Back in December, as her swan song at the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein released a report written exclusively by Democratic staffers excoriating the CIA for torturing suspected terrorists and allegedly deceiving the executive and legislative branches about what it was up to. Feinstein’s report claimed that no useful information had been generated through coercive interrogations. Committee Republicans, along with the CIA itself, released blistering rebuttals denying that anyone had even been tortured, noting that senior executive branch and congressional leaders had been kept fully informed, and arguing that the information generated helped to track down Osama bin Laden.
A lot of ink was spilled in this battle royal by both sides. But the wisest commentary on this brouhaha arrives in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs in an essay written by Robert Jervis, an eminent political scientist at Columbia University who has also served as a CIA consultant. Jervis brilliantly exposes the pretensions of both sides, puncturing the Republicans’ argument that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not technically torture and the Democrats’ argument that nothing useful was learned from the interrogations.
Regarding the question of whether the CIA engaged in “torture,” he writes: “Prisoners went for days without sleep, often with their arms shackled to a bar overhead. Sometimes, handlers forced them to go to the bathroom in diapers (Bush expressed unease about this) and delivered food and water rectally (for medical reasons, the CIA claims). Whether these and other tactics, such as slapping or waterboarding, qualify as torture under the law remains subject to debate. But they certainly count as torture in the ordinary sense of the term.”
Regarding the question of whether the interrogations were “effective,” a point denied by the Democratic staffers, he writes, “On its face, that position is suspect. For it to be true, all 39 of the people the CIA tortured would have had to divulge everything useful they knew before being tortured or given up nothing once they were. In theory, it’s possible that’s what happened, but it seems unlikely, given the wide range of ways that different people respond to duress and pain. And if torture were uniformly ineffective, there would be no need for a treaty banning it—which the Geneva Conventions do.” Jervis goes on to note even if information derived through torture did not directly lead to bin Laden, it surely enabled the CIA to make sense of the mass of other information it had collected and pointed it in the right direction.
Jervis suggests we should stop debating whether enhanced interrogation techniques are actually torture and whether they worked, and start debating a harder but more meaningful question: “whether the interrogation program did more harm than good.” He notes: “Even if torture worked in the narrow sense, its costs might have outweighed its benefits: the negative global reaction to the CIA’s brutal methods decreased support for U.S. policies and may have helped terrorist groups win more sympathizers and recruits.”
Jervis is right to suggest that we need to have a grown-up conversation about the tradeoffs involved in employing torture instead of resorting to the simple, easy, and wrong talking points favored by partisans on both sides.
