On Torture

I know I should feel a sense of moral outrage on the subject of torture but it's never lit any particular fires in my soul. Yes, it's wrong. It is. But I instinctively look at the issue through a more pragmatic lens.

Everyone loves to cite the dramatic "24" scenario where a bad guy is tortured until he reveals, with three seconds to spare, the location of a hidden nuclear bomb... saving every man, woman, and child in Los Angeles. Isn't torture justified then? I suppose under such a fantastic, fictional circumstance I'd be able to live with myself.

But real life torture is more likely to entail rounding up a group of suspect characters, spiriting them away uncharged and untried to parts unknown, and torturing them until you're satisfied that they don't know anything about anything you're interested in. See the difference?

So of course I found the recent Bush prison confession to be of interest. Supposedly some kind of brilliant political maneuver, Bush has admitted the existence of secret CIA prisons and the use of lawful torture methods and added that, oh, by the way, the torture has yielded incredible life saving results.

But has it really?

Public documents show that some of the information that led to the arrests of senior terrorism plotters like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh was known before the C.I.A. detained its first prisoner, Mr. Zubaydah, in the spring of 2002.

Mr. Bush said it was Mr. Zubaydah who disclosed to C.I.A. interrogators that Mr. Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and often used the alias Mukhtar, sometimes spelled Muktar.

“This was a vital piece of intelligence that helped our intelligence community pursue K.S.M.,” Mr. Bush said, referring to the terror suspect by his initials.

The report of the Sept. 11 commission said that the C.I.A. knew of the moniker for Mr. Mohammed months before the capture of Mr. Zubaydah.

According to the report, the C.I.A. unit given the task of tracking Osama bin Laden had intercepted a cable on Aug. 28, 2001, that revealed the alias of Mr. Mohammed.

Mr. Bush also said it was the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah that identified Mr. bin al-Shibh as an accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.

American officials had identified Mr. bin al-Shibh’s role in the attacks months before Mr. Zubaydah’s capture. A December 2001 federal grand jury indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, said that Mr. Moussaoui had received money from Mr. bin al-Shibh and that Mr. bin al-Shibh had shared an apartment with Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot.

And when we're done quibbling over what bits of truthiness we've been able to extract via torture, let's take a look at what happens when torture extracts bits of untruthiness:

One of the men, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, is believed to have given false information about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda after C.I.A. officials transferred him to Egyptian custody in 2002. Mr. al-Libi’s statements were used by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

It emerged later that Mr. al-Libi had fabricated these stories while in captivity to avoid harsh treatment by his Egyptian captors.

Unless you live within an episode of "24", it just doesn't seem to make sense to make torture the cornerstone of your counter terrorism program.