Choose Your Own Adventure

by Katherine

(Note: In response to commenters' requests (thanks, guys) I'm promoting this response to Patterico's hypothetical about torture, which I posted last night.  I've edited for grammar, & in one case--the bit about Abu Ghraib & its relationship to the CIA torture program--for factual precision.)

No, the waterboarding session was not worth it.

The CIA officers charged with waterboarding KSM, lacking the knowledge that everything would turn out so swimmingly, would demand assurances from their boss that they could not go to jail for this. Their boss, & his boss, would ask the Justice Department to assure them that they would not go to jail. In order to tell them that they wouldn't go to jail, the Justice Department would have to write a memo falsely concluding that: (1) terrorism suspects were not protected by any portion of the Geneva Conventions, & the war crimes act did not apply; (2) waterboarding (& such other "enhanced interrogation technqiues" as the CIA would deem necessary) was not torture.

As a result of those memos, CIA agents would torture many other prisoners, and kill several of them, including some who were not high level members of Al Qaeda & whose torture & death did not save a single life. In order to justify what they had done & avoid liability, they would cover up the evidence of this. They would also make false and exaggerated claims about how the program was necessary, how many lives had been saved by torture.

The techniques--not waterboarding, so much, but many of the others--would spread to the military. In some cases, it would be because the Secretary of Defense thought it would be convenient not to have the Geneva Conventions apply to terror suspects in military custody, & to have authorization to use "enhanced interrogation technqiues" to abuse prisoners. After all, were America's brave soldiers lives less valuable than civilians? In other cases it would be because members of the military stationed with the CIA saw what CIA agents could do to prisoners: a guard at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, say, might come into work one night & notice that a CIA agent had tortured a prisoner to death & left his body paced in ice in the shower while higher ups fought about what to do with the evidence. The guard might unzip the body bag, take some pictures with corpse. It might not be the first time the guard had seen a CIA interrogator torture a prisoner. It might assure him that if the CIA could get away with killing a guy, surely he & his friends on the night shift could continue to have some fun with the prisoners, & continue to take some pictures.

Soldiers would torture many, many, many prisoners--in Afghanistan, in Guantananmo, in Iraq. Some of them would be tortured to death. Some of those tortured would be innocent.

The people tortured would make false confessions, which whether they were guilty or not would lead to them being detained for years without charge or trial. Their false confessions would lead to other arrests, and more torture, and more false confessions. Intelligence would be led down God knows how many blind alleys, resulting in the torture of God knows how many, the imprisonment of God knows how many more.

The results would be downright bizarre sometimes. We'd not only imprison & torture innocents--we'd imprison & torture guys we captured in a Taliban prison bearing scars from torture by high level al Qaeda members; one of whom Osama Bin Laden had personally accused of trying to assassinate him in 1998. We'd keep one of them in prison in Guantanamo for the better part of 5 years; another for 6 and counting despite the fact that he kept trying to kill himself.

The administration wouldn't be able to admit that this happened; it would have to classify as much as the evidence as it could, for as long as it could. It would have to keep the courts from examining the legality of these techniques, & push laws through Congress immunizing itself from prosecution, & ensure that the Justice Department remained in the hands of lawyers who would continue to falsely claim that everything had been legal; who would never investigate; who would never prosecute. Members of the President's party would have to support "enhanced interrogation" & pretend it wasn't torture; otherwise they would be admitting that a President in their party had participated in a conspiracy to commit war crimes.

But they wouldn't be able to keep it all secret; the world would find out. It would destroy our reputation, & make it impossible for us to credibly pressure other countries not to torture people or detain them indefinitely based on a bare allegation that they were terrorists or national security threats. It would help drive recruiting for Al Qaeda. It would help seal the failure of our invasion of Iraq.

I suppose you could add a bunch of other stipulations to your hypothetical to prevent these things from happening: these techniques would be practiced only against the highest level suspects, in a few prisons. They would be restricted to trained, professional, carefully selected CIA agents. It would only be used to prevent attacks when there was no other possible way to stop them. We would never torture innocents. We would never torture anyone to death. You could stipulate that, but it just makes the hypothetical even more of an irrelevant fantasy. In real life, this happened. In real life, it always happens when a country experiments with torture: it always spreads, it always leads to innocents being tortured, it never saves more lives than it destroys. In real life, a government who promises that this time it will be different is either lying, or kidding itself.

You should trust a government claiming it needs to torture exactly as much as you should trust a terrorist leader explaining why it needs kill just a few civilians (or a few dozen, or a few hundred), in order to save hundreds of thousands of Muslim children from death and slavery. I could make up a hypothetical where a suicide bombing prevented more evil than it inflicted & saved more people than it killed; would that show that opponents of terrorism just don't understand the moral complexity of it all?

A few other things:

(1) I think this is obvious but just in case: I am not responding to an unrealistic hypothetical with another unrealistic hypothetical. The scenario I lay out here is, as they say in the movies, "based on a true story"-- very closely based on a whole bunch of true stories. I realize that a lot of people aren't going to take my word for it & I need to support that with cites. I don't have time to do that now--I may later, either by revising this post or posting follow-ups.

Before I do, though: if I'm correct about these consequences, was it still worth it?

What if there were no credible, reliable evidence that your hypothetical scenario had ever occurred, but that the facts I discuss above HAD occurred, as a result of the Bush administration's decision to grant the CIA authority to use "scientific" "advanced interrogation techniques" against high level Al Qaeda suspects?

(3) If people insist on basing debates about the ethics of torture on fictional scenarios rather than real ones, though, please discuss the following three hypotheticals (some of these are also taken from comments):

(a) Stipulate that in 2002, Dick Cheney's cardiologist was deeply opposed to the coming invasion of Iraq. Say that based on his conversations with his patient, he was convinced that (1) Cheney was trying to drag the country into war based on lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons program; (2) invading Iraq would lead to the violent deaths of thousands of American soldiers & hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians; (3) these deaths would make the United States less safe from terrorist attack, not more so; (4) if Cheney were out of the picture, Colin Powell would be able to talk the President out of this disastrous course, & the intelligence agencies would be able to present accurate information, & the invasion would not occur; (5) he can prevent all this by deliberately sabotaging a heart procedure on Cheney & making it look like an accident; (6) murdering Cheney in this fashion is the ONLY way to prevent the war.

Say the cardiologist is 100% right about all of this. Is he justified in murdering Cheney?

If yes, does this scenario call into doubt whether there's a moral basis for a blanket ban on: (1) murder in general; (2) political assassination in particular; (3) doctors deliberately harming their patients? Is criticism of advocates of murder, assassination & violations of the Hippocratic oath sanctimonious, self righteous hypocrisy against people who just refuse to toe an ideological line?

(b) Stipulate that there is a ring forged in the fires of Mount Doom in the land of Mordor that makes it bearer more powerful than anyone else in your world, which is called Middle Earth. A dark lord named Sauron is trying to take over Middle Earth. Your fair city, Gondor, is his first target. Sauron is preparing to unleash his armies against you. Your people and your city are doomed to horrible, gruesome painful deaths, and the only hope of stopping it is bringing the One Ring to Gondor. However, for reasons passing understanding, a council of elves & wizards has decided that instead of using the ring to send two hobbits on an utterly hopeless quest to destroy it. (Easy for them to say--they're immortal & they can always sail off to wherever). Stealing the ring from the wee hobbitses, and bringing it to your father to protect Gondor, is the only way to the White City, your people, & your world from certain doom. DOOM! What do you do?

(c) The year is 1984. You live in a place that used to be called England & is now called Oceania, a country ruled by a brutal, evil, totalitarian, one-Party government, which has eradicated its citizens' liberty far more thoroughly than Josef Stalin's USSR.You meet a man named O'Brien, a leader of a clandestine liberation movement called The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the only organized resistance to The Party in existence. O'Brien asks whether you are willing to do the following to support The Brotherhood:

--"give your lives?'"

--"to commit murder?"

--"To  commit  acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?"

--"To betray your country to foreign powers?"

--"'to cheat, to  forge,  to  blackmail,  to corrupt  the  minds  of  children,  to distribute habit-forming
drugs,  to  encourage  prostitution,  to  disseminate  venereal diseases--to   do  anything  which  is  likely  to  cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'

--"If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests  to throw  sulphuric  acid in a child's face -- are you prepared to do that?'"

You believe that joining this organization is the only possible hope of opposing the party, & that you can only join if you answer "yes" the whole list. How should you respond to O'Brien's questions?

Comments

[Katherine]

(Dear Secret Service: this post is very much NOT a threat or endorsement of violence against Dick Cheney--not even in hypotheticals or in parallel universes involving time travel and/or Dick Cheney having a psychic, unethical, murderous, yet well-meaning cardiologist.)

[Snarkilicious]

HYPOTHETICAL: that the right-wing supporters and enablers of GWB would engage in honest discussion with those who oppose GWB's actions and policies.

Nah, not worth even thinking about. Never happen.

[OCSteve]

Awesome job Katherine.

[cleek]

another great post.

y'all are really rocking this torture issue.

[JakeB]

What do you mean (b) is a hypothetical?

More seriously, great work, Katherine.

[Edward_]

devil's advocate:

The urgency of the original hypothetical, as well as the immediacy with which anyone who lived through 9/11 can relate to the fervent, panicky desire to prevent another one, are not matched here in the opposition to the suggestion that torture may be morally justified in certain circumstance.

It's human nature to deflect moral nuance when something as threatening as the horror of mass murder is accessed in their consciousness. What Patterico keeps coming back to (and we're not effectively countering, IMHO) is a visceral rejection of the clinical rationales of those who argue torture is always wrong. There's a separate, illogical, but still powerful reasoning process in play there.

What my side (the side opposed to torture) isn't that good at, but perhaps needs in order to help the Patterico's get it, viscerally, is an equally compelling consequence narrative.

I think K's done a good job of presenting the real world consequences of latitude where torture is concerned, but it's still too easy to weigh the two (mass murder in an instant vs. systemic graying of moral boundaries that can/might work themselves out over time) and side with those who feel the means justify the ends.

I suspect nothing short of the kind of epiphany Camus' father had while witnessing an actual execution by guillotine will drive home for most of Patterico's ilk why they're wrong.

The problem is, they already have strong images from 9/11 and elsewhere to counter any inherent empathy they might otherwise have for someone being tortured, and Patterico can tap into those.

What am I getting at? That perhaps Americans should be forced to watch waterboarding being conducted? No. That's obscene. Besides, we have films and such delving into that of late, and it's still not a parallel to the hours of footage we've consumed of the towers collapsing and such. But perhaps a simple meme that asks anyone who'll publicly support waterboarding to agree to undergo it first before they bother the rest of us with why they feel it's justifiable.

Indeed, hearing folks defend it is approaching being nearly as painful as knowing the US is doing it.

[Katherine]

Eddie: It's impossible for us to make the case against equally compelling because they don't consider the victims--even the innocent ones--as human as Americans. They don't think their lives are worth what our lives are worth. So the mere possibility that torture is necessary to prevent an attack & save American lives (however unlikely, however unsupported by reliable evidence that this has actually happened), outweighs the real & proven suffering of actual real life torture victims (even when the victims were tortured to death, were innoccent, where torture only produced false confessions, etc. etc. etc.).

They can imagine themselves & people like them being killed in a terrorist attack; they can't imagine our government disappearing & torturing people like them. It doesn't seem real, or matter very much, when it's only done to foreigners.

So how do we make it real? We can write posts & reports & articles discuss actual cases of torture in exhausting detail--reading the details about it is what did it for me--but most defenders of torture's existence aren't willing to read those or acknowledge their existence. How many right wing blogs have claimed that "no one died at Abu Ghraib" in spite of the many photographs of the corpse of a prisoner who died from "Palestinian Hanging"? They won't deal with the facts, they just deny it without even reading the report & then pretend it never existed.

We can make movies about it, but those movies will be as fictional as 24, and they don't have to watch such "liberal propaganda".

It seems more real if you actually see a recording of a victim describing his experiences. But again, they don't have to watch such things. It would seem more real if you had to watch a video of an actual torture session--but those aren't exactly publicly available, & if they were, I wouldn't count on everyone reacting like Camus's father did. It's much more real if you actually speak to a victim in person (look at Congress's inability to look Arar in the eye & tell him that his rendition was justified--and that was just testimony via video link), but why would they choose to do that?

Some people can be convinced by such things, and I don't know of a better approach--I'm convinced a very large majority can be convinced, eventually. But some people really don't care very much if it's something that happens to accused terrorists and foreigners, and there's just nothing to be done about it except to try to outnumber them. I mean, look: even opponents of these policies are not reacting against them as strongly as they would if it were happening to "people like us." Myself included.

[Edward_]

It doesn't seem real, or matter very much, when it's only done to foreigners.

I think it's easy (it is for me) to dismiss such folks as unreachable. Racist and unreachable. I'm reminded, however, of the simple "trick" pulled by the lawyer in "A Time to Kill." He knew the racist jury wouldn't empathize with the torture of the young black girl, so he described her torture within the context of how they'd see it, with their defense mechanisms up and them safely behind the wall of their own "otherness." Once he got them to do that, safely, and only when he had carefully led them to a place where they themselves could let their better human nature peer over that wall, did he then drop the wall and let them discover for themselves how they'd feel if the victim was them.

Where am I going with this? I'm not sure. I guess I have to believe that Patterico is only refusing to peer over that wall. Not that he's inhuman.

"A Time to Kill" is probably a bad example, now that I think about it, though. It's essentially the story of a lawyer who gets a jury to agree a murder was justified, and it's probably just as easy for Patterico to use it to justify his support of torture as it is for anyone to use it to help folks identify with the victims of torture. Besides, the victim in that story was entirely innocent. What Patterico relies on in his hypothetical is the notion his victim isn't.

In the end, though, Patterico's not making an argument for making a distinction between innocent and non-innocent torture subjects. He's making an argument for torture. If he would look over that wall, see himself on the receiving end, however, perhaps he'd get it.

[Katherine]

Sure, lots of people can be reached & it's worth the effort; I think a majority. Him in particular? Maybe; I think it's very unlikely, given the fake, sanitized description of waterboarding he uses.

[Bernard Yomtov]

Wonderful work, Katherine. Thank you.

[cleek]

i dunno... it's gonna take a hell of a lot of convincing to 'reach' most of the pro-torture folks.

go browse any wingnut comment section and count the number of people who are apparently seriously convinced that we're one Democratic president away from sharia and burkas, and that gun-totin, GOP-votin patriots like themselves are our only defense against the establishment of a worldwide Caliphate.