President Biden visited Israel and gave a piece of useful advice:
Again, this is good advice. It also rather drastically underplays how badly the U.S. performed after 9/11.
And that matters for the message that Biden is trying to deliver. The mistakes undermined justice — and in some cases deferred it entirely.
Here’s how: After 9/11, the United States tortured a lot of terror suspects that it captured. Some of those folks were entirely innocent of bad activity. But not everybody. The torture was still a problem.
Take the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. More than two decades after 9/11, he is still sitting in Cuba awaiting trial on charges of helping plot the attack — a trial that has been delayed, to a large degree, by the legal problems created by the torture regime.
Here is Dexter Filkins writing in The New Yorker:
Soon after his capture in Rawalpindi, on March 1, 2003, Mohammed was spirited to secret C.I.A. prisons in Afghanistan and Poland, where his interrogators went straight to brutality: slamming him against a wall (a practice known as “walling”), depriving him of sleep (at one point for more than a week), forcing him to stand or crouch in painful positions, stripping him during questioning, and engaging in a bizarre practice called “rectal rehydration.” (According to a C.I.A. document, it was supposed to help “clear a person’s head.”) In Poland, the interrogators subjected Mohammed to waterboarding, a form of torture that makes a person believe he is drowning, at least a hundred and eighty-three times.
The details of Mohammed’s interrogation, described in the report issued earlier this month by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, make for grim, even sickening reading. During Mohammed’s waterboarding sessions, C.I.A. officers reported that he “yelled and twisted,” “seemed to lose control,” and became “somewhat frantic.” The purpose of the waterboarding appears to have been to bring Mohammed as close as possible to death without actually killing him. As one C.I.A. medical officer who presided over the torture wrote, “In the new technique we are basically doing a series of near drownings.”
Only: It didn’t work1. The Guardian:
Defenders of waterboarding, which was declared to be torture by the Obama administration, claimed it led to concrete results. They said that its use on Abu Zubaydah led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and that the latter’s interrogation using waterboarding led to the location and killing of Osama bin Laden. Former vice-president Dick Cheney claimed that the techniques produced “phenomenal” results.
The Senate report refutes those claims.
They had already been denied by former interrogators at the heart of the post-9/11 manhunt. In 2009, a former FBI agent, Ali Soufan, who had taken part in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah seven years earlier, said that all the useful intelligence came from traditional non-violent questioning, and that his later waterboarding produced nothing further of value.
Fast forward a couple of decades. Why hasn’t KSM gone on trial yet?
But the biggest factor in why it's taking so long, defense lawyers and other experts say, is the secrecy. It took years for defense lawyers to get summaries of the classified evidence against their clients, and they say they still don't have everything they need, even though they all possess top-secret security clearances.
Inside the courtroom, journalists and family members must watch behind a wall of thick glass. The sound is piped in on a 40-second delay to guard against the defendants blurting out something classified, officials said. And what classified information might al Qaeda operatives possess?
…
"Covering up torture is the reason that these men were brought to Guantánamo, and the continuing cover-up of torture is the reason that indefinite detention at Guantánamo still exists," said James Connell, a lawyer for Ammar al Baluchi, who, his lawyers say, was a model for the detainee who was tortured in one of the opening scenes of the film "Zero Dark Thirty."
So I was caught up short when Biden said “we sought justice and got justice.”
What justice did we get exactly?
Well, Osama bin Laden is dead — but that happened only a decade later. The Taliban were knocked out of power. They’re back. KSM is still waiting for his trial. Many thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan are dead and we don’t have a whole lot to show for it.
So it’s possible to hear what Biden said today and hear “don’t go crazy.” But the “we sought justice and got justice and also made some mistakes” make it sound like there’s some balance between the justice and the mistakes. I don’t think that’s true. But making it sound true can work as a bit of permission, too, even if it’s not intended that way. It’s not quite “you’re going to do some things you regret on the road to justice” — making it sound as though the cost is worth it — but it’s not far off.
I understand why Biden does this, I think. He’s the president of a nation that desperately needs to think it’s not the bad guy. But when talking about mistakes and justice, it’s important to be clear about the mistakes — and to wonder whether justice was truly the result.
Torture is immoral and the question of “does it work” thus irrelevant. But it’s useless on top of being immoral, which makes it even worse.
My understanding of torture as a means of interrogation, is that it can be used to obtain a confession. Most victims of torture will eventually say whatever you want. The confession won’t necessarily be true, but if you need a confession for a show trial, torture is likely to work. On the other hand, if you want to learn information that is true and maybe even actionable intelligence, torture is useless, as well as being immoral. As you mention in the article, traditional, non-abusive methods of interrogation are much better for learning useful intelligence.