What Richard Cohen lacks in logic, he makes up in ignorance and emotionalism.
The idea that we don't torture because it's wrong, not because it would make us safer not to torture, is an entirely acceptable argument. But that's not Cohen's argument. His argument is that not torturing people makes us less safe, but also less like the Nazis, a regime that like the Soviet Union, was known for its "safety." Cohen doesn't actually engage the arguments for why torture makes us less safe -- that it exposes Americans abroad to the same treatment, that it incites people to take up arms against the United States, that it makes our allies less likely to cooperate with us because their governments might hold them legally accountable, or that torture froze out some of the nation's most experienced counterterrorism experts and interrogators, men such as Ali Soufan, because they wouldn't participate in illegal interrogation. He also doesn't acknowledge the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report that found there was no evidence that torture foiled any "specific imminent attacks."
Cohen doesn't address any of these arguments, because he's plainly unconcerned with the larger strategic effects of using torture; he's concerned with exacting "good Old Testament-style vengeance."
The horror of Sept. 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station -- the memorials still fresh -- without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day -- yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance -- and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.
The logic of this argument goes like this: I'm angry about 9/11, therefore torturing people will make us safer. These two things are in no way logically connected, although I suppose this argument makes sense to a number of people and I suspect that the people who ordered the program feel much the same way. This not an informed argument about the effectiveness of torture in gaining intelligence, it's just Cohen being angry and wanting to exact retribution against "those people." The guilt or innocence of any detainee caught up in America's torture program is of no consequence.
Cohen has made decisions in this state of mind before. Last year, in a piece for Slate about why he supported the Iraq War, he recalled thinking, "I wanted to go to 'them,' whoever 'they' were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of 'them' was Saddam Hussein." Indeed, considering that the connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq was established by evidence obtained through torture, that worked out well for us didn't it? Maybe then, other than our moral obligations under domestic and international law, we should be more concerned with the overall strategic effect of using torture than our own individual impulses toward exacting vengeance against the nearest scary Arab. Cohen seems to have a problem distinguishing between what makes America safer and what makes him feel relief. This is torture as therapy.
A final point: Cohen says in releasing the memos Obama "has made things a bit easier for terrorists who now know what will not happen to them if they get caught." Aside from the fact that the methods used were already in the public domain, the world should already know that the United States does not torture. In the United States, torture is illegal. Somehow, the idea that the president can simply ignore laws he doesn't like is one that's become so broadly acceptable that pundits writing about torture don't even care to mention it. That's the most frightening part of this whole thing.
-- A. Serwer
