George Friedman
Editor's Note: This piece was originally published in April 2009, as U.S. President Barack Obama – at that time only a few months into his first term – began to reverse key security policies and decisions made by his predecessor, George W. Bush. We are re-distributing the piece in light of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s blistering report this week on CIA interrogation practices implemented after the 9/11 attacks.
The Obama administration published a series of
memoranda on torture issued under the Bush administration. The memoranda, most of
which dated from the period after 9/11, authorized measures including depriving
prisoners of solid food, having them stand shackled and in uncomfortable
positions, leaving them in cold cells with inadequate clothing, slapping their
heads and/or abdomens, and telling them that their families might be harmed if
they didn't cooperate with their interrogators.
On the scale of human cruelty, these actions do
not rise anywhere near the top. At the same time, anyone who thinks that being
placed without food in a freezing cell subject to random mild beatings — all
while being told that your family might be joining you — isn't agonizing
clearly lacks imagination. The treatment of detainees could have been worse. It
was terrible nonetheless.
Torture and the Intelligence Gap
But torture is meant to be terrible, and we
must judge the torturer in the context of his own desperation. In the wake of
9/11, anyone who wasn't terrified was not in touch with reality. We know
several people who now are quite blasé about 9/11. Unfortunately for them, we
knew them in the months after, and they were not nearly as composed then as
they are now.
Sept. 11 was terrifying for one main reason: We
had little idea about al Qaeda's capabilities. It was a very reasonable
assumption that other al Qaeda cells were operating in the United States and
that any day might bring follow-on attacks. (Especially given the group's
reputation for one-two attacks.) We still remember our first flight after 9/11,
looking at our fellow passengers, planning what we would do if one of them
moved. Every time a passenger visited the lavatory, one could see the tensions
soar.
And while Sept. 11 was frightening enough,
there were ample fears that al Qaeda had secured a "suitcase bomb"
and that a nuclear attack on a major U.S. city could come at any moment. For
individuals, such an attack was simply another possibility. We remember staying
at a hotel in Washington close to the White House and realizing that we were at
ground zero — and imagining what the next moment might be like. For the
government, however, the problem was having scraps of intelligence indicating
that al Qaeda might have a nuclear weapon, but not having any way of telling
whether those scraps had any value. The president and vice president accordingly
were continually kept at different locations, and not for any frivolous reason.
This lack of intelligence led directly to the
most extreme fears, which in turn led to extreme measures. Washington simply
did not know very much about al Qaeda and its capabilities and intentions in
the United States. A lack of knowledge forces people to think of worst-case
scenarios. In the absence of intelligence to the contrary after 9/11, the only
reasonable assumption was that al Qaeda was planning more — and perhaps worse —
attacks.
Collecting intelligence rapidly became the
highest national priority. Given the genuine and reasonable fears, no action in
pursuit of intelligence was out of the question, so long as it promised quick
answers. This led to the authorization of torture, among other things. Torture
offered a rapid means to accumulate intelligence, or at least — given the time
lag on other means — it was something that had to be tried.
Torture and the Moral Question
And this raises the moral question. The United States
is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state
that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution does not
speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence
of rights violations (at least for citizens). But the Declaration of
Independence contains the phrase, "a decent respect for the opinions of
mankind." This indicates that world opinion matters.
At the same time, the president is sworn to
protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the
physical security of the United States "against all enemies, foreign and
domestic." Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution
are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.
While this all makes for an interesting seminar
in political philosophy, presidents — and others who have taken the same oath —
do not have the luxury of the contemplative life. They must act on their oaths,
and inaction is an action. Former U.S. President George W. Bush knew that he
did not know the threat, and that in order to carry out his oath, he needed
very rapidly to find out the threat. He could not know that torture would work,
but he clearly did not feel that he had the right to avoid it.
Consider this example. Assume you knew that a
certain individual knew the location of a nuclear device planted in an American
city. The device would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, but the
individual refused to divulge the information. Would anyone who had sworn the
oath have the right not to torture the individual? Torture might or might not
work, but either way, would it be moral to protect the individual's rights
while allowing hundreds of thousands to die? It would seem that in this case,
torture is a moral imperative; the rights of the one with the information
cannot transcend the life of a city.
Torture in the Real World
But here is the problem: You would not find
yourself in this situation. Knowing a bomb had been planted, knowing who knew
that the bomb had been planted, and needing only to apply torture to extract
this information is not how the real world works. Post-9/11, the United States
knew much less about the extent of the threat from al Qaeda. This hypothetical
sort of torture was not the issue.
Discrete information was not needed, but
situational awareness. The United States did not know what it needed to know, it
did not know who was of value and who wasn't, and it did not know how much time
it had. Torture thus was not a precise solution to a specific problem: It
became an intelligence-gathering technique. The nature of the problem the
United States faced forced it into indiscriminate intelligence gathering. When
you don't know what you need to know, you cast a wide net. And when torture is
included in the mix, it is cast wide as well. In such a case, you know you will
be following many false leads — and when you carry torture with you, you will
be torturing people with little to tell you. Moreover, torture applied by
anyone other than well-trained, experienced personnel (who are in exceptionally
short supply) will only compound these problems, and make the practice less
productive.
Defenders of torture frequently seem to believe
that the person in custody is known to have valuable information, and that this
information must be forced out of him. His possession of the information is
proof of his guilt. The problem is that unless you have excellent intelligence
to begin with, you will become engaged in developing baseline intelligence, and
the person you are torturing may well know nothing at all. Torture thus becomes
not only a waste of time and a violation of decency, it actually undermines
good intelligence. After a while, scooping up suspects in a dragnet and trying
to extract intelligence becomes a substitute for competent intelligence
techniques — and can potentially blind the intelligence service. This is especially
true as people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make torture
stop.
Critics of torture, on the other hand, seem to
assume the torture was brutality for the sake of brutality instead of a
desperate attempt to get some clarity on what might well have been a
catastrophic outcome. The critics also cannot know the extent to which the use
of torture actually prevented follow-on attacks. They assume that to the extent
that torture was useful, it was not essential; that there were other ways to
find out what was needed. In the long run, they might have been correct. But
neither they, nor anyone else, had the right to assume in late 2001 that there
was a long run. One of the things that wasn't known was how much time there
was.
The U.S. Intelligence Failure
The endless argument over torture, the
posturing of both critics and defenders, misses the crucial point. The United
States turned to torture because it has experienced a massive intelligence
failure reaching back a decade. The U.S. intelligence community simply failed
to gather sufficient information on al Qaeda's intentions, capability,
organization and personnel. The use of torture was not part of a competent
intelligence effort, but a response to a massive intelligence failure.
That failure was rooted in a range of
miscalculations over time. There was the public belief that the end of the Cold
War meant the United States didn't need a major intelligence effort, a point
made by the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan. There were the intelligence people who
regarded Afghanistan as old news. There was the Torricelli amendment that made
recruiting people with ties to terrorist groups illegal without special
approval. There were the Middle East experts who could not understand that al
Qaeda was fundamentally different from anything seen before. The list of the
guilty is endless, and ultimately includes the American people, who always seem
to believe that the view of the world as a dangerous place is something made up
by contractors and bureaucrats.
Bush was handed an impossible situation on
Sept. 11, after just nine months in office. The country demanded protection,
and given the intelligence shambles he inherited, he reacted about as well or
badly as anyone else might have in the situation. He used the tools he had, and
hoped they were good enough.
The problem with torture — as with other
exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary
situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies
is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a
desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence
interrogator's tool kit.
At a certain point, the emergency was over.
U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent
picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and
was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and
extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary
is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to
unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to
move beyond the emergency. He didn't.
If you know that an individual is loaded with
information, torture can be a useful tool. But if you have so much intelligence
that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with
information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war.
That's not when you use torture. That's when you simply point out to the
prisoner that, "for you the war is over." You lay out all you already
know and how much you know about him. That is as demoralizing as freezing in a
cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.
U.S. President Barack Obama has handled this
issue in the style to which we have become accustomed, and which is as
practical a solution as possible. He has published the memos authorizing
torture to make this entirely a Bush administration problem while refusing to
prosecute anyone associated with torture, keeping the issue from becoming
overly divisive. Good politics perhaps, but not something that deals with the
fundamental question.
The fundamental question remains unanswered,
and may remain unanswered. When a president takes an oath to "preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," what are the
limits on his obligation? We take the oath for granted. But it should be
considered carefully by anyone entering this debate, particularly for presidents.
George Friedman, December 11, 2014
"Torture
and the U.S. Intelligence Failure is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
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