Torture does not equal toughness
The outlook for Gina Haspel’s nomination to run the CIA is not good. As the Washington Post revealed, White House aides had to talk Haspel out of withdrawing her nomination Friday. On Monday, CNN reported a backup nominee is in place in case Haspel isn’t confirmed: Susan Gordon, the current deputy director of national intelligence.
If accurate, this removes the strongest argument for Haspel and the reason her CIA colleagues have been inappropriately lobbying for her nomination: the fear that it is either her, or an unqualified ideologue such as Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who would politicize intelligence. If the alternative to Haspel is another intelligence professional who isn’t marred by involvement in torture and the destruction of evidence, then it is difficult to see why wavering senators would want to stick their necks out to vote for her. Especially when doing so risks lending legitimacy to repugnant interrogation techniques.
But it is clear President Donald Trump sees the reopening of the torture debate not as an excruciating foray into morally fraught terrain but an opportunity to simple-mindedly bash Democrats as terrorist sympathizers. Sorry, Mr. President, but you can be tough on terror and still oppose torture. That, in fact, is precisely the position of your own defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who said during his job interview, “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture.” Trump reluctantly acceded to Mattis’ view by banning torture while insisting that it “works.”
Trump is right: Torture does elicit information. Even if torture can produce more information more quickly, it does not mean it’s worth doing.
France discovered how counterproductive torture was during its war in Algeria from 1954-62. It was common for French forces to hook up detainees to a dynamo called the gégène that administered an excruciating electrical shock. The information thus obtained helped French soldiers to administer tactical defeats to Algerian independence fighters but ultimately cost them the public support they needed to win the war.
The United States had a similar experience after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush administration, in an understandable panic, resorted to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at black sites — including one run by Haspel in Thailand.
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee produced a lengthy report that claimed abusive interrogations did not produce any intelligence that was not available elsewhere. This was strongly rebutted by the CIA, with former Deputy Director Michael Morrell arguing it would have taken a long time to elicit the same information from other sources.
The CIA position is more persuasive, but that doesn’t mean we should torture in the future. While rejecting torture, our political leaders, on a bipartisan basis, also rightly rejected attempts to prosecute intelligence officers who carried out what they believed were lawful orders. Though she is eminently qualified, I would vote against Haspel if I were in the Senate.