What Keeps Us Safe?

Amy Davidson at Close Read:

It’s a bit hard to follow the arguments Cheney et al. are making about how the near-miss over Detroit on Christmas Day shows that we really need to waterboard people and lock them up in places like Guantanamo. This is especially odd because, in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, we seem to have had the raw intelligence we needed we needed, and just didn’t use it intelligently—it was more a failure of reading comprehension than information gathering. (It might also have helped to read his Facebook page.)

More important: look at the way we got that intelligence. It wasn’t by illegally tapping phones, or snatching some guys off the street, or beating it out of them. We got it because someone in Nigeria respected, trusted, and cared enough for the safety of the United States to walk into our Embassy and alert officials there to what his son might do. A cousin told the Times that Abdulmutallab’s father showed C.I.A. agents his son’s text messages from Yemen. Would he have done so if he believed that our default reaction would be to throw his child into a secret prison and torture him? What is it that keeps us safe?

I think our security depends a great deal on the willingness of people around the world -- Nigerian parents, Pakistani police officers, Saudi bureaucrats, Russian spies -- to go out of their way to help us. And the more we torture and bomb, the less willing anyone will be to stay late at work to make that phone call or read that report about a possible terrorist attack on America.