Kathryn Bigelow, the Zero Dark Thirty director who has been attacked by senators and anti-war types for her portrayal of how enhanced interrogation helped intelligence officials track down Osama bin Laden, has published a very sharp response to her critics:
On a practical and political level, it does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in U.S. counter-terrorism policy and practices.
Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue. As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore. War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences. …
Bin Laden wasn’t defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.
From some reason, enhanced interrogation critics hate to admit that opposing these techniques for moral reasons and opposing them because they are ineffective are entirely independent arguments. You don’t see this reaction with other issues. For example, you can criticize Lance Armstrong’s steroid use without needing to claim that doping is ineffective. And people are generally aware that driving over the speed limit is a bad idea, without insisting that it won’t get them to their destination faster.
But enhanced interrogation opponents get offended whenever it’s pointed out that these tactics contributed to keeping America safe. They’re so intent on ignoring reality that they would prefer Hollywood rewrite history rather than acknowledge the benefits of enhanced interrogation. As Bigelow rightly notes, that historical revisionism is a disservice to the men and women of the CIA who put their lives at risk in the Global War on Terror. They deserve to have their stories portrayed accurately, not airbrushed to fit a political agenda.
"But enhanced interrogation opponents get offended whenever it’s pointed out that these tactics contributed to keeping America safe." n nI'm only offended by the euphemism. Call it what it is: torture. And then refrain from pontificating about the practice elsewhere. Finally, tell Senator McCain that his "America doesn't torture!" statement is out of date.
There is a difference between "enhanced interrogation" and "torture" — it is the same difference between being slightly overweight and being morbidly obese — while both are points on the same continuum, there is so much of a distinction between the two that they are not the same things. n nA woman who would look better in her swimsuit were she to loose 5-10 lbs versus the 400+ lb woman who requires special heavy-duty medical equipment because of her weight. Or a movie that shows a bare-breasted woman — even as part of a scene where it is clear that sexual intercourse is taking place — and graphic pornography. Even though children can't legally see either, there is a difference between a "R" rated movie and a "X" rated move. n nOne big distinction — "enhanced interrogation" neither kills people nor has lifelong physical consequences. The intent of "enhanced interrogation" is like that of the TASER — to not kill the person, to not create life-long disabilities.
Obama bombs people, crossing national boundaries, without reference to the War Powers Act, killing civilians, casually and cynically identifying anyone caught in the blast radius a "terrorist" (Blowback, anyone?) Far more children have been killed by Obama's drone-bombing than died at Newtown. Where's your damned outrage at that? No: people like you give him a pass. This is his substitute for enhanced interrogation. So I'll support specific, targeted (unlike his so called "surgical strike" drone-bombings) torture any time (I agree, let us call it what it is) over the President's whimsical acts of slaughter.
Here's a handy guide for determining whether a certain interrogation (sic) technique constitutes "torture": n nWould you or any Hollywood/Vanity Fair types volunteer to submit to the technique? n nWater-boarding: yes, many Hollywood/Vanity Fair types have volunteered to experience this. n nHaving a blowtorch applied to your flesh (à la Roberto Rossellini's famous film Open City): no one that I know of. n nBeing suspended by your arms, as experienced at Auschwitz and by American PoWs in Vietnam, which causes excruciating pain and damage to ligaments: no one that I know of. n nSee the difference?
The reason they have to deny its efficacy is because it is morally indefensible to prohibit waterboarding of known enemies – which is highly uncomfortable but non-lethal – when it is effective and saves many lives of innocents
Some of us, mostly on the Left, have trouble when logic interferes with politics. Torture may sometimes work, but it is a terrible thing. Armed school guards may save lives, but this admission doesn't mean that you're about to join the NRA. Iran may be planning to nuke Israel, but saying this doesn't make you a Jewish settler. AGW is real, but it might not really matter, and we may not be able to stop it. We do not live in a binary world. n
No sense to your comment. IT DOES WORK. IT DOES SAVE INNOCENT LIVES. Allen West used it to save his men's lives. He was punished for using it. His men and their families are grateful to him. I wouldn't fight for a country which would not do EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to defeat an evil enemy such as the Islamists.
You misunderstand me. nI don't believe that torture or enhanced interrogation techniques are ineffective. I was characterizing the opinion of those who say that it is wrong.
Allen West's case is different – what he did was prohibited. He intentionally broke a rule, being an honorable man admitted to what he did, and accepted the consequences of his actions — for the greater good of his men. In a way he sacrificed himself for his men — that is something quite different — quite honorable but also quite different. n nI have met him personally — not many politicians impress me but Allen West did — the man is the "real deal" — very bright, very well read, very principled — an honorable man. The ideal person for the GOP to have run against Obama, and who well might have been able to defeat Obama, but I digress….
A bit off topic but your point about Allen West is interesting. He didn't blame others. Makes for an interesting contrast.
I met him — in a private reception somewhere in DC (I was also rather lost but had managed to find where I was supposed to be) — and I can't emphasize enough the tragedy of him not being re-elected. I am very cynical, UMass does that to you, but Allen West impressed me.
Wow, Bigelow has a sharper understanding of waging war than half of Congress and a whole lot of the officials charged with doing it.
"And people are generally aware that driving over the speed limit is a bad idea, without insisting that it won’t get them to their destination faster." n nNot always. Most cars are most fuel efficient at a sustained 55 MPH and as the air resistance increases at speeds above that, have to burn correspondingly more gasoline. I refer to 80 MPH as the "Mile-Eating Eighty" — it really is as fast as you can go to cover any distance in the shortest period of time. Go any faster and your fuel consumption starts going through the roof — cars get quite thirsty at 85 MPH and for some reason at 88 MPH you are burning gas so quickly that you wind up spending more time getting off the highway and refueling than you saved by going faster. n nThus while it is a bad idea to drive 90 MPH — where you are going so fast that the lines on the highway now look wider than they are long and the standard car is nearly airborne, covering a mile every 45 seconds will sometimes get you there faster. But not always. n nBUT NOT ALWAYS — and that point needs to be remembered relative to everything from polite questioning to outright torture. n nCivilized people have rules of war — these were codified after the First World War into what is generally referred to as the Geneva Convention and civilized nations have signed such conventions (or most of them — the US refuses to sign the land mine one for some very legitimate reasons that could have been resolved if the anti-landmine folk had wanted to address the issue of abandoned live landmines instead of just hating America). n nOne of the big rules is that your soldiers wear a uniform, that they are always distinguishable from civilians, whom everyone agrees to leave alone. Terrorists – any form of asymetric warfare — s inherently in violation of the Geneva Conventions for this reason. You don't target civilians, you don't hide behind civilians (e.g. Hamas in Gaza), and your people are wearing some form of uniform when they do military stuff. n nOK, so we capture members of an opposing force who are wearing uniforms, in marked military vehicles, and they only attack members of our military – what would any of them know of value? Who their buddies are — we can't tell by the uniforms they would be wearing? Where they are — with our technology, *if* they are wearing uniforms and in marked vehicles, we probably can answer that question better than the prisoner. How many of them and how well equipped they are — again we probably have a more comprehensive ability to answer that then the prisoner, we can see the facial expressions of the guys driving the trucks, let along count how many broken headlights and such they have — he has no idea. n nYou have a military installation with barbed wire or more surrounding it, large flags flying and lots of guys & gals in uniform doing stuff inside it — it's not hidden and you don't need to torture someone to know where it is — particularly if you have spy satellites and people spending their entire careers analyzing and interpreting the pictures. Our people are good — very good — there is no need to torture some captured soldier to get information that quite likely will be less precise than what our folk in Langley and elsewhere already know. n nSo torture — demanding answers to your known questions — really won't give you anything from captured members of an organized military. John McCain's point — one spy satellite could have told the NVA more than he even knew (post shoot-down) about even his own carrier group. n nNow when you have your military hiding amidst and behind the civilian population, that becomes a different story. And my point is that one needs to ask what does the captured person have that you can beat out of him/her/it — and that point needs to be clearly made. n nAs does the point that almost anyone will eventually say anything to stop pain — the problem is that they literally will say *anything* and they will desperately try to please you which means they will tell you what they think you want to know. Even if it isn't true — this is how people confess to crimes they never committed, and why the police always hold back a few key but irrelevant facts about a crime, something that only someone who was actually at the scene would know, and if that isn't included in the confession, they know that the person didn't do it, confession notwithstanding. n nThere are other approaches to interrogation that — except when you are dealing with ideological fanatics — usually work much better. n nAs I understand it, we found Bin Laden because someone TOLD US where he was — and that someone was rewarded by being put into a Pakistani Prison for his efforts — two big mistakes on our part, we should have been more careful with our information in the first place, and second as Pakistan is technically an ally of us, we ought to demand that he and his family be released to us, and we put them somewhere at American expense. We need to make it damn clear that the Americans will "look out for" those who cooperate with them — and that is something that we are very much not doing, all the way down to abandoning the folk who interpreted for our military in Iraq.
At the risk of agreeing with the Left, I do have one more thing to say on both "enhanced interrogation" and outright torture — outside of the Islamic world/mentality where mercy is viewed as a sign of weakness (and we need to remember this), there is a lot to be said for being known as a decent and merciful people. There is an old saying that when you invade a country, right behind your tanks are trucks with uniformed soldiers tossing food out the back — as Machiavelli said, you want the people to love you. n nAmerica has a space program because the German rocket scientists — Von Braum and the rest — believed that the Americans would be nicer to them than the Soviets would be. They hiked some distance — memory is more than a hundred miles and Von Braun with a badly broken arm — so as to surrender to the American troops even though the rocket factories were in areas that the Soviets eventually captured. n nAs a result, America got all of the Nazi's rocket technology as well as the folks who had developed it, and all the way up through the massive Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo program. We couldn't have obtained this information via torture — what questions would the torturers have asked about a technology that they knew nothing about? And it took an additional 20 years of additional work to get to the Apollo program — we asked them not just what they knew in 1945 but to work for us for another 20 years to improve it — torture wouldn't accomplish that. n nOne other story involves why the Nazis didn't develop an atomic bomb (as Einstein and others feared they could and hence would). It appears that some highly distinguished German physics professor miscalculated the atomic weight of heavy water — a simple mathematical mistake doing something so simple that a college undergrad could do it — but because he was a Herr Doctor Professor, no one ever checked his figure and all of their research came to naught because they were starting with the wrong atomic weight of heavy water. n nI take this one step further — if the Nazis are holding your family hostage (possibly literally) and you are being forced to work for them but don't want to see the bomb built, what better way to sabotage it than making such a mistake of addition. The Nazi goons watching you aren't going to know anything about ANY of the math you are doing, and should someone point it out, you can simply calculate it out correctly and admit that they are right. This is why people have to want to help you — why things like torture really aren't all that effective….
You lost me when you apparently sympathized with the Nazi murderer Von Braun. Americans finally, recently, woke up the grave injustice of offering that Nazi murderer a welcome to our country. There were and are plenty of great engineers in this country. We did not need that Nazi for our progress. And I say that as an engineer and scientist who worked for JPL and Cal Tech for many decades.
I am trying to dodge the issue of the ethics of giving Von Braun a welcome to America because I genuinely don't know the facts — and my guess is that it is really complicated and I know that his hands were "not clean" — he had a lot to answer for. n nMy point was this: which would have been the more effective means of getting information out of him — torture or praise? Forget everything else, the sole question is that you want to get information — complicated information — from this man and you will "sell your soul" to get it, which is the best way to do so? n nI once wasn't even really trying and I got a UMass Police Officer to publicly admit that there had been a shooting on campus the night before — torture is NOT the best way to get information out of people….. n nMy point is not that the schmucks are nice people, but that pretending to like them is often far more effective than hurting them if you want information from them.
Alana writes, “opposing these techniques for moral reasons and opposing them because they are ineffective are entirely independent arguments.”
No, they are connected issues and the speed limit and steroid use parallels, fail.
Torture, because it uses cruelty against a helpless person, is immoral.
But the attempt to protect innocent people, is a moral good. It is therefore a question of whether that good can be realized and lives saved by resorting to torture. If however, it does not work, if torture is ineffective as a tool for preventing disaster, then it has no moral value and can’t be justified as trumping the immorality of torture.
The analogy with speeding on the highway fails because, though generally a bad idea, speeding can be justified when rushing a pregnant woman to the hospital. Steroid use is are a bad idea for winning a bike race, but not for fighting rejection in organ transfers, combating several cancers, osteoporosis etc.
This makes me feel better about our space program. n nEvery morning, when I take my blood pressure med, I can't help but think where some of that knowledge originated from and yes, that does bother me.
I would argue that the people who insisted on trying to court martial him and not just let him resign his commission (which he eventually was allowed to do) ought to be identified and held accountable.