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Lelyveld on torture
...Chris hits on exactly the things that I admired and appreciated about the piece, and the things that frustrated me. Of the former, the most obvious is the acknowledgment that a significant percentage of people who have been picked up, threatened, tortured, and even killed, have been completely innocent. No one can pin down exactly what that percentage is, obviously. Perhaps we'll never know. But if, as the Red Cross reported last year, 70 to 90 percent of detainees in Iraq were arrested by mistake, and 40 percent of prisoners at Guantánamo should never have been there, if children are among the victims in both Iraq and Guantánamo (more on this from The Heretik), and abuse is widespread, not isolated, then obviously a lot of innocent people have been hurt. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the majority of people who have been tortured should not even have been arrested. There is no excuse for anyone to believe anymore that coercive interrogation is something reserved for the most dangerous and well-connected terrorists.

I think it needs to be emphasized, though, that this isn't a matter of lack of professionalism, or interrogations out of control and hitting the wrong people. It's the nature of the beast. It's all well and good to say that this is a tool that will only be used on the most recalcitrant people in possession of the most urgently needed information, but that assumes that anyone really knows who those people are and what they know. The fact is -- and it's been true throughout history, but we've been given a crash course in the principle in the past couple of years -- once you give anyone this tool, once you say that you can do anything to a person if you think he or she knows something you need to know, it's inevitable that when the tool is used, it will have less to do with who the victim is and what he or she knows, than with the frustration level of the torturers and their bosses, or even the release of aspects of human nature that should never be released. Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with going after terrorists who possessed urgently needed information, and everything to do with frustration over the lack of actionable intelligence for fighting insurgents. Dilawar seems to have been arrested at a time when any poor schlump would do for a scapegoat, and murdered because he was held in a place where sadism was acceptable.

It is impossible to practice and encourage torture, including what Lelyveld calls "torture lite," without sadism becoming acceptable, without "the Monster" -- as one of the interrogators at Bagram, where Dilawar was murdered, was called -- becoming the local hero. The best in a profession stand out. That is not always a good thing.

In the face of that brutal reality, it seems seems bizarrely obtuse to focus much attention on the possibility that under some circumstances that as far as anyone can tell have never been faced, torture might be necessary. In an intriguing twist, idealists are honestly facing reality. It's the people who see themselves as hard-headed realists who are building a home in Cloud Cuckoo Land, fantasizing and philosophizing about what has never been....