What Others Say About Torture

Rich Lowry, National Review:

If Dick Cheney had a fantasy scenario for how the Bush administration interrogation program worked, it might go like this: A top-level al-Qaida operative is captured, but resists traditional interrogation. He is then waterboarded, after which he becomes an invaluable resource. Eventually, the terrorist conducts tutorials on al-Qaida doctrine and operations for the benefit of American intelligence officers.

Except it's not a fable. It describes the course of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's post-capture career, according to The Washington Post. The Post report, together with CIA documents released during the past week, demolishes a key argument of opponents of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques -- that "'torture' never works."

This contention always betrayed an insecurity. For all their thundering about the criminal immorality of coercive interrogations, opponents never dared admit that they could have elicited important, perhaps lifesaving, information. They treated it as a kind of metaphysical impossibility . . . .

On this front, the release of the 2004 Central Intelligence Agency inspector general report -- declassified thanks to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit -- has been a disaster for them. In the intelligence business, it's called blowback.

. . .

When the Twin Towers were still smoldering and we were getting color-coded threat alarms, few would have objected to hanging al-Qaida boss Khalid Sheik Mohammed by his thumbs from the Capitol rotunda. Now that such fears have greatly receded, in large part because of the efforts of U.S. soldiers and intelligence agents, at least some citizens are appalled by the idea that CIA interrogators actually frightened captive terrorists during questioning.

National security tends to shoulder aside all other concerns when we feel threatened -- think internment camps for Japanese Americans . . . .When we felt more threatened, the Bush administration brushed aside noble procedural concerns, making the big and entirely predictable mistake of licensing (via questionable legal memos and secret findings) some nasty methods of interrogation. This has always produced widespread abuse, and did so again. To its credit, that administration quietly reversed itself when it realized the damage it had done. Military interrogators working in Iraq and Afghanistan saw an abrupt turnabout after 2004, when the outrages at Abu Ghraib were revealed. Harsh tactics were forbidden, and some of the worst offenders were prosecuted and punished.

How much further do we wish to go in correcting these missteps? . . . Punishing Republican officials for aggressively reaching, even overreaching, in this effort to protect this country would satisfy certain of Obama's fringe supporters, but would outrage most Americans.

. . .

On the one hand, this is a nation of laws. If torture violates U.S. law -- and it does -- and if Americans engaged in torture -- and they did -- that cannot be ignored, forgotten, swept away. When other nations violate human rights, the United States objects and insists on some accounting. It can't ask less of itself.

Yet this is also a nation where two political parties compete civilly and alternate power peacefully. Regimes do not seek vengeance, through the courts or otherwise, as they succeed each other. Were Obama to criminally investigate his predecessor for what George W. Bush believed to be decisions made in the national interest, it could trigger a debilitating, unending cycle . . . .

There is a better, though not perfect, solution, one that the administration reportedly considered, rejected and should consider again: a high-level, respected commission to examine the choices made in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and their consequences.

Such a commission would investigate not just the Bush administration but the government, including Congress. It would give former vice president Dick Cheney a forum to make his case on the necessity of "enhanced interrogation techniques." It would examine the efficacy of such techniques, if any, and the question of whether, even if they work, waterboarding and other methods long considered torture ever can be justified.