The Need to Justify Torture

Within hours of Osama bin Laden's death, the carrion crows of torture were cawing that it was their toughness that made his discovery possible. They are lying. I say this with complete confidence even though the debate over which statements were crucial, and which ones were made after the detainees were roughed up, continues to sputter on and will probably never be settled. I have this confidence because of the variable of time. When pressed to justify torture, advocates always fall back on some kind of "ticking time bomb" scenario; torture, they say, is necessary to get information from prisoners quickly. They use this ruse because all interrogators know that given enough time, they can get most men to reveal a great deal. They key is patience. By gradually building rapport with prisoners over months or even years, skillful interrogators can extract much more from most men than can gotten by any kind of abuse. When al Qaeda operatives were caught in the early years after 9-11, they were tortured because the US was trying to uncover the operational details of plots currently in motion. So far as we know, no such active plots were exposed by those methods. Information was obtained from some of the tortured men that helped US investigators reconstruct the command hierarchy of al Qaeda and understand its operations, and perhaps (this is unclear) help identify the courier who eventually led us to bin Laden. But that information had no immediate relevance. Its use came years later, when we finally knew enough to track down bin Laden. There is no evidence whatsoever that torture can extract information that cannot be obtained by slow, patient questioning, and since, as it turns out, we had years to work with these men, their torture was nothing but unjustifiable, criminal cruelty.

The crows of false triumph are the cries of guilty conscience. The criminals who advocated torture are using the killing of bin Laden, years after their time of power, as justification for their evil deeds. Don't listen to them.