With publication of the Senate report on torture as practiced by U.S. intelligence operatives in Iraq, the relationship between interrogation and torture again raises its ugly head.
"Again," because it's not new (but it's still ugly!). Torture as a means of obtaining information is probably as old as man himself. But it's one of those issues on which, over time, human thinking has evolved, and remains in evolution. I doubt those guardians of faith/morality who conducted the Spanish Inquisition had qualms about torture, that they would have felt the need to put out a report about it, OR that if they had, the peasants would have much cared.
Today, however, we have different standards and expectations. So despite the well-founded concern that publishing the report may lead to violent reactions and innocent deaths in various quarters, I think it's the right thing to do.
Right doesn't mean effective, of course. We will suffer some setbacks in prestige, some erosion of diplomatic and intelligence relationships, probably some attacks on US interests overseas or at home, and I doubt we'll get much credit for doing so (possibly to some degree philosopically or historically).
I doubt even more that it will necessarily end the practice. How many reports did we have about our adventure in VietNam, and how long did it take us to forget them? (Answer: less than a generation.)
As an Army intelligence officer, I was trained as a prisoner interrogator. As officers, we were taught all the proper Geneva-convention-type rules concerning humane treatment of POWs, as well as the mantras that we're hearing again today: that violence doesn't really work, that torture will just produce false results, that psychological persuasion is more effective and humane.
Let's assume that's all true. It may be. But, leaving aside cases where an adrenalin rush causes an interrogator to lose control (and undoubtedly there are some of those): If your job is to extract information, how strongly does morality weigh in a decision to use force? Can pressure from above affect the relative weight assigned to it? (And by the way, what is the pscyhological makeup of a person in today's volunteer military on paramilitary who becomes an interrogator?) The interrogator, his IPW (Interrogation of Prisoners of War) section chief, the Intel Detachment CO, the Division Commander, and right on up the chain to the SecDef and the President -- it's essentially an individual moral decision that has to be made at each level.
As for Abu Ghraib, I would guess the failure of that moral decision was at the top -- a high pressure to get results, regardless of method, which was made very clear down the line, so that individuals at the blood-and-guts level would have had to be saints to resist it, even if they were so inclined. That is not, however, to excuse the lower echelons. Saints do exist (Rome tells us), and in between, at senior Agency levels, it is difficult to imagine that they framed the issue to then-President Bush as "well, we can use torture, but it probably won't get us any reliable intel." I think not.
We can train and persuade people to make better, more humane decisions, but there will always be those who think that certain issues (e.g. national security) trump the moral ones. And there will likely always be some who don't see a moral issue at all, who are just torturers by nature. It's right to publish the report, but bad decisions will still be made.
I count myself lucky that I was never confronted with making these decisions myself. Despite being trained (for all of six weeks) in this arcane art, my subsequent assignment in VietNam was to an unrelated job. In a typically bureaucratic outcome, I never actually interrogated anybody in "real life." (Whew!)
