The torture news that the NYT sees fit to print

While the New York Times apparently doesn't think the Al Qaeda torture story is news fit to print, here the Times continues its obsession with the "outmoded, amateurish, and unreliable" interrogation methods Americans use. As the Times reports:

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

So what do the psychologists and other specialists sourced by the Times recommend?

Randy Borum, identified as a psychologist at the University of South Floriday and a consultant to the Defense Department, suggests adopting marketing techniques. As the Times reports:

“We have a whole social science literature on persuasion,” Mr. Borum said. “It’s mostly on how to get a person to buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it certainly could be useful in improving interrogation.”

According to the Times:

The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture from the television series “24” to the recent Republican presidential debate, where some candidates tried to outdo one another in vowing to get tough on captured terrorists.

The newspaper did, in all fairness, then duly cite that a 2005 Harvard study "supported the selective use of 'highly coercive' techniques." As the Times went on to report:

Defenders of the harshest interrogations, particularly as practiced by the C.I.A. at secret overseas sites, say they were carefully devised and have produced valuable intelligence. An agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the program “has generated a rich volume of intelligence that has helped the United States and other countries disrupt terrorist activities and save innocent lives.”

Another soft technique proponent, Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, pointed to the "effective questioning" of German and Japanese prisoners during World War II. He said that in a questioning process that took about four hours, World War II interrogators were able to "educe information" without stooping to torture.

The Times, however, did not provide specific examples of just what type of information these four-hour conversations educed.

In fact, the Times failed to provide any specific cases where soft techniques had produced valuable information. From this I gathered that most soft technique proponents base their arguments largely on the immorality of harsh techniques - as opposed to the better results they produce.

But I do concede that perhaps this was because this is the Timess position as opposed that of the experts. And then it would make sense why the reporter didn't think it was even necessary to provide any concrete examples that show that soft techniques do in fact work.

Anyway, I wasn't really surprised to then read that Robert A. Fein, the Harvard psychologist who directored an Intelligence Science Board study of the subject, wrote in a prologue to the group's 325-page report that, contrary to what Mr. Borum told the Times, in fact, there is a shortage of relevant research.

According to Mr. Fein, this is why U.S. interrogators had to wing it after 9/11, and why there ended up being some, as he puts it, “unfortunate cases of abuse.”

The Times, incidentally, gave some interesting background in its report:

Many of the techniques that have come in for such criticism were based on those used in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, or SERE, in which for decades American service members were given a sample of the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Because the training was developed during the cold war, the techniques later adopted by the C.I.A. and Special Operations officers in Iraq were based, at least in part, on how the Soviet Union and its allies were believed to treat prisoners. Such techniques included prolonged use of stress positions, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation and even waterboarding.

Let's hope that for our future enemies' sake that in the next war, Americans don't base their interrogation techniques Al Qaeda's torture manual. Yes, the same manual, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, that the Times continues to ignore.

I guess their view of news is if Americans bleed - or caused the bleading - it leads; otherwise it's not fit to print.

Are the rules of war going to unmake the modern world?

Blogging now from Moscow, which first came to prominence under the Mongol Empire (1206-1405), I'm struck by the contrast between the modern rules of war that the United States is expected to observe and how the Mongols waged war.

What got me thinking about this was this report in today's New York Times on the military hearing that just ended. This was the trial that, as the Times reports, "concerned just one issue: whether an inexperienced Marine lawyer’s failure to question the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha 18 months ago constituted a criminal dereliction of duty."

As the Times continues:

The presiding officer, Maj. Thomas McCann, seemed disconcerted about the testimony he had heard from several officers, from the general in charge of the Second Marine Division down to the first lieutenant whose men killed 24 civilians in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005. Several officers described civilian deaths as unfortunate but justifiable if they occurred during combat.

. . .Because so many witnesses had testified that civilian deaths from “combat action” need not be investigated, Major McCann said, “I’m trying to figure out what authority they are citing.”

The witness testifying then, Col. Keith R. Anderson, a senior Marine Reserve lawyer now with the Department of the Navy, delivered a succinct and telling answer. “There is no authority,” he said. “I think it’s just a mind-set.”

As the Times continues:

Captain Dinsmore, a 21-year veteran testifying by telephone from Iraq, offered a relatively impassioned response. He said the Iraq war rarely provided clear lines between combatants and civilians. The marines in Haditha that day, under small-arms fire in a profoundly hostile Sunni Arab region, could either abide by the laws of war and risk being killed, or could take aggressive steps to protect themselves and their squad members, and risk committing a war crime.

Now contrast the way the Mongols waged war. From Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, the excellent book by Jack Weatherford:

Warriors everywhere have been taught to die for their leader, but Genghis Khan never asked his men to die for him. Above all else, he waged war with this strategic purpose in mind: to preserve Mongol life. . .


The Mongols did not find honor in fighting; they found honor in winning. They had a single goal in every campaign - total victory. Toward this end, it did not matter what tactics were used against the enemy or how the battles were fought or avoided being fought. Winning by clever deception or cruel trickery was still winning and carried no stain on the bravery of the warriors . . .


In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. . .Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much as much as any other man in history.

And, far from being the "stereotype of the barbarian, the bloody savage, the ruthless conqueror who enjoyed destruction for its own sake" as Genghis Khan and the Mongols have been widely portrayed, writes Weatherford:

[The Mongols] sought not merely to conquer the world but to institute a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all languages. Genghis Khan's grandson, Khubilai Khan, introduced a paper currency intended for use everywhere and attempted to create primary schools for universal basic education of all children in order to make everyone literate. The Mongols refined and combined calendars to create a ten-thousand year calendar more accurate than any previous one, and the sponsored the most extensive maps ever assembled.



. . .In nearly every country touched by the Mongols, the initial destruction and shock of conquest by an unknown and barbaric tribe yielded quickly to an unprecedented rise in cultural communications, expanded trade, and improved civilization. In Europe, the Mongols slaughtered the aristocratic knighthood of the continent, but, disappointed with the general poverty of the area compared with the Chinese and Muslim countries, turned away and did not bother to conquer the cities, loot the countries, or incorporate them into the expanding empire. In the end, Europe suffered the least yet acquired all the advantages of contact through merchants such as the Polo family of Venice and envoys exchanged between the Mongol khans and the popes and kings of Europe. The new technology, knowledge, and commercial wealth created the Renaissance in which Europe rediscovered some of its prior culture, but more importantly, absorbed the technology for printing, firearms, the compass, and the abacus from the East.

Anyway, that's how the modern world came to be made, says Weatherford.

So my question is this: Will the way Americans are now expected to fight end up unmaking this modern world?

Civilian deaths: U.S. expresses shame, so what do terrorists say?

The Economist reports:

THE American army delivered an apology and blood money on Tuesday May 8th to the families of 19 Afghan civilians killed in March by marines. As in similar cases in Afghanistan and Iraq the killings, which took place on a road near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, were discovered by journalists and initially misrepresented by American commanders. Announcing the climb-down, an American colonel in Afghanistan told reporters: “I stand before you today deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people.”

I wonder if we'll ever hear Al Qaeda or the insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq apologizing and expressing shame about all the innocent civilians they kill.

Oh, that's right, the rules of war only apply to one side nowadays.

Just War Tradition's debt to sensitive men

It's funny (well, to me at least) that the origins of the modern rules of war alluded to in the post below can be traced back to Cicero, the great Roman statesman and orator.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about him:

During the chaotic latter half of the first century BC, marked by Civil Wars and the dictatorship of C. Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional Republican government; however, his career as a statesman was marked by inconsistencies and a tendency to shift his position in response to changes in the political climate. His vacillations may be attributed to his sensitive and impressionable personality; he was prone to overreact to political and private changes. "Would that he had been able to endure prosperity with greater self-control and adversity with more fortitude!" wrote C. Asinius Pollio, a contemporary Roman statesman and historian.[3][4] His inability to persevere with calm, unswerving determination was his main weakness.[5]

Sounds just like a number of modern politicians.

The rules of war: You can kill an enemy combatant but you can't beat him up

Today's New York Times reports that Iraqi soldiers claim that after they beat up a detainee or two, they often get critical information from enemy detainees. Here is the Times account:

In one of the new joint American-Iraqi security stations in the capital this month, in the volatile Ghazaliya neighborhood, Capt. Darren Fowler was heaping praise on his Iraqi counterparts for helping capture three insurgent suspects who had provided information he believed would save American lives.

“The detainee gave us names from the highest to the lowest,” Captain Fowler told the Iraqi soldiers. “He showed us their safe houses, where they store weapons and I.E.D.’s and where they keep kidnap victims, how they get weapons, where weapons come from, how they place I.E.D.’s, attack us and go away. Because you detained this guy this is the first intelligence linking everything together. Good job. Very good job.”

The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees to the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two, the Iraqis said. The stripes on the detainee’s back, which appeared to be the product of a whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.

To the Iraqi soldiers, the treatment was normal and necessary. They were proud of their technique and proud to have helped the Americans.

“I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” Capt. Bassim Hassan said through an interpreter. “We know how to make them talk. We know their back streets. We beat them. I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”

While most Western experts suggest that torture is useless because the victim will eventually say whatever his torturers want him to say just to stop the torture, the Times reports a different finding on the ground:

The beaten detainee, according to Captain Fowler, not only led the Americans to safe houses believed to be used by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but also confessed to laying and detonating roadside bombs along a section of road heavily traveled by American patrols. Just a month ago, four soldiers from Captain Fowler’s regiment died on that road after the explosion of a large, deeply buried bomb, possibly made in the bomb factory that the Americans were able to dismantle because of the detainee’s information, Captain Fowler said.

Regardless of what the facts show, as the Times went on to report:

[B]eating is strictly forbidden by the United States Army’s Field Manual, as well as American and Iraqi laws. When the Americans learned about the beating, they were quick to condemn it.

But Iraqi soldiers, the Times went on to say, discredit what the experts say and suggest that Americans are naive:

The insurgents are playing for keeps, they say, and force must be answered with force.

“If the Americans used this way, the way we use, nobody would shoot the Americans at all,” Captain Hassan said. “But they are easy with them, and they have made it easy for the terrorists....”

Captain Hassan and his colleagues said they knew the Iraqi Army had rules against beatings, but “they tell us to do what we have to do,” he said. “For me it’s a matter of conscience, not rules,” he said.

What about the consequences of criminalizing warfare?

David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey raise a critical question in an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal.

Using the term "lawfare" to describe the "blizzard of litigation initiated in U.S. federal courts on behalf of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees" the former Department of Justice officials refer to the lawsuits that, in their words, "range from habeas corpus petitions...to tort suits seeking monies from U.S. government officials, to challenges regarding the detainees' conditions of confinement."

Along with the litigation, as Rivkin and Casey write, "[then there are the 'progressive'] NGOs [who] routinely demand that irregular enemy combatants like al Qaeda and the Taliban can be treated as POWs or criminal defendants, claim that military force can be applied only to the minimum amounts necessary to neutralize a particular opponent (rather than with a view to achieving ultimate victory), [and who aim] to ban an increasing number of weapons and weapons systems as being 'inherently indiscriminate.'" They argue that:

The effect of this lawfare effort, were it successful, would be to make it exceptionally difficult - if not impossible- for a law-abiding state to wage war in anything like the tradtional manner, bringing the full weight of the national armed forces to bear against an enemy, without prompting charges of war crimes and efforts to intimidate individual officials with prosecutions on ersatz 'war crimes' theories.

While this may be all well and good in theory, it would seem that Messrs. Rivkin and Casey raise a point point worth considering: Exactly what alternative method do those who would criminalize war suggest should be used to "[ensure] the welfare and security of the civilian populations that the armed forces of states, and of the U.S. in particular, are raised and maintained to protect"?