression. It can also work as a method of extracting false confessions.
I think it’s an interesting question what the Bush/Cheney administration actually hoped to gain from their torture regime. Were they really utterly unaware of torture’s non-usefulness in actual intelligence gathering, or did they have something else in mind from the start?
May 3, 2009 at 11:28 am
Chris J
I agree with Ben — the torturers were clearly seeking a statement, any sort would do, that Iraq and 9/11 were connected. As I think about it, it’s astonishing they couldn’t extract even that. Spanish Inquisitors would be contemptuous of their work.
May 3, 2009 at 11:33 am
ekogan
Is it true that the Iraq/Afghanistan war has seen the minimal violations of human rights by the US of any war in which it participated?
Let’s see:
War on Terror – Abu Ghraib/torture
Vietnam – My Lai massacre, rapes
Korea – US-sanctoned Bolo massacres
WWII – nuclear bombing, fire bombing of cities, interment of Nisei
US-Spanish war – Philippine’s concentration camps
Civil War – suspension of habeas corpus
Seems like the current atrocities are a molehill compared to historical ones.
May 3, 2009 at 11:45 am
Gareth Rees
An incident from the Algerian War deserves to be better known. Alistair Horne describes it in his history A Savage War of Peace:
Teitgen’s reluctance to order his suspect tortured, despite the ticking bomb, might have had something to do with his experiences at Dachau in World War II, where he had been tortured by the Gestapo.
(Unfortunately few French policemen and soldiers had Teitgen’s courage: torture and murder were endemic during the Algerian War.)
May 3, 2009 at 11:49 am
dana
Is it true that the Iraq/Afghanistan war has seen the minimal violations of human rights by the US of any war in which it participated?
Hard to say, because I’m honestly not sure how to do the math. (How many waterboardings are equal to My Lai?)
May 3, 2009 at 12:13 pm
drip
Ben Alpers is, of course, correct, so permit me an edit. If torture worked to produce truth it would be legal. Isn’t that always the context which torture defenders, like the failed CIA analyst Schuerer, imply? It’s certainly the context in which most of the debates in this country take place. I’ve yet to see a torturer speak of it as a useful method of terrorizing a population. If they would state that as a reason, we could begin to find a new level of contempt.
May 3, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Matt McKeon
The villagers at My Lai weren’t tortured, they were murdered.
Comparing atrocities seems useless. More soldiers died at Antietam in one day then in the entire Iraqi occupation. Does that make the occupation a good idea? The Civil War a bad idea?
There is something about torture, about inflicting pain on someone in your power, what is so corrupting. The whole structure of memos and lawyers and procedures, the articulate defenders in suits and makeup on televsion. It makes us just another group of mechanized savages.
Recently anyway, regimes that torture are as diverse as France in Algeria, the Soviet Union, the Germans…they all have one thing in common: they were losing.
I can’t think about this very rationally.
May 3, 2009 at 12:58 pm
AWC
I don’t think there’s much question as to what Bush-Cheney wanted to accomplish: to demonstrate American machismo and thus cow the non-whites, who according to the administration’s racial theories, only respect the use of force.
This is why the policy remains so popular among Republicans in the South; it is consistent with the reasoning behind lynching, though lacking the public element.
Anyway, the policy is not just immoral. It’s imbecilic because it assumes global politics is a sausage measuring competition and absurdly imagines that Muslims only respond to power.
May 3, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Malaclypse
War on Terror – Abu Ghraib/torture
And white phosphorous, and “shock and awe.”
Beyond that, what Matt said about comparing atrocities.
May 3, 2009 at 2:21 pm
JPool
Matt McKeon, I think you’re on the right track. Losing isn’t the necessary condition, but being terrified/freaked out certainly seems to be. That’s what seems to knit together the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya and the US after 9/11 (torture as part of a totalitarian regime is, I think, a different but related phenomenon).
There are the intellectual rationalizations of torture (which I think dana’s piece does a nice job of responding to), there are the policy decisions to embrace torture as a practice, and then there are the people left to carry out those practices. I wonder if we’ll ever get an accurate history of the decisions that went into the festival of waterboarding that the CIA pursued with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I don’t think they were trying to send a message. You don’t have to go to the extremes that they went to for that. I think Chenney, et al. decided that torture was worth embracing both for the symbolic politics (“We’ll do anything, up to and including anything”) and because they really believed that it might work. That doesn’t explain, however, why the CIA decided to step in with these torture tactics in situations where they were unnecessary (suspects were already cooperating) or with a true believer like KSM, who seems to want to confess to anything you’d care to tell him about.
May 3, 2009 at 2:27 pm
JPool
I forgot to add that what the repeated repeated waterboarding of KSM and others reminds me of the most is that line in Discipline and Punish where Foucault notes the danger with physical punishment of matching the symbolic power of the state against the physical body of the accused. Apparently it’s actually pretty difficult for horses to pull a body apart.
May 3, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Anderson
As I think about it, it’s astonishing they couldn’t extract even that.
Darius Rejali says that torture — old-school, rack-&-thumbscrews torture — typically fails to obtain even a false confession most of the time, looking at old-school records from the French ancien regime.
If this is true, I suspect it’s because of the powerful antipathy created by torture. The victim hates the torturer, the victim wants to hurt the torturer, the victim is powerless *except* for one thing — the ability not to tell the torturer what he wants to hear.
That may be more common than we realize. I’m reminded of the native Americans in Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” spitting abuse at their tormentors.
May 3, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Anderson
Apparently it’s actually pretty difficult for horses to pull a body apart.
Right. The kind of detail that shows how deeply torture is based in the torturer’s fantasies, not in what’s “effective” — even when the effect desired is as gross and unsophisticated as in the case of … Damiens, right?
May 3, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Kieran
This post reminds me of how long this issue has been around. It’s crazy.
May 3, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Walt Pohl
I think that first link was the inspiration for Jim Henley’s crushing evaluation of Volokh:
“The further you get from standard Republican issues like guns and university speech codes, the more likely he is to arrive, with exquisite regret, at the conclusion that the State, particularly when helmed by George W. Bush, must have its way.”
May 3, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Michael Turner
May 4, 2009 at 12:29 am
Michael Turner
I like how my comment above looks at the moment. I’ve never seen a blank one before. I could stare at it for hours. It’s kind of like zazen. But I did say something there, so if anyone else can see it, I’ll assume I’ve got browser trouble.
May 4, 2009 at 3:36 am
Martin G.
It’s blissfully, selflessly blank, I’m afraid. Mu.
Dana: what you said.
Also, what Ben said, and Walt said. And Kieran. And, y’know, what The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment said.
May 4, 2009 at 4:54 am
Michael Turner
I don’t think there’s much question as to what Bush-Cheney wanted to accomplish: to demonstrate American machismo and thus cow the non-whites, who according to the administration’s racial theories, only respect the use of force.
You lost me after “and thus”, AWC.
You were doing OK up to that point, and it’s a point that matters strategically: it’s said that bin Laden ditched his finely wrought 20-point theological manifestos, and went to punchier rhetoric calculated to bring out the cowboy in America, on the urging of al Zawahri. If the goal was to goad a cowboy-led U.S. into creating more jihadi training zones, more war scenes with propaganda value, it worked pretty well.
But “cowing the non-whites”? Well, to more civilly paraphrase something Lenny Bruce once said, let me introduce you to some of the relevant, uh, non-whites in Bush’s administration: Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Alberto Gonzales. There’s also the lesser-known Zalmay Khalilzad, probably more important in this line-up than Powell in most ways. He’s a Persion-speaking, muslim, ethnic Pashtun Afghanistani who led the Bush-Cheney transition team at DoD in 2001, and who was never far from the center of things after 9-11, eventually going on to serve as ambassador to Iraq, and instrumental in negotiations in Kuwait (ca. 2005) with representatives of almost every major Sunni insurgent group in Iraq to figure out how they might be enfranchised, and finally turned against Zarqawi et al.
Yes, if you want to keep race the central ideological touchstone of all evil today, those Bush people are all what Malcom X called (in an admittedly brilliant trope) “House Negroes.” But please, there’s a limit, isn’t there? As I think Malcom X himself would probably be saying today.
May 4, 2009 at 7:19 am
BP in MN
Michael, good point. I think AWC’s main argument is not wrong, but could be better defined as cowing the Other, where Other refers to just about any society that diverges from Western norms, or rather refuses to adopt at least a Western veneer. Note the difference with, say, Mexico; AWC’s characterization of Bush policy as opposed to non-whites might be applied to other elements of the Republican party, but certainly not to the Bush administration. In practice I think the Other meant Islamic states, Russia, and China, and arguably North korea though I think that’s more of a special case.
These are the countries where the Bush administration seemed particularly unable to make any effort to comprehend the notion that their counterparts had any rational interests or points of view that would lead them to oppose American interests. And in all of these cases, we have examples of either the administration or influential elements within the broader foreign policy structure calling for the United States to use force to send a message: the downed U.S. spy plane, the Georgian crisis, and of course Iraq and Iran.
May 4, 2009 at 8:28 am
delagar
BP, being that 9/10th of my family is still hardcore Republican, I’d like to agree with you that those on the Right aren’t racist as a central tenent of their being.
I get arguments from those on the Right constantly that this isn’t so. Everyone of them will point to Condi and Colin and the six other PoC in Bush’s admin. as evidence, just like they will point to Condi and Ann Coulter as evidence that the Right isn’t sexist.
Well, sorry. Women can be corrupted by the patriarchy. Gays can be homophobes. PoC can imbibe the prejudices of the hegemonic culture. Having spent the past six years reading Right-Wing blogs, and my entire life among the Red States, I have to disagree with your central assessment. They may claim it’s guns, and state’s rights, and God, and tax issues, and what is it this time? The Right to Torture Bad Guys To Save Innocent Babies? I don’t care what they claim. It is always about hate, and they always hate the Other.
May 4, 2009 at 8:37 am
jazzbumpa
I don’t think the (Bush) Cheney admin can reasonably be charged with racism. They can be charged with class-based elitism, where class is defined by wealth and/or specific connections to friends and family, and a blatant disregard for any individual, group or nation not on their good-guy list.
Any skin color is welcome. Just bring lots of cash, or a signed affidavit from Alberto that says you are “one of us.”
May 4, 2009 at 9:55 am
Michael Turner
The Other. Yeah, that’s closer. (Please note, I didn’t mean, by my mentions of minority representation in the Bush administration, that the GOP doesn’t still work its old race equations when convenient.)
I ended up watching a whole lot more Malcom X than just what I linked above, and I noticed an evolution in his post-Hajj thinking that hadn’t struck me before: he thought that moderate, modernizing Islam could make America a better place. And the more you notice him talking about that, the more you think, if he’d survived, he might eventually have been a real force in making Islam a mainstream religion in America. And that would have been good–not because Islam is better than any other religion, but just because it’s different, and America needs to be less scared of that. What if there’d been a dozen or more muslims in the House, and maybe even one in the Senate, on September 11th 2001? The whole tone of many relevant debates might have been different enough to steer the nation toward better choices and better outcomes.
May 4, 2009 at 11:48 am
AWC
I didn’t actually say that Bush and Cheney hate all people of color. As you say, this is demonstrably false. I’d even admit there’s a bit of egalitarian thinking in their policies, as there was in TR’s policy in the Philippines. At his best, Bush thinks the “wogs” can be educated.
My point was that the torture policy is premised upon an understanding of the Muslim worldview that is racist in nature and derived from Imperialism and the pre-Civil Rights South. And I said that this makes the policy more popular among white southerners today. Which it is.
Finally, I’m not sure that you actually explain why the carrot/stick, good-black/bad-black, house/field dichotomy is irrelevant. Clearly, that is the very essence of our simplistic policy under Bush. I have no desire to make race the touchstone of all evil, but I know it when I see it.
May 4, 2009 at 11:56 am
AWC
Also, I’m not sure what “the other” adds to a discussion of _torture_ (the subject of the thread). I am not aware that the Bush administration has tortured any white non-Muslims. So I’m willing to grant that this is about religion, as much as race, though I think the latter informs the matter.
May 4, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Erik Lund
“But “cowing the non-whites”? Well, to more civilly paraphrase something Lenny Bruce once said, let me introduce you to some of the relevant, uh, non-whites in Bush’s administration: Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and Alberto Gonzales. ”
I’m going to defend AWC in a way that he perhaps doesn’t want to be defended. _Race doesn’t exist._ Yes, there are some North Americans who look inescapably White or Black. But that doesn’t capture their “one drop rule” identities. On the evidence (DNA, blood typing, mass demographic analysis), to the contrary.
You can’t understand North American society without racial passing.
So what is racism? A psychological defence mechanism against the existential threat posed to the passer by the very existence of non-Whites. Torture? _Articulated_, it is as AWC would put it, but in fact another defence mechanism. (“Losers torture…” whoever said that upthread, I’m totally stealing your insight.)
If I am right, there are as many people who would qualify by the one-drop-rule as Non-White in the GOP/Tories/NDP (in their own odd way, as much a Canadian party of reaction as the Conservatives) as on the centre left. The point is that they do not self-identify as Non-White.
May 4, 2009 at 1:08 pm
JPool
AWC, do you have a citation for the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as being based in a model of “the Muslim mind” (which would be culture rather than race, but these things slide back and forth fairly easily in contemporary thought) as only responding to violence/pain? All of the stuff I’ve read/heard would indicate that it was a more general principle that they would do “whatever was necessary” just in case (this of course ignoring the possibility that torture might not only not be necessary, but might foreclose other, more effective necessities*). I haven’t read the torture memos directly, so I might be missing something fairly obvious. But is it just that this was torture applied to Muslims and so you’re reading an implicit psychologizing about Islam back into the decision to torture, or is it something more concrete than that?
May 4, 2009 at 1:25 pm
AWC
No cite, but I took the widespread reading of Bernard Lewis as indicative of the administration’s thinking. And this was also the context for “shock and awe” (though I admit that’s not torture).
I will also grant my blog comment was overstated in this respect: I’m sure that many people in the administration supported torture for what they imagine to be utilitarian justifications. No policy is ever supported for only one reason.
But I do believe certain ugly assumptions underpin the policy, in that we haven’t suggested torturing people in our conflicts with European nations.
May 4, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Anderson
AWC, do you have a citation for the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as being based in a model of “the Muslim mind”
Possibly AWC had in mind The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai. More here:
The book was used as a kind of guide book for the torturers of Abu Ghraib. Because Arabs were believed to be especially vulnerable to sexualized humiliation, that is the form the torture took.
May 4, 2009 at 3:45 pm
AWC
Thank you Anderson. You are correct.
It was unfair of me to blame Lewis for torture, but his influence was insidious for contributing to the broader conception of Muslims as irrational, backward, and anti-modern. In the hands of the administration, his historical argument about the Ottomans fed a broader caricature of the Middle East.
May 4, 2009 at 4:16 pm
kid bitzer
osama’s own “stronger horse” comment was used to justify a lot of crap.
here it is, less than a year ago:
http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=ccd8b8fd-71b9-4f51-9565-6236045b14ae&k=41228
being used to explain that “…Middle Easterners are power-worshippers. So are others; nothing succeeds like success anywhere in the world; but in the Middle East success is the mystical fulcrum, the end-all and be-all of everything, the fountainhead, the “stronger horse” from Osama bin Laden’s bestiary. There’s a corollary: Arabs despise weakness and failure.”
the mysterious orient.
anyhow–i agree w/ awc. the neocon line that ‘all they understand is force’ was imbued with racist assumptions. call it ‘the other’ if you like. the neocons’ ground troops don’t seem to share your scruples: they don’t call them “sand others”.
May 4, 2009 at 4:57 pm
dana
Hell, last week, there was some moronic defense of torture on the grounds that in the mystical oriental culture, the torturer is helping the tortured go to Allah with a clean conscience.
May 4, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Walt
No, I’m pretty sure that I dreamed that. No actual human being could say something that dumb. It’s funny that you had the same dream, dana.
May 4, 2009 at 7:57 pm
andrew
This article seems relevant here, particularly paragraph 22 and following.
May 4, 2009 at 8:02 pm
andrew
Also, I know that John Walker Lindh’s conversion takes him out of the category of white non-muslim, but I wonder if anyone’s followed up on this.
May 4, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Michael Turner
No actual human being could say something that dumb.
No actual human being did, Walt. As far as I can tell, anyway.
As stupid as Thiessen’s (and Cliff May’s) “reasoning” was, it could be read as “we needed to find harsh interrogation techniques that could not kill the interrogation subjects, which could be a challenge considering that, according to them, their theological ideology requires that they each resist up to their personal limits of suffering.”
That view might embody a dangerous overestimate of the degree to which religious zealotry could harden a suspect against torture, but I don’t see what any “oriental culture” misconception has to do with it. (The “mystical” part, I’ll get to below.) They cite a theological imperative, but one could substitute a non-theological one, like “devotion to the goal of a classless social order in which all men are free.” For all we know, Viet Cong faced with U.S. interrogators, or anarchists against Francoists in Spain, held out on such grounds because, among other things (i.e., not overridingly; see below) they were trying to be good utopian ideologues. To ignore this aspect of the detainees thinking would be, if anything, irresponsible.
I’m against torture, but I’m hardly against interrogation of terrorism suspects. If it had been my job, I might have inquired into how anything in the captive suspects’ ideology, religion, culture or class background could be a special source of leverage.
Upon hearing that these religious zealots felt God requires them to not rat out their brothers before reaching some limit of suffering, I might first have despaired, thinking “Well, probably some ignorant kid from Alabama, recruited into the infantry in 1964 in part by an appeal to go fight the Godless Reds, and captured by the VC in Vietnam, might have felt a similar obligation, even though we didn’t actually indoctrinate our troops about interrogation in quite those terms.”
I hope I would have corrected myself and realized that the more salient term was “brothers”, not “God”. God can seem a very distant and suspect abstraction when you’re suffering. But a brother is someone you can remember palpably, in a quiet moment in your cell between sessions. You can remember laughing with him, that time, during a sunny afternoon in the mountains, about some stupid screw-up of yours during the hard training you shared; you can remember consoling him about how he couldn’t go back home for a funeral. He was someone you loved and felt a special bond with. You would never want him to go through what you’re going through, when being tortured. But giving up information could lead to him being tortured too, so you hold out.
There’s certainly nothing culture-bound about this idea. Modern military training relies very much on the concept of developing and maintaining unit cohesion. And terrorist training camps employ modern military training.
Nevertheless, there’s a funny way in which God might be down there in the details. “Mystical”? I don’t see this term actually used by torture apologists (so far), but I think I could defend its use in developing non-torture styles of interrogation. Because it’s not just the brothers you know, it’s the ones you don’t, the ones you never met. In Christian theology there is the notion of the “mystical body of Christ” through which we are all united, and most religions have some similar concept, including Islam.
In the one time I prayed as muslims do (very much out of curiosity — I am not religious), I was deeply moved by one feature of the practice, which is not something that’s conspicuous from photos. The edges of the feet of those praying together in a line are touching. You connect physically. I didn’t have a great basis for any other connection in this case. The man I prayed with was Tanzanian. He was morally much more conservative than I am, there was much we didn’t agree on politically.
We prayed in a back room in his shop, where he sold cheap dry goods and barely eked out a living for his family. Afterward, I thought: we prayed on cardboard. What a shame. A few days later I bought a prayer rug for him, took it to his shop, and thanked him for showing me how muslims prayed.
Now, if (in some future I don’t want to imagine), I were one day detained at an airport, and grilled about my supposed “links” to supposed terrorist muslims and this particular “link” came up, I think I would have remembered having prayed with him, with the edge of my left foot touching the edge of his right foot. It’s probably something that would come to mind if I were indignant, and didn’t feel like helping these assholes track this man down. I might remember how it felt, buying that prayer rug for him. If the interrogation became particularly harsh, I might start thinking about how I was more connected to him in some way than to my assailants. Would that be “mystical” of me?
Islam doesn’t care about your race, your culture, your politics, your social position. It does ask that you buy into a decidedly mystical idea: that in accepting Islam, you become connected with, and equal to, everyone else who has accepted it, in the eyes of God.
As mystical ideas go, it is a particularly beautiful one. I wish I could share in it fully. Instead I’m left with sharing in it just a little, in my own way. And maybe that would help me to not turn that guy in, up to whatever my breaking point is, if they couldn’t give me decisive evidence against him.
So I can believe that an intelligent interrogator of Al Qaeda suspects might actually appreciate that mysticism could play a significant role in detainee resistance. The CIA hires some very smart people, many of them with liberal arts degrees, many of them also religious. It would be interesting to see what the evidence says on this point.
May 5, 2009 at 5:51 am
dana
That view might embody a dangerous overestimate of the degree to which religious zealotry could harden a suspect against torture, but I don’t see what any “oriental culture” misconception has to do with it.
Following your link chain for the quotes.
“In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that “Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.” The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. ”
What’s orientalist about this claim is that it seems to accept an awfully convenient easy-peasy rationale towards an Other that wouldn’t stand up were the prisoners Western or Christian, and chalks it up to something about the Other’s strange beliefs. The Other can only talk if freed to do so by extreme pain? Really?
The interrogators who were successful (Soufan, among others) were familiar enough with the religion and culture to recognize that there could be profitable discussions with them, winning their trust by showing that they understood their culture, and showing that there were reasons internal to Islam to re-think their position. The point isn’t that the interrogator talked them out of terrorism, but that he established a common ground that allowed the prisoner to think of him as someone who got it. And this is, incidentally, what interrogators during WWII report doing with German prisoners.
Moreover, as thinkprogress notes, the scenario May outlines – a member of al Qaeda who wants to save innocent lives (thus, someone who has rejected quite a lot of jihadist ideology) by talking but can’t do so because he needs to be freed to do so – doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it.
May 5, 2009 at 5:58 am
Michael Turner
Re Anderson @ 3:31pm, that link to CT discussion of Patai’s The Arab Mind revealed this interesting comment, including . . .
It goes on to say that Macnamara also described
The scholarship (such as it is) at that CT post looks a bit suspect. For example, what Patais supposedly wrote about how Arabs disdain dirty work turns out, in fuller context, to apply only to non-working-class Arabs (though I’m not sure that Patais’ Old Testament/Genesis theological rationalization for this attitude holds much water.)
Is it such a slur? I can tell you from living in Japan for over 14 years: the Japanese say the same thing about themselves, when it comes to any work that’s “dirty, dangerous, and/or digging.”
Admittedly, Patais’ work must be full of very sweeping generalizations. After all, what unifies the Arab world besides language, an overwhelming majority-Islam religious profile (the Koran being in Arabic is probably a major factor), a history of being dominated by colonial and imperial powers, and of being governed under varying degrees of strong-man-rule dictatorship since then? However, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of Patais’ generalizations hold up reasonably well, because just those four nearly-uniform factors could create an awful lot of cultural alignment.
In any case, it appears that The Arab Mind was the foundation of coursework at exactly one military school, under exactly one professor (and military intellectuals argue with each other in ways not too different from other academics.) How this book could have gotten trumped up as the “neo-con bible” on the subject is beyond me.
May 5, 2009 at 6:29 am
Michael Turner
What’s orientalist about this claim is that it seems to accept an awfully convenient easy-peasy rationale towards an Other that wouldn’t stand up were the prisoners Western or Christian, and chalks it up to something about the Other’s strange beliefs. The Other can only talk if freed to do so by extreme pain? Really?
The judgment of “strange” is yours. I haven’t seen it explicitly given in the torture-apologist sources you point to. They probably know better. They don’t explicitly say otherwise, but I can see reasons for that. Embarrassing reasons, for them. See below.
If I were part of a culture of resistance evolved over decades of having torture used against it, I might easily accept this doctrine you find so “strange”. And that’s the culture we’re talking about. We as Americans should know. Because we helped create it.
With acquiescence and even encouragement from western powers, including the U.S., the governments of nations like Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia brutally suppressed organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, and torture (using techniques learned in part from the U.S., in the case of Egypt, at least) was a big part of their arsenal.
Over the course of such repression, these resistance organizations must have learned that torture could open their most ardent followers right up, then quite possibly leave them so broken (and/or so deep in Stockholm Syndrome, or so uncertain of whether they could still be resistance members) as to defect to the very people who tortured them. That’s a double threat: intelligence and loss of members.
By theologically requiring the endurance of pain and suffering at the hands of captors, then forgiving the inevitable breakdown, several advantages might be gained for these resistance movements:
(1) Buying time. When your brother has just been arrested, you can pray that his willingness (nay, his duty to the movement and to God) to endure as much torture as possible before breaking will give you extra time to respond — to destroy or hide evidence, to arrange safe transit for brothers not captured, and for yourself. In these scenarios, mere minutes can matter. There’s no TTB artificiality there.
(2) Retaining membership. When your brother breaks in prison, he can expect forgiveness and understanding from the movement — and from God. He is less likely to fall prey to Stockholm Syndrome. If the intelligence he yielded led to the deaths of other brothers, he need not feel shame — if and when he’s released, he can hope to be welcomed back with open arms. He only did what any of them would do.
(3) Valorizing suffering. Even an incompetent member of the movement, if captured and tortured, can become a hero, just by being tortured.
(4) Demonizing the Enemy. The torturers keep slipping from what little moral high ground they might occupy, by persisting in practicing torture — which they might feel they have no choice to do, because the movement they are suppressing requires endurance of torture by captive brothers. Any doctinre that makes torture of captured brothers more likely, also causes more hatred of the torturing enemy.
Strange beliefs? Oh, yes. But so what? Strange beliefs can be quite rational, if the circumstances are sufficiently unusual. There’s nothing in the above that wouldn’t work just as well for any other religious (or ideological) resistance movement facing persistent, decades-long torture regimes. The U.S. (in a direct-application mode of torture, anyway) is just the most recent arrival to their scene, for committed Islamists.
People seem to think torture is something new to the U.S. Everybody should read Chomsky & Herman’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. The U.S. was neck deep in torture for decades. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, CIA secret prison networks — that’s just the blood level finally lapping up as high as our nostrils.
May 5, 2009 at 6:57 am
dave
And which bits of 1-2-3-4 didn’t apply to the French resistance facing the Gestapo? I’m not seeing the ‘theology’ here. The ‘strangeness’ lies in the forging of a kind of twisted complicity, which itself isn’t all that ‘strange’ because it goes back to many, many historical examples of the prime rationale for torture: that only pain can produce truth. The Romans thought that about slaves – their testimony was only valid IF produced under torture. Prior to the abolition of judicial torture in Europe [which happened quite abruptly in the late C18], it was a commonplace understanding of the practice that it should routinely be used to assist in the discovery of truth in criminal cases.
May 5, 2009 at 7:08 am
dana
The judgment of “strange” is yours.
No, it’s really not, because I’m not the one accepting their belief system as something inexplicable ( “The only thing they understand is force—force, pride and saving face.”) or impervious to rational understanding as justification for torture.
In other words, I don’t think it’s strange at all to believe that God will forgive you for talking under torture*; I think May and others have to think of the prisoners as strange creatures to believe that this counts as a justification for torture.
*I’m not sure I remember the context exactly (Neddy?), but if I remember it, the maxim in question more like “‘you said that God would be angry if I gave up my comrades to the enemy. but what if I’m tortured horribly?’ ‘God will understand'” rather than what’s described by May.
May 5, 2009 at 7:15 am
Jonathan
“Tater done it.”
Isn’t Bin Laden in his early fifties?
May 5, 2009 at 7:21 am
Anderson
it was a commonplace understanding of the practice that it should routinely be used to assist in the discovery of truth in criminal cases.
In a biography of Frederick the Great, I recall noting that he had to quell a mini-rebellion among Prussia’s judges, who literally had no idea how anyone could be convicted if torture wasn’t allowed.
Modern interrogation and police work date from roughly that period.
May 5, 2009 at 7:23 am
Michael Turner
I’m not seeing the ‘theology’ here.
Per se? Neither am I, so long as you can substitute some equally compelling long-run outcome or eschaton as a motivator. As I’ve said at least twice now. [*] Or are we just in violent agreement here, dave?
My ruminations about “mysticism” as a component of the theological motivation — yeah, I’ll cop to wild-ass speculation there. If it adds anything, it’s probably doesn’t amount to much. It’s just something I feel.
Prior to the abolition of judicial torture in Europe . . . .
Yes, and I realize from that point of yours that I shouldn’t be too quick to attribute the supposed “strange beliefs” simply to decades of U.S. hegemony and what Chomsky & Herman call its “subfascist client states” and their torture, during the Cold War. With a little delving by someone who knows the history of Islam, we might discover that, as a specifically Islamic doctrine bout torture (in some embryonic form, anyway), it dates back the Spanish Inquisition and earlier, to Islam’s reaction to the barbarity of torture in Iberian lands that it once called its own, that it ruled in a (relatively) civilized manner.
—
* Me at May 4 10:25pm “They cite a theological imperative, but one could substitute a non-theological one, like “devotion to the goal of a classless social order in which all men are free.” And again right above: “There’s nothing in the above that wouldn’t work just as well for any other religious (or ideological) resistance movement.” I’m happy to include sufficiently fervent nationalism, as well as resistance to genocide, in the mix, and the French Resistance would definitely count.
May 5, 2009 at 8:17 am
Michael Turner
I think May and others have to think of the prisoners as strange creatures to believe that this counts as a justification for torture.
I just read Thiessen’s piece again. I can’t see where he makes it clear, in any way, that he thinks the prisoners are “strange creatures”. Admittedly, he doesn’t say he thinks it’s normal or understandable either. He’s a speechwriter for Dubya, so maybe he understands perfectly well that it’s normal, and also hopes the American public will conclude: “strange.” But I can’t read his mind. Neither can you.
If there’s anything strange with Thiessen’s piece, it’s his apparent belief that the American public will take this kind of reasoning as a justification for torture. Strange to me, anyway. But that’s not where all this started. It started with the claim that somebody based some justification of torture on “mystical oriental culture”, and that sounded like such a juicy morsel of stupid that I went galloping after it, only to find . . . . well, not that, anyway.
Weirder still, I’ll admit, is Cliff May’s take on the question. I really have to hold my nose to read anything at the The Corner, here’s all he adds to Thiessen’s scenario:
Now, as I understand it, Islam actually requires that muslims defend infidels — even against attack by other muslims — so long as those infidels aren’t against Islam. However, I don’t know what sort of cooperation it requires of a believer who is up against infidels who (he believes) are enemies of Islam.
I could be ex-al Qaeda, tired of fighting, and converted away from terrorism, but still feel that the Saudi monarchy is apostate, Israel is an abomination, the Egyptian government even more so, and that the U.S., being an ally of all three, is clearly an enemy of Islam, and therefore not worthy of my cooperation until I absolutely have to give it, under duress. My religion might require that I let my former “brothers”, however wrong, be guided by their own consciences about terrorism, because they are nevertheless muslims, and I can’t aid enemy infidels against them in any way. I might not feel bound to turn them in, short of being taken to some personal limit of suffering. Part of it is basic gang ethics, perhaps: don’t ever be a rat, even if you want out of the game. But theology could endow that near-instinctive loyalty with a nimbus of sanctity. And the prospect of returning some day to a social order that would honor my choice might also be an incentive to hold out.
I’m no expert in these things, but it could explain something I find otherwise paradoxical: the Muslim Brotherhood has forsworn violence, possibly because the governments it wants to take down have so many apparently sincere muslims in them, but still supports (violent) Palestinian resistance against Israel.
Anyway, Cliff May might think these beliefs make the torture victims “strange creatures”, but again, he doesn’t actually say anything like that. Actually, he sounds impatient that torture opponents aren’t thinking it through. Maybe he’s right, in a way. Because if we did think it through, we might do better in our opposition than just putting words in their mouths. A lot better.
May 5, 2009 at 9:19 am
dana
Because if we did think it through, we might do better in our opposition than just putting words in their mouths. A lot better.
I have done more than this. I did not say that May used the word “strange”; I said that to hold the beliefs about Muslim terrorists he does in that particular unreflective way is evidence that he finds them to be strange and alien, rather than ordinary human beings reachable through ordinary efforts, because he jumps from a naive thesis about their religious beliefs to the conclusion that torture is justified. (It’s instructive that it would be very hard to imagine the same thing being said seriously about a Christian radical, even though the Bible and Christian traditions are full of passages about the glories of the early martyrs.)
And, I have further pointed out that successful interrogators have not shared this assumption, taken the time to educate themselves seriously about Islamic terrorism and the intellectual traditions of Islam and gained usable intelligence.
May 5, 2009 at 10:32 am
JPool
An interesting parallel to the OP, Alix Spiegel got some of the psychologists involved in designing “harsh interrogation techniques” to talk to her on the record. It’s chilling, particularly the part where these (admittedly non-Hypocratized) folks saw nothing wrong in shifting from teaching soldiers how to resist or endure torture to teaching them how to torture others.
May 5, 2009 at 10:43 am
Michael Turner
dana, nowhere do I say that you said May or Thiessen used the word “strange”. What I’m looking for is how you infer that they think this. I just don’t get it. Can you take me through the logical steps?
A “naive thesis” about al Qaeda religious beliefs, that’s apparently attested by an actual al Qaeda member? How does that work? Did he dumb it down for them?
You know for a fact that there are no successful interrogators that have shared this assumption, also taken the time to educate themselves seriously about Islamic terrorism, and the intellectual traditions of Islam, and gained usable intelligence? If there are some, so what? I mean, if torture works sometimes, it works sometimes. That doesn’t make it right.
What about the idea that people who supported these torture policies are wrong because, well, torture is wrong? Then, you can grant them any degree of sophistication about detainee psychology — degrees far beyond your own — and it doesn’t change the basic fact that their conclusions are wrong. Better: You can even benefit by what you learn from their greater sophistication, in your suggestions of how to conduct effective interrogation without torture.
But if you just start from them being wrong morally, and try to work out how they must be just plain stoopid in every other way, well . . . . then you end up vaguely remembering that they resorted to arguments from “mystical oriental culture”, misquoting largely irrelevant sources, and generally making one of the biggest mistakes you can make, going up against anyone in any conflict: underestimating the opposition.
Does it matter? I think so. Depending on which polling sources you rely on, somewhere between a plurality and about 70% of Americans believe that torture is justifiable in some circumstances. At that link, see: “Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey. April 14-21, 2009.” That survey shows the number saying torture is “never justified” shrinking from 31% to 25% over the last few months. Disturbing. The lowest number since they started asking that question, in summer 2004.
May 5, 2009 at 1:30 pm
politicalfootball
Michael T, Thiessen is not a nice person. He’s okay with torturing and he’s okay with lying to support torture. Why would you give any weight whatsoever to this?
Zubaydah would be an unreliable witness even if he had not been tortured. And you want to hold him up as an authority because he told a torturer that torture is particularly efficacious when applied to Muslims? Am I getting you correctly here?
Zubaydah, per Thiessen, teaches us that the only reason torture is ever ineffective with these sorts of Muslims is because it’s insufficiently painful.
And look at what Zubaydah is actually saying here: No Muslim is required by his or her religion to hold out longer than possible. What religion tells you that you must do things you are incapable of doing?
It’s silly stuff.
May 5, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Michael Turner
Why would you give any weight whatsoever to this?
(1) Thiessen is “not a nice person” (though I must say, that’s a nice understatement!), but he’s probably not so stupid as to actually misquote the memos. So I assume the memos report Zubaydah as saying this.
(2) Is what Zubaydah apparently said likely to have been produced only under torture, or the threat of it? I don’t see why.
Though I might doubt Zubaydah as a source when it comes to anything he says under torture about presumed al Qaeda plots, I see nothing in his “revealing” this theological point about torture that would be, in itself, compromise or damage his movement. Do you?
Do you think they tortured him with the question, “Why don’t you people tell us things until we torture you a lot”? I think they had better questions to ask, and better uses for their time.
After all, the CIA has been providing advice about torture for a very long time, to oppressive regimes in the Middle East facing destabilizing Islamist movements. Intelligence is a two-way street: certainly the CIA also learned something Islamist resistance to torture in the process.
Naturally, Bush-era torture apologists wouldn’t tell us how they’ve long known what Zubaydah said, and would rather rely on a direct quote from him. It’s a bad PR for the CIA to talk about how they’ve been complicit in torture (even of Islamists who have forsworn violence) in murderous Arab dictatorships, for so long.
It seems you don’t see what may be the real perfidy here, in the rhetoric of Thiessen and May: it could be that it’s extraordinarily disingenuous of them to trot out what Zubaydah said as some recent discovery. The thinking behind this Islamist doctrine on torture resistance might go back as far as the mid-50s, after Islamists had to absorb the implications of Sayyid Qutb’s torture by the Nasser regime. The CIA might have learned of it not long after, perhaps around the time they got involved in a plot in 1958 to have the young, Nasser-inspired Saddam Hussein try to assassinate a coup leader in Iraq. Or the CIA might have learned of it earlier, from the British. For all we know, they first learned of it in reading Islamic histories of the Crusades.
(3) As I outline above, in any case, what Zubaydah said makes perfect sense, mutatis mutandis, for any movement — ideological, religious but not islamic, nationalistic, or (as usual) some blend thereof. Of course you evolve such doctrines when facing a state apparatus that routinely uses torture against you.
What religion tells you that you must do things you are incapable of doing?
Well, uh . . . Christianity? Up until the 1800s in some places? about how testimony under torture was considered definitive then, because if your heart is pure, God won’t let you lie under torture? As dave points out above? To which this particular Islamic doctrine about torture might actually have been a very civilized reaction, back then?
Zubaydah, per Thiessen, teaches us that the only reason torture is ever ineffective with these sorts of Muslims is because it’s insufficiently painful.
Some WaPo readers seeking rationalizations for torture (the dimmer ones) might happily jump to that conclusion, and as a GOP flack, Thiessen probably wouldn’t mind that — as you note, he is not a nice person.
Still, in that op-ed, Thiessen leaves himself enough wiggle room to say later, “Of course, anybody can be made to admit anything under torture. But we weren’t trying to get them to admit just anything, or to turn their mothers in. Where torture — er, I mean ‘enhanced interrogation’ — is aimed at eliciting specific, independently verifiable information from people we know from hard evidence were involved in plots, ‘these sorts of muslims’ first require that the torture reach their personal limit of endurance before they stop evading our questions or supplying false information. They are the ones making it a necessary step for us. So our moral obligation is only to make it the step as safe as possible for them.”
It’s weird, sick, disingenuous rationalization by a shameless propagandist, but I’d prefer that it at least be analyzed correctly, in the (missing) historical perspective of CIA complicity in torture against Islamists in Arab dictatorships. I’d prefer to take the stance that these people might actually know a lot more about their victims than we do, but that what really matters here is that torture is wrong and these people are lying about it. “Torture is always wrong” has such an air of wide-eyed innocence about it (to many, if not most, Americans; see my poll references above) that I’d rather not compound any impression of naivete with “. . . and people who think otherwise are stupid.” Especially when that’s not true, and other intelligent people on other sides of this debate can see it. The well-intentioned people on those sides will recoil at our naivete, and people like Thiessen will craftily use it against us.
May 5, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Michael Turner
I highly recommend reading Bybee’s comments about what he’d been told about Zubaydah, in his memo of 1 Aug 2002, pp. 7-9, starting with “. . . it is believed Zubaydah wrote al Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques”, and up to the end of the section.
With very minor changes, the text could be a coldly objective OSS report concerning the interrogation strategy for a captured Nazi intelligence officer. With only a few more minor changes, it could be an in-depth eyes-only memo to the head of HR, from a staffing consultant, about a recently interviewed CEO candidate for a Fortune 500 company.
In tracing the origin of this supposed “mystical oriental culture” attitude, I think we can rule out both OLC and the part of the CIA that had the job of assessing Zubaydah.
May 6, 2009 at 6:07 am
dana
It’s worth pointing out that Zubaydah is the man who was successfully interrogated without the use of torture by FBI agent Ali Soufan. Then he was tortured by CIA.
So here is the claim. (“By “naive” I did not mean “stupid” or “stoopid”, but “credulous.” ) Zubaydah says “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” We don’t know the context, so leave that aside, but note that what he is saying is that it is permissible to give up when one has reached one’s limits.
Where I think the beliief that the Muslim must be a strange Other comes in: what Zubaydah said is emphatically not “it is permissible to confess only under extreme duress”, which is how May takes the claim (given the prisoner’s need for the interrogator to torture him to be free to save innocent lives on religious grounds). It is also not a claim that this belief renders them impervious to non-torture interrogation. And even if it were, it could turn out, as we saw in the case of Abu Zubaydah, that this belief is false. That they believe something doesn’t make it true.
So, what would make someone like May conflate “permissible to talk under torture” with “needs be tortured to talk with a clear conscience” and “if they believe it, it must be true, so possessing this belief meant that nothing else but torture would be effective?” And, in May’s expansion of the scenario, this includes someone who wants to do the right thing to save innocent lives yet needs to be tortured for the sake of his duty to Allah. (Not just to be loyal to his colleagues or gang mates; May’s clear that we’re torturing the prisoner for the sake of honoring his religious obligations in his scenario.)
So, my hypothesis is that May can only make those leaps if he is also assuming that there is something unique about Islam’s power to enable people to resist questioning (there’s your mysticism) or something unique about the Arab mind that requires torture (there’s your orientalism.) (And of course the phrasing was riffing on kid bitzer’s previous comment.) I think it is plausible given the background salience in contemporary American culture of propositions like “Force is all Arabs understand”, “these people hate us irrationally”, “Iran is full of crazy imams who will initiate nuclear war if they ever get a bomb” and the general lack of knowledge about Islam (which means that people are inclined to imbue fragments of knowledge with more weight than they would a comparable comment about Christianity or a religion with which they were more familiar.) I am not assuming he’s dumb, by the way, just that he’s reasoning from questionable assumptions.
I am coming around to the idea that I ruled out simple malice on the part of May. It is 2009, after all. The abuses and failures are well-documented and publicized.
May 6, 2009 at 9:44 am
Michael Turner
It’s worth pointing out that Zubaydah is the man who was successfully interrogated without the use of torture by FBI agent Ali Soufan.
There are ways to take advantage of fortuitously pre-existing or arranged “psychological and physical hardships” (see below) that have not, to my knowledge, been discussed as resembling torture techniques. But they might be relevant for the Zubaydah/Soufan interaction.
I’m relying on the account in the Newsweek article. It says that Soufan et al. were “keeping him alive”, after being wounded in an intense firefight, and that he had a high fever. It doesn’t make clear whether Zubaydah knew — or was even capable, in his wounded, weakened, feverish state, of knowing — whether he was being questioned by friend or foe. Also, for all Zubaydah knew, he was being nursed back to health by some guys who, if they became dissatisfied with what they were learning, could start to neglect his treatment if they chose.
Bybee’s memos are careful to hint that it’s naive to equate the stresses and after-effects of SERE training with outcomes for the same techniques when applied to a detainee who doesn’t know his captors aren’t allowed to cripple or kill him. After all, part of what made it torture was the victim’s (played upon) uncertainty about how far things would go. Being very sick and wounded, and kept alive by people who might choose not to, if you didn’t cooperate, well . . . . Zubaydah (noted in the Bybee memo as being very untrusting) might have been good at appearing to trust, whenever he thought it might have been matter of survival. It might not have mattered to him if Soufan insisted that they’d get him healthy again no matter what. What would be Zubaydah’s basis for believing that, if he was lucid?
Now let’s review the doctrine attributed to Zubaydah, insofar as we know it. (The “Effectiveness Memos” quoted are still classified.)
We don’t have the torture-resistance manual that the CIA thought Zubaydah might have written. But if it exists, it’s probably quite comprehensive, and might include what Zubaydah went through with Soufan. Islamists might have been enduring modern torture techniques as early as 1948; it’s mentioned that Zubaydah consulted extensively with Zawahiri about his own experiences and knowledge, not just under the Egyptian authorities but with the Russians. These people had an enormous base of collective experience, and the doctrine attributed to Zubaydah might neatly crystallize it. And in that base of experience, the torturous-but-not-torture factors I note (or hypothesize in the absence of details) from Soufan’s account might all have been a matter of record, singly or even in the very same combination Zubaydah experienced while being interrogated by Soufan.
Note that the doctrine doesn’t get even as specific as “torture”, but rather “psychological and physical hardships.” Soufan et al. might have lucked out a little, in having Zubaydah already in a situation where he was already immersed in considerable hardships of both kinds. And Soufan et al. might have taken more advantage of that fact than they are letting on (or that Newsweek bothered to report.)
So the situation as described in the Newsweek article does not unambiguously depart from the religiously permitted conditions, as I read them. I think it’s fair of me to withhold judgment on this.
The reports of Zubaydah that Bybee relied on (see link above) describe a Zubaydah who is clearly back on his feet, healthy again, in his usual more-than-full command of himself, and very resistant. Also, in the Newsweek article, Soufan complains that the interrogator who took over from him in Thailand was — by his own admission — laughably inexperienced. So he was not of the people who took over Zubaydah later, who were so experienced that they apparently peppered OLC with incredibly detailed questions about what was permissible or not, among the practices they already had experience with, or were already engaged in, or contemplating.
. . . my hypothesis is that May can only make those leaps if he is also assuming that there is something unique about Islam’s power to enable people to resist questioning (there’s your mysticism) or something unique about the Arab mind that requires torture (there’s your orientalism.)
Zubaydah said a muslim world was inevitable? Well, Marx said communism — class distinctions erased, material abundance for all, no government needed anymore — was inevitable. “Heaven this side of the grave”, as Schumpeter neatly put it. But not necessarily before you’re in your own grave. Good communists fought selflessly to make that “inevitable” arrive a little sooner, if possible. A lot of them have gotten captured and tortured over the years, and no doubt that many of them held out as long as they could, where they though it might have mattered.
So take out “Islam” and plug in “Marxism”. Throw in a dash of nationalism, maybe you get the Tamil Tigers. Inquire deeply enough into how the Sri Lankan government has been interrogating captured Tigers over the years, and if it’s been rough, even torture by anyone’s definition, I wouldn’t be surprised if they told you that the combination of Tamil nationalism and their Marxism made them pretty tough nuts to crack. (It’s a movement that, for a while anyway, was marked by a higher rate of suicide bombing than any movement in the Arab world, so these are pretty selfless true believers who might in fact be able to handle somewhat more torture than most soldiers.)
So: no mysticism required. Scientific socialism plus nationalism works just as well. It’s just religion in this case. Maybe Cliff May could get into that, but then he’s just rewriting Eric Hoffer, and why would he bother? He’s already quoted Hoffer to the same effect:
Where you get the thing about May and some fixation on “the Arab mind”, I don’t know. Experts in terrorism have already marveled at Al Qaeda as a remarkably globalized organization, with representation from a lot of different cultures, languages and races. Cliff May very likely know this. If you want to sweep Indonesians in with Arabs as all being “Oriental” somehow . . . oh, I don’t even know where to start with my objection. The Indonesians I know are nothing like the Arabs I know. I took a course in Indonesia cultural geography in college; from what I know of the Arab world from other reading, I don’t see many points of comparison, beyond Islam and a history of colonial rule followed by indigenous dictatorship. It should suffice (for now–I’m open to contrary evidence) that Cliff May said nothing about Arabs specifically in that NRO note. I could go looking for what else he might have said, but it seems I’m the only one doing much looking for anything here, as if what people actually wrote actually matters. And I’m a little tired of it, frankly.
Cliff May is not wrong because torture never works. Cliff May is not wrong because he’s ignorant or stupid — I believe he’s neither of those things. Relying on that argument will backfire on you. So will putting words in his mouth. No, Cliff May is wrong because torture is wrong.