Military Interrogator: Torture isn't Operationally Effective

Posted by Damozel | I can't believe citizens of this country are still debating this issue.  But yesterday, Professor Alan Dershowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, presented the Democrats with a poser---a/k/a "the ticking time bomb scenario."  TPM: "The ticking-bomb case -- depending on where you sit on the torturet question -- is either the hardest test of someone's sense of balance between human rights and national security or a rhetorical trap designed to box opponents of torture into saying that it's better for Sheboygan to be nuked than someone be waterboarded."

Today in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Representative Trent Franks of Arizona---who says he is against torture--- presented U.S. Air Force Reserve Colonel Steve Kleinman, a longtime military interrogator and intelligence officer, with this Socratic .  If you capture an uncooperative detainee whom you (somehow) know has knowledge of an imminent attack, may you torture him if you can't get the information any other way? 

According to TPM, Kleinman said that torture is the wrong call. "[I]t'd be unneccesary to conduct our affairs outside the boundaries...." According to him, experience "proves the legal and moral concerns to be almost immaterial, because what we'd need to do to be operationally effective" wouldn't involve torture.  (TPM)

And in fact, this is what SERE's instructors teach their students:  that information gained under torture is unreliable.   All the torture experts who have come forward to speak have said that this is so.  In other words, waterboarding---besides being morally reprehensible---is regarded by those who know as a waste of time.

Yesterday, Professor Alan Dershowitz made the absurd and quite shameful argument that the experts who say waterboarding and other such techniques don't work are clearly wrong, and why?  Because the Nazis---whose expertise no one can question---effectively used torture against certain members of the French resistance to get reliable information.  So now we're meant to be getting guidance on effective interrogation technology from the Nazis, are we?  I see. 

Malcolm Nance, an instructor at SERE,  has news about interrogation technology for Alan Dershowitz and others who think we need a loophole for waterboarding in case of ticking time bombs:

Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful" in interrogation, Nance says. SERE's historical memory goes back to the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed "enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, "after Guantanamo, I thought, how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?"

Nance remarks, "Two centuries of knowledge were thrown out the window" when the administration decided after 9/11 that, to use Cofer Black's famous phrase, "the gloves come off." What administration officials mistakenly thought, Nance says, is that "these were actually gloves, not empirical data. Dude, it's not a glove. It's a fact. But they thought it was one more tool in the tool box."

The result, Nance says, is that al-Qaeda now has, essentially, its own SERE school in U.S. detention facilities, as released detainees have given numerous accounts of their interrogations. What's more, he warns that the world is about to see an uptick in the use of torture as "cops in Bogota, everyone" now believes that the U.S. has lent torture its imprimatur -- or, at least, isn't in a credible position to criticize foreign countries' human rights abuses. He says he's testifying in part to help his old comrades in SERE, which he sees as a vital tool for training U.S. troops. "SERE needs to be increased," Nance insists, "but what needs to be stopped is the transfer of SERE techniques to official interrogations."  (TPM)

Memeorandum has more here: Discussion: Think Progress and The Carpetbagger Report

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Comments

[BlueMax372]

I think the good colonel is only a supervisor of interrogators. He should defer to the analysts as to whether or not his techniques are effective.

[BlueMax372]

I think the good colonel is only a supervisor of interrogators. He should defer to the analysts as to whether or not his techniques are effective.

[cockney robin]

This would be a convincing argument only if 'the good colonel' had been the only person with knowledge of interrogation techniques to come forward. There have been many. In case of doubt, maintaining the moral high ground requires us to resolve any question in favor of not using morally repugnant (Mukasey's words) methods.