CIA agents once played rough with possibly 30 terrorists, and maybe they shouldn’t have, but they saved American lives that way. And if you say no, no, a thousand times no to playing rough in the future, you may be saying yes to thousands of deaths.
Admit that, at least, says Michael Hayden, a former CIA director whose voice on the subject is one of the clearest, most reasonable and knowledgeable you’re likely to hear. If you are against harsh, coercive interrogation techniques under any and all circumstances, that may be an honorable, courageous stance, he says, but only if you concede there could be a cost in American fatalities.
In releasing previously classified documents on the treatment of terrorists, the Obama administration admitted no such thing, of course, and its cheerleaders are practically doing back-flips to make the opposite point – that tough-guy methods produce no useful information. That’s hokum.
As Hayden said on TV and wrote in a Wall Street Journal piece co-authored by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the questioning of these prisoners is a complicated, multi-faceted proceeding in which certain controversial techniques have helped produce facts crucial to protecting citizens.
The two noted that we have specific knowledge of how the techniques helped thwart murderous plots – there’s not a lot of guesswork necessary here. Any pretense otherwise is a disingenuous dodge, no matter how often we are piously instructed that “torture doesn’t work.”
Torture? That, of course, is the word du jour. But was it torture to deprive people of sleep or shove them against a wall engineered to cause no harm or to put a man fearful of insects in cramped quarters with a caterpillar? Frightening and unpleasant and even downright nasty, sure. But torture? These techniques are a large remove from how the word has been traditionally used and how it has been defined under law.
