And Rightly So

January 19, 2010

When the infamous "torture memos" delineating the "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved by the Bush administration were released by the Obama administration, and you could get a better look at what exactly we had done, I was actually somewhat relieved. Until that point, I'd had a vague impression that unspeakable horrors had been perpetrated by our agents and authorized by our government. Patriotic Americans, and particularly conservatives, don't want us using the very same techniques (or the very same arguments from moral expediency -- that a good enough end justifies any means) as we condemn when our enemies use them.

But the actual "torture memos" seemed to demonstrate that the folks in the Bush administration were doing their best to avoid actually harming our prisoners while still putting as much pressure on them as they believed they were justified in using, in order to live up to their responsibility to stop future attacks. They tried to draw a clear line between torture and real physical harm, on the one hand, and, on the other, techniques that were only somewhat painful and very frightening, but not really damaging. The details of some of the approved techniques -- particularly "walling," in which the prisoner (his neck having been carefully supported against the possibility of whiplash) is slammed into a specially constructed soft wall -- seemed to demonstrate that our government was going to extraordinary lengths to treat our enemies humanely.

Now, the officials making these decisions may not have drawn that moral line in exactly the right place. I'm still disturbed by some of the approved methods -- lengthy sleep deprivation even more than waterboarding -- aside from, of course, deploring the grotesque abuses, as at Abu Ghraib, that never were approved.

But whatever the effect on us of the release of those "torture memos," it seems clear that their publication is not going to make Americans safer. That's the burden of Marc Thiessen's book, our Main Selection this month. Thiessen, as the White House speechwriter charged with defending "enhanced interrogation" to the public, probably knows more about it than anyone but the CIA agents who did the interrogations (and who aren't permitted to defend them in public). In Courting Disaster, Thiessen argues persuasively that the information we got from these methods -- and that we didn't get or wouldn't have gotten by using only gentler ones -- has allowed us to stop attacks that would have killed large numbers of Americans. And that the world is going to be a more dangerous place now that the terrorists know exactly how far we were ever willing to go in interrogations -- and that we've pulled back from that point.

Of course the effectiveness of an interrogation method is no justification for it if it's wrong in itself. But are these methods certainly wrong? Thiessen addresses the moral argument as well. I don't think his reasoning here (particularly on "double effect") is as persuasive as in the practical case, but he seems to be right in pointing to casuistry -- careful case-by-case reasoning about the morality of different particular acts -- as the right method for approaching the problem. It's no good just throwing up your hands, saying you refuse to touch this filth with a ten-foot pole, and declaring that anyone who wants to make gradated distinctions among interrogation techniques is a torture apologist. Is dismembering a prisoner on the wrack always wrong? Yes. Is waterboarding? That seems less clear. What about "walling"? I rather doubt it. Yelling at him? Surely not. Unless the only moral way to treat actual terrorists, who are not supposed to be beneficiaries of the Geneva Conventions, is to ask them their name, rank, and serial number and leave it at that -- even in a ticking time bomb scenario -- then it's worth discussing exactly where the lines are between right and wrong in these cases. Marc Thiessen's book is a valuable contribution to that conversation.