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CAMPOS: By fear corrupted

By Paul Campos, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 12, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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The news the CIA destroyed tapes of interrogations during which al-Qaida operatives were tortured has elicited little public reaction. This apparent lack of concern helps explain the behavior of several leading Democratic members of Congress back in 2002, when they were briefed on the potential use of waterboarding and similar techniques to extract information from terrorist suspects.

With the exception of a letter to the CIA written by Rep. Jane Harman of California, these Democrats seem to have raised no objection to making it United States government policy to torture terrorist suspects (it's worth emphasizing these techniques have been used on people who not only haven't be convicted of any crimes, but who in some cases turned out to be innocent altogether).

There are three distinct arguments against torture: it's illegal, it's immoral, and it doesn't work. The first is the easiest to dismiss, since, like any great power, the United States only pays attention to international law when its government believes it's in the nation's interest to do so.

In any case, nothing is easier than to find lawyers such as University of California law professor John Yoo and now-federal Judge Jay Bybee - advocates who informed President Bush that, in their view, waterboarding isn't really torture, and that, furthermore, laws prohibiting the president from torturing the nation's enemies might well be unconstitutional.

As for the morality of torture, disputes about fundamental moral principles are famously impossible to resolve. The moral axiom that there are certain things it's never permissible to do, and that torturing a human being is one of them, can never be proven, no matter how self-evident it may appear to those who agree with it.

Which brings us to the third objection to torture - that it doesn't work.

Consider the case of Abu Zubadyah, one of the men tortured in the interrogations recorded on the destroyed tapes. Zubadyah turned out not to be any sort of terrorist mastermind, but rather a low-level operative who had almost no useful information to confess to his tormentors. (The agent who led the interrogation has claimed torturing Zubadyah did produce evidence of various genuine plots, but there is no independent evidence for his claims).

He was also - or perhaps he became in the course of his interrogation - seriously mentally ill. Nevertheless Zubadyah was waterboarded, threatened with certain death, kept awake continuously for days at a time, and otherwise tortured, until he started "confessing" to his involvement in an amazing variety of terrorist plots. Zubadyah claimed he was involved in plots to blow up the Statue of Liberty, to attack shopping malls, to blow up water treatment plants and the Brooklyn Bridge, to sabotage nuclear facilities, and so on. Each of these "confessions" led to a massive waste of law enforcement resources, as various state and federal agencies rushed to avert the imaginary plots Zubadyah described.

Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly sums it up nicely: "we brutally tortured an al-Qaida operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical 'confessions' under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and law enforcement personnel."

It would be an exaggeration to say torture never works. But it is, to say the least, unclear whether the practical costs of cases like Zudabyah's outweigh the benefits of the occasionally useful piece of information torture elicits.

That an immoral policy which also doesn't work has been embraced by both major parties is a sad comment on the extent to which fear has corrupted both our leaders and ourselves.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

Comments

  • December 13, 2007

    7:23 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Spencer writes:

    We should try waterboarding Bush and Cheney to find out why they started a bogus war. It isn't torture afterall.

  • December 15, 2007

    5:20 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Rangerjoe1 writes:

    Sorry compost. I think I'll wait for the real, (in your words)independent evidence, than to believe any of your evidence on any thing you say. I will just keep serching as you do for evidence that prove my conclusion. Should we have gotten "Independent evidence" when that reporter got his head remove by those obvious innocent enemys of ours. Keep being "warm and fuzzy" to the enemys that want to kill us.

  • December 16, 2007

    11:45 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    gary writes:

    I agree...no torture...let's just do to them that they do to us.. off with thier heads. Nice and simple..can you understand that Campos??

    Oh I forgot..Campos loves his enemies!!!