Oh Come On, Ramesh
How can the most serious wonk at NRO think he can get away with a line like this?
Charles Krauthammer is the latest in a long line of commentators (a line that also includes Andrew McCarthy) that torture is not only morally permissible, but obligatory, in cases where it is necessary to, say, save a city from imminent destruction. (“Let’s take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He’s not talking.”)(I have always wondered how much construction has gone into this hypothetical example. In the normal run of things, wouldn’t we be more likely to have no idea that a bomb was ticking somewhere, and be torturing someone to find out if it was? But Krauthammer says that Israeli interrogators have run into similar real-world examples, so let’s leave that aside.)
I still resist Krauthammer’s conclusion, because the example seems to go a lot further than he suggests. Doesn’t his bomb end up blowing up any categorical moral prohibition? If we’re talking about saving a city, for example, would it be permissible to torture the terrorist’s innocent elderly mother or infant child to get him to talk?
You can spin out a hundred different permutations of this objection to torture and torture-light—would it be permissible to torture the brother of a known terrorist if it would get that terrorist to divluge the location of a bomb that threatens downtown Atlanta? Even if the brother is a twice-wounded Marine decortated for valorous conduct in defeating the terrorists in Fallujah? Such a scenario, like Ramesh’s above, raises a hypothetical that is very unlikely to become real in the hope of knocking down the logic that will come to play in real world scenarios. As such, it isn’t very useful except as an abstract parlor game.
A much more likely scenario than either the grandmother or the decorated Marine brother or even the ticking timebomb is the captured terrorist who knows operational details of an attack that is currently underway. There is no bomb yet, just the plan for a bomb or series of bombs either in another terrorist’s head or in his satchel. Would it be permissible to pressure or even torture the captured terrorist into divulging what he knows about the free terrorist, either his movements or his plans or both?
That scenario is not only likely to happen, it already has. We captured Jose Padilla aka Abdullah Al Muhajir in 2002 based on information extracted from Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda terrorist who had worked Padilla’s career within the organization. Padilla was useful to al Qaeda because he was an American citizen. He was sent to the US by Zubaydah on a mission to scout for materials to make a “dirty bomb” and to plan an attack on a number of apartment buildings in the Chicago area. After Zubaydah’s capture in Pakistan in April 2002, he was taken to Guantanamo and most likely underwent torture-light in order to find out what he knew. It turned out that he knew a lot, including where and when Padilla would re-enter the US to begin his mission. Zubaydah’s information led directly to Padilla’s arrest, and probably prevented at least one and maybe several terrorist attacks.
Was pressuring, possibly even torturing, Zubaydah permissible? I think instead of focusing on grandmothers of terrorists and hypothetical ticking timebombs, it helps to look at scenarios that are more likely to occur. This war isn’t a parlor game. It’s deadly serious, and we should frame our arguments and rhetoric as though we understand just how serious it is and how difficult the decision we make will be.
UPDATE: This is a bit like picking a fight with Yoda, but I’ll plow ahead anyway. In writing the above, I didn’t mean to imply that Ramesh has introduced the ticking timebomb as a new concept to the torture discussion. My own poor writing can explain any misconceptions about that. I’m well aware that going back to within a few days of 9-11, many many pundits have brought up the ticking timebomb as a starting point for discussing whether and when torture might be acceptable in combating terrorists. Alan Dershowitz wrote and spoke back in March 2003 about the ticking timebomb, and used it to justify torture in extreme circumstances. So that scenario isn’t novel or new to Ramesh or even Charles Krauthammer.
What is new in Ramesh’s argument—as far as I know—is asking whether it might be acceptable to torture parties not involved in terrorism, but who have blood or other connections to terrorists, in order to make a terrorist talk about a ticking timebomb. My objection to this line or argument is that it’s a bit of a straw man. It’s very unlikely to happen, but it does raise up enough hackles in anyone with any moral sense that they might in the end deem all pressure tactics out of bounds. I just think that its very unlikelihood makes it a somewhat unfair starting point and would probably result in an outcome not closely related to the choices we will actually face. We are very unlikely to be in a position to know enough about what a captured terrorist knows and then be in a position to seize someone close to him in a timely manner and then torture that other person to make the terrorist talk. That kind of thing happens in movies, but not very often in the real world when you’re fighting a war on the other side of the world in a country that is home to neither combatant parties, such as the US fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, and where the enemy combatants hail from nebulous tribal backgrounds that make establishing even their basic identity problematic. Who is Ramzi Yousef, really? It depends on who you ask. He may be Iraqi, he may be Kuwaiti, he may be something else entirely. His true identity has never been conclusively nailed down beyond doubt. That being the case, whom could you grab and torture to make Yousef talk? Or where would we go, for instance, to seize someone close enough to Zarqawi that their torture would make him talk? His own family and tribe in Jordan have renounced him. He might care what happens to them, but he isn’t likely to put their welfare before his jihad ambitions. So I just don’t think that the grandma scenario is very likely to appear in this war.
What does happen in the real world is what happened in the Padilla case—we had captured a terrorist who, during the course of intense interrogation, gave up operational details of an attack that was underway. Our interrogators either knew or strongly suspected that Zubaydah knew some very useful things about ongoing operations because of his position within al Qaeda, and pressured him to divulge his knowledge. That pressure was direct and personal, making him think he’s drowning and so forth, but so far as I know not physically harmful. Is what we did to Zubaydah morally acceptable or not? It did in fact lead to the arrest of a dangerous terrorist who was planning murder on a grand scale—the Zubaydah interrogation saved lives even though it didn’t lead to a ticking timebomb. Asking the question based on this case at least gets us out of the realm of bad Bruckheimer films and into what has already happened and is likely to happen again in this war that we’re fighting right now.
The McCain effort would seem to ban even what was done to Zubaydah, which demonstrably saved lives. That’s where the argument over torture and torture-light should be, in the real world, not in very unlikely hypotheticals like grabbing a terrorist’s grandma to make the terrorist talk. In my humble opinion.