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Recently there’s been a good deal of lively debate concerning the effectiveness of Bush’s torture program; i.e. does it and did it work or not? This may be referred to as the expediency question.
Interviews of those with experience in acquiring information from prisoners suggest that torture is not a very effective way of doing so; however it can be effective in getting someone to say what you want him to say.
Bush can not have been unaware of these facts; yet by his own admission he approved of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques." Why?
On April 22 McClatchy newspapers reported that a former senior US intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist said that the Bush people wanted "to find evidence of cooperation between al-Qaeda and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime" and that "for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were demanding proof of the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and others had told them were there."
We’ve learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded by the CIA 183 times and Abu Zubaydah 83 times to get them to say (apparently without success) that Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda.
McClatchy News further reported that the Bush administration sent Ibn Sheikh al Libi to Egypt for "further debriefing" and after being beaten repeatedly and locked in a small box for some 17 hours he "confessed" that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda in the use of chemical weapons - he later retracted his statement. The CIA dismissed his confession, calling it unreliable intelligence.
But Bush had what he wanted - a confession (albeit a false one) that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were linked. This was a major point in Colin Powell’s presentation (later debunked) to the U.N. in the lead-up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
So, to the question: "Does torture work?" The answer is an equivocal "Yes and no" depending on your purposes. It very likely will not save us from the "ticking bomb," but every despot knows that it can be an effective tool for extracting politically useful (but false) "confessions" as a basis for contriving a consensus among the people to follow him in whatever mad scheme he has planned .
Another question is :"Is torture ever morally justifiable?" Of course this question has no meaning for those who would never consider asking it, but for the rest of us it is even more important than the expediency question discussed above.
I’m guessing that most people reading these remarks subscribe to some form of ethical or moral code of behavior, whether theologically or philosophically based or maybe just out of some intuitive sense of fairness.
I’m further supposing that that moral code includes some form of the "golden rule": "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
With that in mind it is difficult (I believe impossible) to reconcile the torturing of another person with such a moral code and that consequently torture is never morally justifiable.
The third question is: "Is torture legal?" This is the easiest one to answer. In both American and International law the answer is an unqualified: "No! Torture is not legal under any circumstances."
There is sufficient evidence already available to convene a grand jury to indict and subsequently try Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Rice, Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Feith, Haynes and perhaps others. We, as a nation of laws, must do this to remove the stain these men have brought upon all of us. If we fail to do so we will for generations be regarded as an international pariah and a rogue state.
