9/11 was a real watershed in American interrogation of prisoners and detainees. There was a legal
problem: who should hold those people and who should interrogate them. It was the
U.S. military that held lots of prisoners during wartime that had the experience.
Rumsfeld just said no. The military will not do this. Once he said no,
CIA was the only choice they had. Before 9/11, the CIA wasn't in this business at all.
I don't want to blame these people, but there was no plan. So this was improvised.
For the first roughly three quarters of a year, it was badly done by the standards the
people in charge themselves had set up.
That's when one prisoner held by the CIA was killed.
Because the CIA was running it on the fly, and as the leadership has said
I don't think anyone's disputed it, they didn't have the sort of management
supervision in place. As the interrogations we were doing started
to seep out into the public, the term enhanced interrogation techniques became adopted.
It referred to a set of very tough techniques including shackling
people in stress positions, throwing cold water on them when they were nude and keeping them
in quite cold rooms, slapping them, pushing them against walls, and of course what's
best known, waterboarding. Torture is illegal. It's illegal under several
international treaties; it's illegal under American domestic law. And the
government went to great lengths to define torture in a way that did not
include the enhanced interrogation techniques. And many people like myself
just feel that's a linguistic evasion. But we have to realize that the
government didn't do what you might call heavy torture--
they didn't pull out people's fingernails. Because the people in charge--CIA,
the cabinet, and the president--felt we don't torture, and even if that would work
these are things we wouldn't do.
The main arguments on morality of EITs are whether they are, if not technically torture,
the sort of brutality that the U.S. or any civilized country shouldn't engage in.
The American use of these enhanced techniques has been condemned around the world. And in the end
it is hard to know for sure whether these techniques were effective.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had an enormous staff report on this,
ended up saying that these were ineffective. But the argument is really much more difficult.
My judgment is that it was effective in the sense that it did bring in valuable information.
Now perhaps you could have gotten that information, and even maybe quicker or better,
if you hadn't used the brutal methods. That we'll never know.
We need to think about the hard question: what if they're immoral but actually are effective?
Right now the prohibition against enhanced interrogation techniques
is in an executive order by President Obama. Obama could repeal his order,
or disregard it, or a new president could do that.
I don't envy the people sitting around the table next time
because they do have to worry, "oh my god, what if there is
information out there that we could have gotten and we didn't
and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Americans died."
But the leaders do have their consciences. What are our standards of morality?
What are we as a government, as a people, willing to do to protect ourselves?