Reuel Marc Gerecht still thinks life is an episode of 24. "If you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah," he says in response to Andrew Sullivan, "and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman." Forget the question of torture. Gerecht has managed to answer the question in the form of an accusation of deadly cowardice. But we weren't confronted with that situation on September 7th and, so far as we know, have not been confronted with it since. The appropriate analogy is to imagine yourself an Army recruit who becomes an interrogator in Iraq. A group of young men are captured in a nighttime raid. Some of them might be terrorist sympathizers. Some of them might be innocent. Do you use physically coercive techniques? In general, we did. Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for a special operations officer that led the interrogations task force that eventually located, and killed, the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He oversaw more than 1,000 interrogations and personally conducted more than 300. He writes:
Torture and abuse cost American lives. I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
Now go back to Gerecht's example, because Alexander faced something near to it. You are an interrogator charged with finding the deadliest terrorist in one of the most violent and combustible slices of the globe. You are repeatedly faced with prisoners who know his location, and refuse to divulge it. Finding Zarqawi will save American lives. What do you do?
The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them...I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi....Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.
There's something intuitive about torture. Hurt something until it breaks. The phrasing of the the 24 scenario plays implicitly on that intuition: Do you do the thing that works and saves lives? Or do you let abstract principle ensure the deaths of thousands? Framed thus, it's an easy argument to win. When applied to policy, though, it directly ensures the deaths of thousands and fails to capture the worst of the terrorists. God's sense of humor is dark indeed.
