Byron York, at The Corner: [1]
The new issue [2] of The Atlantic has a piece by Mark Bowden, “The Ploy,” about the American interrogation team in Iraq that found Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. It is teased as “the inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle — without resorting to torture — and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq.”
The torture reference is interesting, because the story suggests that the legacy of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has actually been useful to American intelligence agents. Iraqi terrorists do not, it appears, believe the U.S. has cleaned up procedures at Abu Ghraib, so if a detainee is being interrogated elsewhere in Iraq, and it is not going well, and the interrogator suggests that perhaps it’s time for the detainee to be transferred to Abu Ghraib — well, that sometimes inspires prisoners to start talking.
Exactly so. As an example:
After a lot of extraordinarily clever misdirection, the American interrogator cut to the chase. “You have information you could trade,” he told Abu Haydr. “It is your only source of leverage right now. You don’t want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade.”
The basis of the success of that interrogator was primarily due to the fact that the individual in question did not want to be given ‘the treatment’. So much for the argument about how torture is ineffectual. The fact is it does work; it works quite well, and this incident proves it rather nicely. That’s how the real world works, my friends. That’s why all this hand-wringing over ‘torture’ is counter productive.
The fact that he was not tortured not withstanding; he thought he WOULD be, thought the threat a genuine one and so responded. But the threats are not worth squat if we don’t demonstrate it at least once in a while. Evil? Perhaps…. but needed.
Look; we elect governments on the basis that they are a necessary evil. Because, while having a government is inherently problematic, not having one is more so. That concept carries here.
There are those who will argue against what I’m saying here, on moral grounds. I can’t say I blame them much. But they’ve not thought through the consequences of what they propose.
For instance ; how many more people would have died, being beheaded, etc., had the information we obtained from Abu Haydr, not turned Zarqawi? If one is truly moral, one cannot turn their back on the number of people that Zarqawi would have killed…. but that is precisely what the crowd complaining about ‘torture” would have us do… turn our backs on our own. (I use quotes, in this case, because most of what they’re complaining about simply doesn’t qualify as such. )
Certainly, keeping that larger number of people from being killed by the likes of Zarqawi is the smaller of the two evils. Of course, it should be noted that the people complaining about places like Abu Ghraib the loudest, are also the ones who wouldn’t mind seeing us lose in Iraq. Not all of them, but most.
See also: