A Daily Dish reader shares his expert viewpoint on the “ticking time-bomb” defense of torture:

I was an officer that ran interrogator teams in the Marine Corps from 2001-2004.

Reuel Marc Gerecht uses the biggest fallacy in all of the torture debate–the ticking time-bomb fallacy. He assumes that an ideologically driven terrorist like [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] or Abu Zubaydah would answer the questions truthfully even under torture when all he had to do was withstand for 4 days to let 9/11 happen.  This is absurd.

They would withstand because they are so close to the “finish line.”

Even more likely though, assuming that KSM was captured on 7 September, would be to give us thousands of leads (which he did anyways when he was captured) with a little truth at the core and we would go ragged chasing them all down while the terrorists boarded the planes without a problem.

Bottom line, the ticking time-bomb scenario is just not a justification for torture of an ideologically motivated person who has immense incentive to withstand and disseminate false information. Finally, there are other methods that could “break” KSM in the above scenario like the shock of capture and some thoughtful, sophisticated tricks that are certainly not torture and in the Army manual.

The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat has been “thinking about torture.”

I keep waiting, I think, for somebody else to write a piece about the subject that eloquently captures my own inarticulate mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt about the Bush Administration’s interrogation policy, so that I can just point to their argument and say go read that. But so far as I know, nobody has. There’s been straightforward outrage, obviously, from many quarters, and then there’s been a lot of evasion - especially on the Right, where occasional defenses of torture in extreme scenarios have coexisted with a remarkable silence about the broad writ the Bush Administration seems to have extended to physically-abusive interrogation, and the human costs thereof. But to my knowledge, nobody’s written something that captures the sheer muddiness that surrounds my own thinking (such as it is) on the issue.

Some difficult truths:

So as far as the bigger picture goes, then, it seems indisputable that in the name of national security, and with the backing of seemingly dubious interpretations of the laws, this Administration pursued policies that delivered many detainees to physical and mental abuse, and not a few to death. These were wartime measures, yes, but war is not a moral blank check: If you believe that Abu Ghraib constituted a failure of jus in bello, then you have to condemn the decisions that led to Abu Ghraib, which means that you have to condemn the President and his Cabinet.

Given this reality, whence my uncertainty about how to think about the issue? Basically, it stems from the following thought: That while the Bush Administration’s policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn’t fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose … and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

Ross’ very honest “thinking” about this issue was refreshing. He framed it beyond the typical partisan framework, rather framing the issue from a very personal, morally troubled, yet pragmatic viewpoint. His post is long but well worth the read and worth considering. The last sentence that I quoted above was a profound one…

… while the Bush Administration’s policies clearly failed a just-war test, they didn’t fail it in quite so new a way as some of their critics suppose …

This is one of those uncomfortable truths that many Americans don’t realize or choose not to accept. A careful analysis of our nation’s policies throughout our history will find far too many examples of immoral and unlawful policies and actions. One example Ross cites:

The use of the atomic bomb. I think it’s very, very difficult to justify Harry Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in any kind of plausible just-war framework, and if that’s the case then the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities - and indeed, the tactics employed in our bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan more broadly - represents a “war crime” that makes Abu Ghraib look like a trip to Pleasure Island. (And this obviously has implications for the justice of our entire Cold War nuclear posture as well.) But in so thinking, I also have to agree with Richard Frank’s argument that “it is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs” - in so small part because I find it hard to imagine myself being in Truman’s shoes and deciding the matter differently, my beliefs about just-war principle notwithstanding.

While I completely disagree with this administration’s policies and actions, I realize that this is indeed not “quite so new.” Which goes to this starkly profound statement from Ross…

… and moreover, had I been in their shoes I might have failed the test as well.

And that’s the fundamental point. Given the same circumstances with the same responsibilities, any of us might have made similar decisions as Bush and Harry Truman. That’s because we as humans fail, especially when under extreme circumstances. And that’s why we have laws — to help us make the right decision when the right decision is the most difficult one to make in the midst of the worst of circumstances.

An analogy: If someone were to harm one of my daughters in any way, I undoubtedly would be consumed by rage. My fatherly instinct would be to exact pain and suffering in a proportionally magnified degree greater than that which was inflicted upon my child. What keeps me from unleashing this instinctive (and some would argue justifiable) revenge are laws and the consequences that come with those laws. And those laws are there to maintain a civilized and orderly society and to protect us all from our human failings — things like misidentified persons being wrongly caught up in regrettable, yet nonretractable retaliation (such as killing the wrong man whose later proven to be innocent).

As much as I abhor this administration’s policies and actions, I find myself among those who have no stomach for a major reckoning of those who made these disastrous decisions. What I do want, as a condition of immunity from future prosecution, is a full accounting of the decisions made, the orders given and the actions taken by all those involved as well as an acknowledgement that these were wrong and regrettable.

We have to learn from our mistakes. But we have to acknowledge them as mistakes before we can truly learn from them and take corrective action.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald spotlights the backtracking of key Senate Democrats on the issue of CIA torture…

Time constraints prevented me yesterday from writing about Dianne Feinstein’s comments concerning torture in yesterday’s New York Times, in which the California Senator — who will replace Jay Rockefeller as Chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee — rather clearly backtracked on what had been her repeated, unequivocal insistence throughout the year that the CIA should be required to comply with the Army Field Manual when interrogation detainees.  Time’s Michael Scherer picked up on the same backtracking and did a very good job of highlighting what appears to be Feinstein’s (as well as Ron Wyden’s) conspicuous, and somewhat disturbing, reversals.

But it’s actually somewhat worse even than Scherer suggests.  According to Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, who wrote the article, Feinstein and Wyden are just two of the “senior Democratic lawmakers” who have “seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases” — despite the fact that both Feinstein and Wyden said throughout the year that they emphatically favored such a measure.

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What makes this so notable is that, for the last year, Feinstein and Wyden were both insistent that the only way to end torture and restore America’s standing in the world was to require CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual — period.  But as long as George Bush was President, it was cheap and easy for Feinstein and Wyden to argue that, because they knew there was no chance it would ever happen.  As they well knew, they lacked the votes to override Bush’s inevitable veto of any such legislation.  So as long as Bush was President, it was all just posturing, strutting around demanding absolute anti-torture legislation they knew would never pass.

But that has all changed now.  Although Obama’s top intelligence adviser, John Brennan, has questioned whether it was necessary or wise to do so, Obama himself said repeatedly and unequivocally during the campaign that he supported legislation to compel CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual, making it virtually impossible that he would veto any such legislation.  Senate Democrats know now that if they pass the law they claimed to so vehemently support, it would actually get enacted.

So now, suddenly, Feinstein and Wyden are sending at least preliminary signals that they are far more “flexible” on the issue — I believe the all-purpose catchword now is “pragmatic” — than they ever were before.

Very disappointing, but not in the least surprising. The Democrats are proving once again they are no more principled or trustworthy than their counterparts.

You can read Greenwald’s entire in-depth Salon piece here.

Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym for a veteran who led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006, writes in today’s Washington Post about the cost of America’s use of torture — known in Bushspeak as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

This piece is a must-read.

Sullivan makes another important point…

Consensual adult sado-masochistic porn? So obscene you can put someone away for nearly four years. Actual sadism and actual torture? You get legal immunity if you do it at the behest of the president of the United States.
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Proverbs 20:10…

Differing weights and differing measures—
the LORD detests them both.

Beginning tomorrow evening, HBO will be showing the 2008 Academy Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. “a compelling and illuminating expose of the US-sponsored policy of torture which emerged after 9/11,” as described by the advocacy group Reject Torture. Here’s the program description from the HBO website:

Not long ago, the United States was viewed around much of the world as the good guys. But the appallingly inhumane tactics used by military prison guards changed all that. This is the story of how America lost its dignity in its zeal to win the War on Terror. This 2007 Oscar®-winning documentary takes a disturbing, in-depth look at the highly questionable interrogation practices used by the U.S. military on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in the years following 9/11. Beginning with the story of an innocent Afghan taxi driver who was killed while being held in a Bagram prison in 2002, the film tells the grim, cautionary saga of how the U.S. government–desperate to draw information from a top Al Qaeda leader–approved the use of cruel and unusual interrogation techniques that were later imported to U.S. prisons abroad.

Here’s the trailer.

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I encourage every American citizen to watch this documentary to better understand what our government does in our name. The first airing on HBO is Monday at 8pm our time. Here’s the complete schedule of its airing.

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I came across this video by the non-partisan Reject Torture campaign after reading this story regarding the U.S. being accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships. If we sacrifice our values in supposed defense of those values, what have we gained? And, if we are a Christian nation, as many proclaim us to be, what defense can a Christian make of such policies and practices?

From the Reject Torture campaign:

• reaffirming America’s commitment to existing federal laws and international treaties that ban torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under all circumstances.
• renouncing all legal interpretations and executive orders that redefine torture and permit such acts as sensory and sleep deprivation, stress positions, sexual humiliation, and mock executions.
• enforcing full transparency of information about how America treats any and all detainees held by our personnel and those in our employ anywhere in the world.
• rejecting and abolishing the practice of rendering detainees abroad.
• establishing a single standard of interrogation procedures to apply to all persons held in U.S. custody or by those under U.S. control, whether C.I.A., military, or civilian.
• treating our detainees as we would have others treat detained Americans.

I have now joined the initiative this election year to press the presidential candidates to adopt a “no torture, no exceptions” policy if they should be elected president.