CONTRA DERSHOWITZ

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the fact that our government uses torture on a routine basis. Advocates of torture have defended the practice with statements such as the following, by Jane Harman of the House Intelligence Committee, "If you're serious about trying to get information in advance of an attack, interrogation has to be one of the main tools. I'm okay with it not being pretty." Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has gone further. He argues that in a "ticking bomb scenario", government agencies should have access to a "torture warrant" which would allow them to torture openly and with accountability (his preferred method is sticking needles under the fingernails). As he says, "If anybody has any doubt that our CIA, over time, has taught people to torture, has encouraged torture, has probably itself tortured in extreme cases, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn." And furthermore, he adds, "Don't you think that if we ever had a ticking-bomb case, regardless of your views or mine, that the CIA would actually either torture themselves or subcontract the job to Jordan, the Philippines or Egypt... to do the torturing for us?" Human rights advocates have responded in a predictable manner which misses the main problem with Dershowitz's argument. As Vincent Warren, Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, maintains, torture is "illegal, immoral and does not work." In a debate with Dershowitz, Ken Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, said that the prohibition on torture is "one of the basic, absolute prohibitions that exist in international law. It exists regardless of the severity of the security threat." In fact, both sides are arguing about hypotheticals and ignoring the reality. For they both assume that torture has been used by our government, and was designed, for the purpose of extracting information which could save lives. In actual fact, although Dershowitz is right that torture has been used-- and much more extensively than he maintains-- by agencies such as the CIA, it has not been used, nor was it intended to be used, in order to extract information. The specific techniques in common use, called "Psywar", are demonstrably useless for that purpose. But they are useful for a much more sinister one-- the erection of a totalitarian state.

The suspect in the so-called "War on Terror", whether he is guilty or innocent, is from day one treated as a subhuman being. He is immediately hooded to induce sensory deprivation, and taken to a prison in a secret location, where he may be subject to further sensory deprivation by confinement in a darkened, soundproof cell. He may be isolated from other prisoners, shackled to the floor, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures, deprived of food and water, subjected to a capriciously changing routine, stripped naked, not allowed to urinate or defecate or forced to do so in the sight of others, made to stand in "stress positions", and subject to sexual assault, electrical shocks and waterboarding. All this happens before he is "interrogated", as reputable individuals-- for instance FBI agents who were excluded from the process at Guantanamo-- can attest. All these methods have been shown to produce psychosis-like results. By the time the suspect encounters the "interrogator", he is no longer able to trust any promises of better treatment for cooperation which may be offered. He may have lost his will to live. Indeed, he may no longer be in his right mind, and completely unable to respond to such questions as "Where is your training camp located? What sort of terrorist activities is your organization planning?"-- if indeed, he ever knew the answers to begin with. This is not a matter of excessive force so much as the wrong kind of force employed to produce results which cannot possibly yield "actionable intelligence".

As Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his excellent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, most of the methods of torture in common use by the U.S. government today have their origins in the CIA. If one examines their history, one finds a CIA hierarchy enthralled with the success of such totalitarian spectacles as the Stalinist show-trials and North Korean "brainwashing", and trying to work out its own methods of producing the same results with the aid of unscrupulous psychologists and psychiatrists. These methods rely a great deal upon psychological stresses, although they have always been accompanied by physical coercion. If one examines the various methods explored by the CIA in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, culminating in the Kubark Manual of Interrogation (1963-- "Kubark" was the CIA cryptonym for its own headquarters), one can see how antithetical they are to the goal of obtaining intelligence. The simplest of these methods is sensory deprivation. In 1951, with CIA backing, Dr. Donald Hebb did a study of the effects of such such isolation. He found that after just four hours of total sensory deprivation, subjects "could not follow a connected train of thought." They progressively lost touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations and other pathological effects."

Other techniques explored by the CIA have been electroconvulsive treatment or ECT, familiar to us as a treatment for depression (remember the skeleton in Eagleton's closet?), which has been widely criticized by mental health activists because of the fact that it can cause amnesia, hypnosis, which heightens a subject's suggestibility to delusions introduced by the hypnotist, and above all LSD, which contrary to widespread belief, was not unleashed on American society by Timothy Leary but rather Allen Dulles. This experimentation involved the use of unsuspecting human guinea pigs and led to at least one death. It is a well-known fact that LSD can produce hallucinations and ultimately, psychosis. Amnesia, delusions, hallucinations, psychosis-- how do these help an interrogator get at the truth? If anything, they would seem impediments. CIA methods are so exclusively oriented toward "breaking" a subject-- that is to say, destroying him psychologically-- that a 1983 training guide for the Honduran government advises the so-called interrogator to do things which are directly antithetical to the acquisition of intelligence, such as "asking nonsensical questions" and incredibly, "rewarding non-cooperation"! If Dershowitz thinks that the CIA can be confined to torturing only for information in "ticking bomb scenarios" by a "torture warrant", or that it will subject any of its highly illegal activities to the rule of law, I have a bridge to sell him in Brooklyn.

Okay, you may say, but these guys deserve it-- although of course you cannot know, any more than I can, whether or not they are really terrorists, because they've never had a fair trial of the sort we offered even to Nazi war criminals. Maybe you think they deserve it just because they're Muslims. But then be honest-- you're not after intelligence that can save human lives, you are out to punish and hurt them for your own gratification. If you are going to argue for a torture warrant, why not say why you really want it, and not hide behind the fallacy that you are concerned with the protection of human life?