The pragmatism of principle

Not to belabor the point, but you’ve probably heard a thing or two about torture in the
past few weeks.

First there was Mark Danner’s essay explicating the International Committee of the Red Cross report, which provided gruesome first-person accounts of torture victims at “the black sites.” Then most recently, the Obama administration authorized the release of four Justice Department memos constructing the legal and administrative framework for “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

As clamor for an independent prosecution a la the Nuremberg Trials has intensified, the American blogosphere has discovered its sense of outrage. But the most insightful commentary has come from Danner, who recently wrote, “We need an investigation that will ruthlessly analyze the controversial and persistent assertions that torture averted attacks.”

This question cuts to the core of the torture scandal and challenges the moral sensibilities of Americans who might otherwise experience pure outrage at descriptions of waterboarding and sleep deprivation. After all, as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued, most people would justify torture under some circumstance or another – to save a child, say, or to rescue a friend.

Most of those who still support torture substantiate their convictions with claims of its effectiveness in extracting information from hardened terrorists. But interrogation expert Matthew Alexander refutes this argument in his book “How to Break a Terrorist.”

Alexander, who led the Special Operations task force that captured al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said torture is actually a deeply ineffective method of interrogation.

Having been commissioned as a senior investigator to locate Zarqawi, Alexander arrived in Iraq in March 2006, one month after Zarqawi’s forces destroyed the golden-domed Askariya mosque, sparking an explosion in sectarian violence.

As suicide bombers plunged Iraq into civil war, Alexander was startled to find the Army still employing the Guantanamo Bay methods of interrogation. But instead of sustaining such practices, he taught his team a more traditional methodology – “one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information.”

Not only did Alexander’s new methods lead to the location and murder of Zarqawi, but Gen. David Petraeus used similar tactics a year later to ignite the “Anbar Awakening,” in which tens of thousands of frustrated Sunnis betrayed al-Qaida to join U.S. forces, dramatically reducing bloodshed in the region.

Alexander is familiar with the Cheney counter-argument that torture “policies ... were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

But as Alexander points out, American torture practices at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have been the most successful recruiting tool for al-Qaida in Iraq. In Alexander’s estimation, a lifetime military expert, at least half of American casualties in Iraq have come at the hands of foreign fighters who joined the insurgency because of American prisoner abuse.

As Dershowitz reminds us, torture is not without its moral complexities or complications. But if Alexander’s experience teaches us anything, it’s that the torture debate should not only be about principle, but about pragmatism as well.