Squaring the Culture

It was during the Clinton years that America began the practice of sending international prisoners — prisoners detained because of their connection to international terrorists — to foreign nations so they could be interrogated regarding what they knew about their own network of co-terrorists. This practice, called extraordinary rendition, has always been troubling because the nations to which we send these prisoners are far more likely than we are to torture or simply murder their prisoners. The Bush administration asserted rules regarding rendition, and constructed interrogation facilities of its own to handle prisoners captured during the worldwide war against Wahabist radicals.

Now the Obama administration has announced its plans to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and all the secret CIA detention facilities around the world. Over the weekend, however, reporters noticed that Obama’s Executive Orders regarding the handling of prisoners left open the possibility of extraordinary rendition.

From the LA Times:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street…

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice…”

Despite concern about rendition, Obama’s prohibition of many other counter-terrorism tools could prompt intelligence officers to resort more frequently to the “transitory” technique.

Rightward blogs that picked up on it are commenting wryly about the inconsistency, or in Moe Lane’s case at Red State, practically screaming in rage. I understand the irony here, but my concern touches problems beyond the mere inconsistency of leftists.

Simply put, we’re stuck with using the worst of our interrogation tools, and we’re increasing rather than decreasing the likelihood that our detainees will be mistreated.

From the LA Times again:

CIA veterans involved in renditions characterized the program as important but of limited intelligence-gathering use. It is used mainly for terrorism suspects not considered valuable enough for the CIA to keep, they said.

“The reason we did interrogations [ourselves] is because renditions for the most part weren’t very productive,” said a former senior CIA official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject.

The most valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda came from prisoners who were in CIA custody and questioned by agency experts, the official said. Once prisoners were turned over to Egypt, Jordan or elsewhere, the agency had limited influence over how much intelligence was shared, how prisoners were treated and whether they were later released.

“In some ways, [rendition] is the worst option,” the former official said. “If they are in U.S. hands, you have a lot of checks and balances, medics and lawyers. Once you turn them over to another service, you lose control.”

CIA seems to know pretty well how to interrogate prisoners. It’s not clear that our foreign neighbors are as good at this as we are. If they are, though, they don’t always tell us what they’ve discovered. Either way, it’s hit or miss regarding whether we get intelligence back.

More troubling is the torture aspect. The notion that the Bush administration chose to engage in full-scale torture is laughable; as far as we know, the total amount of time prisoners have spent on the waterboard while in US custody is around 5 minutes. That’s not five minutes per prisoner; it’s five minutes total for the entire program. On the contrary, most of our interrogation tactics are completely benign. One of the more common tactics involves sitting the prisoner in a La-Z-Boy recliner, giving him cold drinks, and having a grandmotherly woman ask him questions. I know this sounds like “the Comfy Chair” from Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition skit, but I’m not joking; the La-Z-Boy is offered as a reward for cooperation, and apparently works pretty well on some detainees.

I’m sure President Obama is sincere regarding his concern that prisoners not be tortured, or at least, as sincere as he knows how to be; it seems likely to me, though, that he’s naive about foreign nations’ willingness to keep their word regarding treatment of prisoners we turn over. When we’re interrogating prisoners ourselves, we have control of the process, and can limit the cruelty. We lose that control when we send prisoners elsewhere. This is why the humane policy of a humane nation required that we build the detention facilities; the Bush administration was protecting civility.

I know there are those among us who don’t care about prisoners being tortured by American personnel, who point to the suffering of the victims of the terrorists’ plans and say the prisoners should suffer as much as the victims. I’m not among them. My own position is that we’re justified in doing what we need to do in order to keep ourselves safe, but wise and moral to put in place the checks and balances that prevent excesses. The danger that we could someday become as cruel as our adversaries is real, and the restraint built into the system is the proof that we’ve not fallen so far.

It’s ironic that the liberal policy that claims to be restoring civility is actually likely to result in greater brutality to the detainees, while providing less information with which to secure our safety. This is hardly an unusual irony from liberal policies, though; it’s unfortunately the rule rather than the exception that liberal policies produce the opposite of that at which they aim, but make liberals feel morally superior in the process. With the left, it’s all about appearances, whereas with the right it’s more often about results.

More to the point, the building of our own interrogation mechanism was a hard decision that needed to be made, and President Bush had the courage to make it; first President Clinton, and now President Obama, display cowardice by avoiding the hard decision and simply pawning the responsibility for harsh interrogation onto foreigners.

All that said, I am curious to see whether the leftists who shrieked for Cheney’s head on a platter will raise a finger of objection to Obama’s hedging on rolling back the “regime of torture.” I’m not holding my breath, though. In the discussion I had with a progressive blogger on the subject, he acknowledged that Democratic Congressmen were hypocrites to have privately approved the interrogation regimen and then publicly to have denounced them, but he failed to notice that this made those Congressmen liable for prosecution along with the Vice President. If Cheney actually committed war crimes or violated American law by endorsing “torture,” then the Congressmen providing oversight surely made themselves accessories to those crimes by approving the procedures, and should likewise be prosecuted. I’ve heard no calls for prosecuting Democrats, though, and I don’t expect to.