Past in Print Weblog

Evidence of torture, new and old, has landed President Obama in a bit of a quandary.  A significant percentage of his supporters are calling for criminal prosecution of Bush officials responsible for apparent war crimes.  Meanwhile, the President’s detractors pose numerous counter arguments, recommending against investigating the Bush Administration’s torture policy.  Barack Obama is in a tight spot, and his impetus to “look forward, not back” is understandable considering the antagonistic state of political affairs in America.  However, as unpleasant as investigations and prosecutions will be domestically, external perspectives need to be considered.

Perhaps the most important foreign perspective worth considering is that of our enemy:  Al Qaeda.  How is the argument over torture within the U.S. perceived by Osama Bin Ladin ?  More importantly, how does it impact their recruiting capacity?  To a certain extent, we already know the answers.

One extremely informed opinion was published at The Daily Beast last week.  Writing under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, a 14 year Air Force interrogator offered his assessment in a April 20 post.  Responding to Christopher Buckley’s and Michael Mukasey’s criticisms of Obama for releasing the previously classified Office of Legal Council torture memos, Alexander wrote:

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse…

In addition to increasing Al Qaeda’s pool of recruits, the torturing of detainees has undoubtedly led counter terrorism officials to waste time and resources chasing invented threats.  Former Middle East CIA field officer, Robert Baer noted in the May 4 print issue of Time that the Bush Administration selected their techniques from a 1957 paper regarding communist efforts during the Korean War:

The Crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can’t be relied on to produce more than false confessions — because people will say anything to make the pain stop.  This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore…

I’d love to know what you think.  If you’re able, set aside the moral and legal implications of the Bush Administration’s treatment of captured enemy combatants.  Then consider the implications of the above informed commentators, Alexander and Baer; respectively, that torturing our prisoners makes it easier for our enemies to recruit, and that waterboading, specifically, is more likely than not to produce false information from a prisoner.  These tactics, then, are quite contradictory to the maintenance of U.S. national security.

(Originally posted at Care2.com, Political Causes Blog 28 April 2009)