Wolf Howling: ticking time bomb

Friday, May 15, 2009

Krauthammer & The Continuation Of The "Torture Debate"

The left has demagoged the critical national issue of interrogation techniques. Obama put this issue in the center of debate by releasing carefully redacted memos and throwing the OLC attorneys as a sacrifice to his base. He has opened a Pandoras Box in so doing. That said, this issue is one on which we deserve a legitimate debate with all of the information on this made public. Right now, President Obama is deliberately preventing that by refusing to release documents that would show the public what resulted from the waterboarding of three al Qaeda senior terrorists. It is a travesty on which I've blogged here and here.

I seriously doubt this issue will go away. The partisan left is determined to establish, once and for all, their moral superiority on this issue and ensconce it as U.S. policy going forward. But as Michael Sheurer points out, the moral preening of the left is wholly misplaced - they turn morality on its head - and potentially suicidal. This is an issue with a very long shelf life that will only haunt Obama until he finally acts to allow the release of the documents requested by Dick Cheney.

And so the argument continues today with Charles Krauthammer, who addresses criticism from his last article on this topic.

Krauthammer's last article on this topic dealt with the question of when we would want to consider using enhanced interrogation on an enemy operative:

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

. . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the "torture memos" noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist "chatter" had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how -- and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques -- face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space -- torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together." . . .

Read the entire article. Also in that article, Krauthammer took Nancy Pelosi to task for her disingenuous and morally vacuous claims as to what she knew, when she knew it, and her justifications for failing to raise an objections.

The response to Krauthammer's positions drew a lot of criticism. One of the main criticisms is one I've addressed in two posts, here and here, the rather incredible - and intellectually vacuous - assertion that the ticking time bomb scenario does not exist. Krauthammer responds to that by showing a clear example of such a scenario:

On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

Krauthammer directs the rest of his article to those who have risen in defense of Nancy Pelosi, claiming that her massive hypocrisy on this issue is meaningless to the debate on waterboarding and torture.

My column also pointed out the contemptible hypocrisy of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is feigning outrage now about techniques that she knew about and did nothing to stop at the time.

My critics say: So what if Pelosi is a hypocrite? Her behavior doesn't change the truth about torture.

But it does. The fact that Pelosi (and her intelligence aide) and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and dozens of other members of Congress knew about the enhanced interrogation and said nothing, and did nothing to cut off the funding, tells us something very important.

Our jurisprudence has the "reasonable man" standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances.

On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Moreover, the circle of approval was wider than that. As Slate's Jacob Weisberg points out, those favoring harsh interrogation at the time included Alan Dershowitz, Mark Bowden and Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. In November 2001, Alter suggested we consider "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies" (i.e., those that torture). And, as Weisberg notes, these were just the liberals.

So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

You don't need a psychiatrist to tell you which of these theories is utterly fantastical.

Read the entire article. Moral absolutism meets the reality that moral questions must be answered within the context of surrounding conditions. The conditions in 2001 were dire. The conditions now are political - and for the far left, highly partisan. Indeed, many have dreamed of using this issue to destroy Bush and the right. Who is the more moral, and who is masquerading behind a mere facade of morality while pursuing an agenda best described as political opportunism? Easy questions for me at least. What say you?

The Ticking Time Bomb & Coerecive Interrogation

Soccer Dad sent me a link to an article near a decade old written Stephen Flatow in the NYT. The article illustrates a "ticking time bomb" scenario - a scenario when our intelligence agencies have reason to believe that a terrorist in our custody has information that could stop a terrorist plot slated to occur in the near or, at least, foreseeable future. In a post below, I address Rick Moran's argument that such a scenario is purely the stuff of fiction. Here is a heart breaking real world example of a ticking time bomb scenario from the pages of the NYT:

On Aug. 21, 1995, Suffiyan Jabarin, a 26-year-old Palestinian member of the terrorist organization Hamas, blew himself up on a bus in the heart of Jerusalem, taking the lives of four people -- three Israelis and an American -- with him.

I followed the story of the bombing on Bus 26 quite closely; my 20-year-old daughter, Alisa, had been killed by an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber on a bus in Israel four months earlier. A few days after the Aug. 21 attack, Israeli and American newspapers reported that the man who masterminded it, Abdel Nasser Issa, had been in Israeli custody two days before the bombing.

Israeli authorities had arrested Mr. Issa on suspicion of terrorist activity and questioned him the same way they would question anyone else: posing questions and waiting for answers. Mr. Issa revealed nothing unusual to his interviewers. It was only after the bus bombing that Karmi Gilon, then chief of Israel's secret service, the Shin Bet, authorized the use of ''moderate physical force.''

The next morning, Mr. Issa, who had not been told of the bombing of Bus 26 the day before, told the Israelis about his plan for that attack. He also provided information that led to the arrests of 37 Hamas militants who had been planning additional bombings.

Mr. Gilon told reporters that the blood of the next victims of terrorism would have been on his hands if physical pressure had not been used in the interrogation of Mr. Issa. And Yitzhak Rabin, then Prime Minister of Israel, said that had the Shin Bet applied such pressure earlier, the attack on Bus 26 might have been prevented.

In the last two years, the Shin Bet has averted 90 planned terrorist attacks. Yet the United Nations Committee Against Torture recently condemned Israel's methods of questioning suspected terrorists as torture, even though Israel limits and regulates the use of force and allows detainees to petition the highest court to stop possibly illegal measures. . . .

I have always cherished America's unparalleled standards of individual and human rights. But the Middle East is different from the United States. Israel lives in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called ''a very tough neighborhood.'' Indeed, more than 200 Israelis have been killed in terrorist attacks during the past four years.

The most important obligation of any country is protecting the lives of its citizens. To hold individual human rights as an absolute rule when occasional exceptions to that rule can prevent the random murder of civilians seems to me morally unjustifiable. Moreover, Israel's use of limited physical pressure during interrogations, a practice that is regulated and regularly reviewed, cannot be compared with the uncontrolled torture of suspects employed by some of Israel's neighbors, like Syria. . . .

I cannot consider the individual rights of a Palestinian detainee in an Israeli jail as a separate issue from protecting the lives of bus passengers. Nor do I have the luxury of examining this question from an abstract moral perspective.

If applying limited physical pressure to a suspected terrorist can spare even one parent the pain of losing a son or a daughter, I am all for it. In the meantime, I pray that the conditions that give rise to the need for such methods will speedily come to an end.

Read the entire article. It is of course depressing to know that the decision to conduct a coercive interrogation did not occur in the above case until after people died. Still, it would seem that the information gleaned did stop other similar bombings.

The tough neighborhood Mr. Flatow describes came to our shores on 9-11. There can be no doubt that it will come again given the opportunity. This also ties in to my post here, examining the moral issues that surround coercive interrogation tactics. Talk of protecting lives in the abstract as a moral imperative of the President is one thing. Hearing it through the pen of a man who lost his daughter to terrorism gives the issue the solidity it deserves.