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Someone asked me a question in response to the release of the CIA IG report. Pointing to the revelation on page 43 that an interrogator told Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, "We’re going to kill your children," my interlocutor wanted to know: Well, isn’t that better than pulling out his fingernails? There was a time — actually, March 2003, when the threat was most likely made — when I agreed.
That month, a couple days after KSM’s arrest, I wrote the most shameful thing I’ve ever published. It was supposed to be a piece for TNR’s website about why we didn’t need to torture KSM in order to get valuable intelligence. Instead, I bought into an untenable distinction between "torture" and "torture-lite" and it led me to sadistic places that I just didn’t think through. Toward the end of the column — which had absolutely no discussion, as I recall, of what was legal — I wrote the repugnant line that we didn’t have to torture Khalid Shaikh Mohammed because we could just tell him that we’d harm his children if he didn’t tell us what we wanted to know. Counterintuitive, right? I was caught up in triumphalism at the time and didn’t realize how depraved that sentiment was. Not that that makes it any better.
My friend Julian Sanchez has a typically precise account of what’s so morally obscene about this:
I guess what especially turns my stomach here is that the idea wasn’t just to inflict mental anguish on a presumably odious man in order to extract information. It was to inflict that pain by exploiting, as a weakness, whatever flicker of nobility or love remained in an otherwise wretched soul. It was a method of torture that would have been effective only because and to the extent there was something human left in him.
I was hoping to link to my 2003 piece — indeed, to read it for the first time in years, so the shame can soak in — as I’ve heard that TNR’s long-gone web archive is back online, but it appears there are still some problems with finding it. In any case, when I can get it, I’ll update this post.
I don’t just bring this up on pains of intellectual dishonesty. I bring it up because it speaks to my reluctance to criticize CIA interrogators for what they did. There was an entire structure of both policy and public discourse that supported those decisions. That’s what ought to be criticized. Including, shamefully, myself. I try to learn from my mistakes, and this was my biggest. Without offering any excuse, in retrospect I was caught up in revenge fantasies for 9/11 and rationalized them as intelligence work. Not again.
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At least you’ve got the guts to recognize and then admit mistakes.
“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.” — Louis Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead v. United States (1928)
Nice post. An example of courage and compassion. When I think of all that has been done in response to “9-11″ I think folks would do well to consider the quote by Mahatma Ghandi “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
You should have several children and love them intensely as penance for that.
Once again, I admire your honesty. It takes some of us many decades to develop that kind of wisdom and compassion, and many never do.
One of the key purposes a society enacts rules and laws is to function as a check on our base motivations. At a time when hatred burns hot, and the bloodlust is singing in your ears, you aren’t expect to provide your own anchor. You are expected to cling to the one your society provides, the one that says “it just don’t matter how much you WANT to or how much good you’re convinced it’ll do – just DON’T DO IT.”
A long time before you were born, the US Army taught me to kill. But they also told me that, without exception, I was to follow the rules as they laid them out.
The events in my life that have cost me countless hours of sleep and peace occurred when I chose not to do so…
mikey
Your reluctance to criticize is misplaced. You were a young man with no particular training or experience in interrogation or legal policy. What you did is regrettable. What the CIA torturers and the Bush Administration torture policy makers and their attorney enablers did was illegal, immoral, and uncivilized. They all had a very specific duty to you and every other citizen of this country to uphold the laws of the United States of America, no matter what their personal fears or beliefs were. As Richard Clarke would say, they failed you. He, at least, had the decency to apologize (for failures an order of magnitude less than the ones perpetrated by the torture cult).
One of the techniques that evil uses to protect and promote itself is to deceive the decent, but unwary into believing that they were complicit. It is entirely appropriate to feel ashamed for failing to live up to your ideals. It is entirely inappropriate to go easy on the real villains because of your shame.
Let he who was not a chest pounding, blood lusting, raging testosterone crazy idiot after 911 cast the first stone.
Spencer,
You’re not Shia, and it’s not Ashura. Take the lesson, but ease up on yourself: few, in the U.S., didn’t then have bouts of temporary insanity.
wow spencer. no excuses and you use words like “shameful,” “depraved” and “morally obscene.” you rock. i haven’t had so much hope for my country since before the winter of 2002 — when it became clear that we were torturing suspects and i couldn’t find anyone (family, neighbors, co-workers) who cared.
we all do things worth regretting. but there’s not many who have the guts to own up to it and try to learn from it. fwiw, you have my very sincere admiration and respect.
Excellent comment, mac.
Spencer: Excellent post. Your last line is worth pondering on the broader response to 9/11.
For example:
I think your quote with this adjustment accounts for a good chunk of people’s support for the Afghan war.
Wow. Too many writers don’t know their own work this well, let alone know themselves.
I’m sure I’ve believed and advocated worse things than this in my life. No one can see all sides of an issue simultaneously, so any honest explorer of an argument is find themselves on the wrong side for some of the time. It’s hard to remember when consequences of being wrong are measured in lives and even souls, but if you’re afraid of being wrong you’ll never learn anything.
The horror of it was that we had captured (how’s that for a verb?) Khalid Sheik Muhammad’s 7 and 9 year old sons six months before we captured him — and he obviously knew it. Though I believe that the ‘we’ here is the Pakistanis in the first instance, and that they turned the boys over to us. (Did we buy them? I’ve wondered about that.)
So it was even worse torture than telling a captive in, for instance, Guantanamo, that we’d have his mother raped in front of his eyes, when last he’d seen her she’d been safe half way around the world.
In the instant case, Muhammad knew that we really could kill his sons. And we were threatening to do so if something happened over which he could have no control whatsoever. Sick.
I applaud you for fessing up to being wrong. It does take either character or smarts to do so publicly. I don’t know yet which one it is with you personally. Please keep in mind that you were wrong in the first place — your thinking was wrong, your judgement wrong — and try to understand why you were wrong. From that place comes real wisdom.
An excellent point. Why you were wrong is always the appropriate question. I tried to deal with that above by saying I was afflicted by 9/11-revenge-syndrome. That’s really the bottom line, and I feared that if I tried to tease that out too much it would come across as apologetics or moral grandstanding.