Who Cares Whether Torture Is "Effective"?

(updated below--twice)

Dick Cheney and his merry band of torture apologists have momentarily succeeded in steering the media into a debate about whether the various techniques authorized by the Bush administration were "effective." This is deeply exasperating, for a number of reasons.

First, and most obviously, it's completely irrelevant. Torture is categorically prohibited by numerous laws and treaties. It's illegal. Indeed, it's a war crime. Ethnic cleansing may also be an "effective" way of accomplishing certain strategic goals, but that doesn't make it any less reprehensible or illegal. There are all kinds of "effective" strategies and techniques that are foreclosed by the law and by international treaty.

I mean think about this for a second. Suppose we concede, for the sake of argument, that waterboarding is an effective way of getting information out of people. Well, if it is, then logically other more brutal torture techniques should be just as effective, if not more so. After all, it's the same mechanism, the same motivational strategy being employed, right? Is there some point along the spectrum of torture where it ceases to be "effective"? The reality is that the "effectiveness" argument proves too much. If you accept effectiveness as the relevant criterion, then anything goes.

The reason torture is illegal in the first place has nothing to do with effectiveness and everything to do with basic understandings of human rights and human dignity, ones that many of us, until recently, didn't know were in dispute in this country and at this point in history.

Moreover, even if we were starting from a blank slate and we could simply ignore the fact that techniques like waterboarding are proscribed by numerous laws and treaties, to make a policy case for the use of such techniques, you would have to do much more than establish that they occasionally have produced actionable intelligence. Among other things, you would have to prove that 1) such information could not have been extracted using other means, 2) that the misinformation produced by such methods doesn't overwhelm the accurate information to the point of rending the whole exercise pointless, 3) that the strategic costs of using such techniques (international outrage, increased radicalization of the Muslim world, increased danger to U.S. troops, etc.) don't outweigh the benefits, and 4) the value of the information produced is worth the tradeoff of never being able to use that information (or the fruits thereof) in court and severely jeopardizing any hope of ever convicting that individual in any constitutionally compliant legal proceeding.

So even if we all check our moral faculties at the door (and choose to ignore the law), the defenders of these techniques have come nowhere close to making a compelling policy case for their continued use.

UPDATE: Somewhat off point, but yesterday Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner published an email from a reader that made the following "point":

Regarding the differences in SERE and actual interrogation, your second correspondent and William Saletan make a very similar mistake. They both insist that key difference is that interrogation is an involuntary exercise while SERE is voluntary. On the contrary, all the suspect has to do is cooperate with his interrogators and the ordeal will be over.

Saletan puts it this way: "Fifth and most important, SERE is voluntary. 'Students can withdraw from training,' Ogrisseg noted. In a report issued four months ago, the Armed Services Committee added that in SERE, 'students are even given a special phrase they can use to immediately stop' any ordeal.” Terrorists under interrogation have a similar phrase: It’s called, “I’ll talk.” Similarly, your second correspondent says, “These are profound differences from the situation of a prisoner, who can't opt out, and for whom the whole experience is counter-instrumental to their goals.” The first part of this is incorrect, the target can opt out at any point he wants by providing the information.

Ponnuru adds at the end that he "agrees with most of this." Good grief. So we're to believe that it took 183 sessions on the waterboard before KSM finally cracked and decided to cooperate? Please. Anyone who has read even a fraction of the news coverage of these practices knows how soul-crushingly stupid and counterfactual this argument is. First, as a matter of common sense, torturers don't stop just because you tell them you'll talk. They only stop (if you're lucky) when they believe that you've told them everything you know (or, all too often, everything they want to hear). It's all based on their perception, not yours. Second, virtually every published report so far has made it clear that the CIA interrogators were ordered by higher ups to continue with interrogations well beyond the point where they believed they had extracted all the information out of these people. Indeed, Zubayda was reportedly fully cooperative before any torture began. In other words, to get the torture to stop you not only have to convince your immediate interrogators that you're fully cooperative, you have to convince their superiors, people like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who aren't even in the room and who are desperate for information that will support their policy objectives and buttress their pre-conceptions. People who are being tortured, by definition, have no control over their circumstances. That's the whole point.

UPDATE II: In the comments below, Tom Maguire writes:

We have waterboarded tens of thousands of US servicemen in SERE school (by way of comparison, none have been subjected to cattle prods to the genitals, to my knowledge). Was that "torture"?

Can we please dispense with this ridiculous argument? First, SERE was created to help U.S. servicemen withstand torture by our enemies. That's the whole point. Second, and more importantly, there is all the difference in the world between consensual training and forced interrogation. It's the difference between sex and rape, suicide and murder. Thousands of people consent to having others whip them. Does that mean that we can whip detainees? Does it mean that whipping people isn't torture? Please stop with this nonsense.