Spencer Ackerman reports on some encouraging news from the executive task force on interrogations -- they've spent a great deal of time and effort researching interrogation methods, and they seem to be settling on a proposal for an interagency interrogation team that would eschew anything resembling torture, according to former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann:
Heymann said that interrogators from across the military, CIA, and FBI, would be charged with creating a “syllabus” of best interrogation practices that fall within the boundaries of the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogations, which complies with the Geneva Conventions. Heymann said that the social science research supporting the Intelligence Science Board's work ruled out all forms of physical and psychological torture as methods for soliciting information. “What I mean by ‘non-coercive' is in line with what our major allies do — Britain, France, other European nations — and not out of line with what's accepted by western nations,” Heymann said. “We would not do anything to other people that we would complain about if done to Americans abroad in other circumstances, we wouldn't do something we wouldn't do to an American in the U.S., and we would be pretty well in line with the views of our major allies,” a perspective adopted in order to ensure robust intelligence cooperation with U.S. allies concerned about torture can continue.
The debate over torture has generally been hijacked by Hollywood fantasies about torture's immediate effectiveness. The reality is that torture has a number of external consequences -- both domestic and international. The use of torture forced the FBI to withdraw its experienced interrogators and analysts in order to avoid breaking the law -- but internationally, torture made other foreign intelligence services wary of cooperating with us. Even if torture was as effective as Jack Bauer makes it seem -- and judging by what we know about the internal evaluations in the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report, it isn't--the externalities associated with using torture create costs that far outweigh the supposed benefits.
-- A. Serwer
