Mr. Cheney, Can You Please Shut Up Already?

Two weeks ago, Dick Cheney gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in order to rebuke President Obama's vision of the role of the federal government with regard to its duty to provide for national security. While on one hand no one can fault Cheney for putting forth a passionate argument in support of his position, the fact remains that his position is seriously misguided. Cheney committed a number of factual errors during his unnecessary rant. One of the most egregious of these errors can be seen in the following statement: "In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations." With this statement, Cheney asserted that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, facilitated the administration's ability to obtain accurate and useful information regarding potential terrorist activities on U.S. soil and abroad. In other words, Cheney holds that the use of interrogation techniques amounting to torture, at least under the definition adopted by the UN Convention Against Torture, has produced vital intelligence information which in turn has saved countless American lives. The key flaw inherent in this line of reasoning is that Cheney has failed to produce any tangible evidence whatsoever to justify his assertion that this program of enhanced interrogation techniques has produced beneficial results from the perspective of the American intelligence community.

In fact, the administration's program of "enhanced" interrogation techniques was unwisely modeled after a program developed by the CIA during the Korean War, known as the SERE program. During the war, Communist forces tortured captured American troops in order to produce propaganda films of troops confessing to brutal crimes. The CIA knew that the confessions were false and that they had been coerced through the interrogation proceedings, and thus the CIA was looking for a way to prevent the spread of such propaganda in the future. Therefore, in light of these coerced confessions, the SERE program was established in order to put trainees through simulated torture in order to build up their resistance.

When the Bush administration was debating which methods should be used in order to interrogate suspected terrorists, it ultimately decided to adopt the same methods used by the Koreans to torture American troops. As stated by the head of the U.S. Southern Command, General James T. Hill, administration officials tapped the “SERE School and developed a list of techniques." However, in approving of these interrogation techniques, the Bush administration failed to consider the fact that they were not developed for informational purposes: rather, they were only used by the Koreans in order to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes. Therefore, the SERE techniques were mistakenly applied by the Bush administration under the misconception that their use would produce valuable intelligence. Even the CIA itself had conceded in a 1963 interrogation manual that the coercive approach was not conducive to obtaining reliable information because “under sufficient pressure subjects usually yield but their ability to recall and communicate information accurately is as impaired as the will to resist."

To make matters even worse for the administration’s program, in the years since the authorization of the harsh interrogation techniques it has become apparent that the officials charged with implementing the techniques were not well-trained, and were unaware of both the origins and practical limitations of the SERE techniques. Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage reports that the interrogators did not understand that “the coercive techniques used in the program were designed to make prisoners lose touch with reality so that they will falsely confess to what their captors want to hear, not for extracting accurate and reliable information." Thus, the Bush administration’s approval of the SERE techniques illustrates that the proponents of torture have significantly underestimated the difficulty of both establishing an effective torture practice, and then properly training and equipping a professional torture force. At least at the current point in time, the U.S. government has not yet been able to establish either of these two essential preconditions for the effective use of torture. As the example of the Bush administration serves to show, it is unlikely that such institutions will be adequately established within the near future as well.

As a result, Army Colonel Stuart Herrington, who conducted interrogations in Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, sternly asserts that torture should be outlawed under all circumstances. “Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply ‘not a good way to get information.’” In his experience, Herrington discovered that nine out of ten people can be persuaded to talk without using harsh techniques at all. In fact, Harrington implies that an inverse relationship exists between the severity of the interrogational techniques used and the reliability of the information obtained: as the severity of the interrogation increases, the reliability of the information decreases because torturing a prisoner undermines the ability of the interrogator to build a rapport with him. According to the Navy’s top forensic psychologist, Dr. Michael Gelles, the rapport-building approach to conducting interrogations is far superior to the adversary approach, at least from the perspective of attempting to obtain accurate intelligence. Thus, we can conclude from this discussion that torture is an effective means of gathering information. However, the information obtained through the application of torture will likely serve no practical use, on account of the fact that its accuracy is uncertain.

Therefore, contrary to Cheney's assertion, these techniques were clearly not well tailored toward the important goal of obtaining accurate information about potential terrorist attacks. And what has been the ultimate result of this unfortunate reliance? Well in the run up to the war in Iraq, the administration's primary evidence for the necessity of invading Iraq turned out to be based on coerced evidence, which subsequently turned out to be false. When Colin Powell went before the UN and articulated the administration's case for invading Iraq, he showed the international community pictures of an Iraqi trailer that allegedly contained biological weaponry. This evidence was based on the confession procured from a captured terrorist, who stated, after being subjected to waterboarding and other enhanced techniques over a period of several weeks, that the trailer contained these weapons. The CIA later determined that the confession did not contain a word of truth in it.

Thus, the use of torture served to provide the administration with a fictitious justification which facilitated the administration's ability to commit the U.S. to battle in Iraq. Indirectly, the use of torture has led to the death of over 4,000 troops and nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians at this point in the war. In summation, instead of aiding the U.S. in its effort to defeat international terrorist organizations, the use of torture has actually been counterproductive insofar as it has served to spark the ire of the Muslim world, alienated our traditional European allies, and undermined the United States' position as the world's foremost superpower as the primary promoter of human rights and principles of justice throughout the entire world. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence against his position, Cheney still stated that, "We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans. Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations." This blanket assertion begs the question, in which specific instances did the use of waterboarding and similar techniques serve to produce reliable intelligence? Cheney has yet to provide an answer to this crucial inquiry. The facts on the issue of enhanced interrogation techniques are not merely what Mr. Cheney claims them to be, but rather can clearly be found in several reports published by the CIA and the military on the merits of using techniques such as waterboarding.

Sources:
Savage, Charlie. Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. 2007.
Applebaum, Ann. “The Torture Myth.” Washington Post. January 2005.