The Frequently Ticking Time Bomb
Marcy Wheeler offers some close reading and observes that “According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.”
This should, I think, put to rest the notion that some kind of ticking time bomb story lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s torture policy. And of course once you start torturing people, the tendency is for torture to always become excessive. Among other things, normal people aren’t going to want to torture anyone. So after the first few dozen torture sessions, your more well-adjusted torturers are going to find themselves drifting out of the torture business and you’re left more with the people who like torturing. Maybe they’re sadists or just eager to avenge 9/11 or god knows what. But that how your torturing sessions can end up in the triple digits.
36 Responses to “The Frequently Ticking Time Bomb”
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April 19th, 2009 at 10:14 am
The same thing holds true for factory farms and slaughterhouses, which is why they are even more horrible places than they need to be (see, for instance, http://www.meat.org)
April 19th, 2009 at 10:15 am
What you’ll find now is that the right will pretend that this argument never existed, and rather focus on the idea that all this waterboarding produced useful intel.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:20 am
183 times in a month.
Sounds like the sessions were real productive.
6 times a day. Damn. It must have started to get a little routine. Just like a job.
-Hey, Jack, you ok for the 12, 2, and 4 sessions? I’ve got to pick my daughter up from nursery school and take her to the pediatrician.
-Can’t today. He’s bleeding from the ears and I’ve got to meet with the Young at Heart group later and don’t have a have a change of shirts.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Maybe they’re sadists or just eager to avenge 9/11 or god knows what.
Maybe they just love America a whole lot?
April 19th, 2009 at 10:35 am
I predict that many on the right will argue that if someone can be waterboarded that often and survive then it can’t be torture. There is no end to this really. But I would point out that if someone does something innocuous like pinch you once or twice it is in fact no big deal (well, I guess that depends on where on the body one is pinched). But I would also point out that being pinched 183 times in a month, more than five times per day while one is incarcerated, by a guard who has total control over you and your body, might in its way be deeply distressing, perhaps even torturous. Now imagine being waterboarded more than five times per day for a month, while during your “downtime” you’re subject to being kept naked in a cold room, perhaps awake for up to 10 days and 23 hours. Think of the joy in something like that for creative sadists.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Matt’s main argument is wrong because I have seen the TV show “24″ and they have gone on for many seasons and they torture people all the time, except I guess the entire show has taken place over a time frame of a net 7 or 8 days, so maybe that’s entirely inapplicable.
April 19th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Among other things, normal people aren’t going to want to torture anyone.
This line of thinking bears further exploration. What kind of person tortures? What kind of person enables torture? What kind of person orders torture?
We might want to go back and look at the arguments put forth against the Abu Ghraib grunts and apply them to the muckety-mucks who were doing the same and worse to accurately take the measure of these “bad apples.”
April 19th, 2009 at 11:04 am
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE4BI0VQ20081219
We’re all capable of inflicting torture under the right circumstances I suspect. This is why laws against torture are so important. If we’re angry enough, or if an environment allows us to dehumanize someone enough, we can do significant harm.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:05 am
A rare stupid conclusion from Matt; why would he think that those conducting the torture were setting the schedule?
April 19th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Among other things, normal people aren’t going to want to torture anyone. So after the first few dozen torture sessions, your more well-adjusted torturers are going to find themselves drifting out of the torture business and you’re left more with the people who like torturing.
I’m doubtful this is the main factor. My guess is that several people higher up in the food chain were convinced that these guys must know something very, very important, and that pressure was thus exerted all the way down to the line, leading into the torture chamber, to produce some of that “high value intelligence” which wasn’t forthcoming. So the torturers were under orders to keep going until they got something.
There was a paranoid, government-wide mindset in that administration that we were dealing with a vast and omnipotent global conspiracy of “terror masters” with “global reach” and massive “state sponsorship” that was on the verge of dropping the nuclear, biological or chemical Big One. No middle level intelligence officer wanted to be the guy who had failed to pull the big secret from the key prisoners, in the event the worst came to pass.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Mary asks: What kind of person tortures?
and I would add, what kind of person waterboards another human being, oh say, 175 times and doesn’t say to himself, this isn’t really working, we shouldn’t be doing this?
I’m all for going after the idiots who ordered and justified the lunacy, but now I’m really not convinced that those who carried it out should be held blameless.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:40 am
#9,
Nothing in Matt’s post indicates that the process he discusses applies only to the hands-on interrogators.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Adagio,
Funny you should ask that. From today’s NYT:
The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.
The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show.
Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
This was not a situation of Langley, Justice, and White House officials backing up the decisions of people in the field. This is about people in Washington ordering field personnel to torture, even when they considered it useless and wrong.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:49 am
What kind of person tortures? What kind of person enables torture? What kind of person orders torture?
Milgram experiment, anyone? (Or, to put it another way: “Milgram experiment: anyone.”)
The memos play the role of the guy in the lab coat, assuring the people with the shock button that they won’t be held responsible while telling them that it is essential for them to continue. Remember, the point of the Milgram experiment was to test obedience to authority, not simply the capacity to inflict pain.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Maybe they’re sadists or just eager to avenge 9/11 or god knows what.
Maybe they just love America a whole lot?
yeah chris, that’s it. The person who waterboarded the guy 45 times loves America more than the person who did it only 25 times. He loves America 20 times as much! that’s a LOT of love. If somebody tortured the guy three times a day for a 5 or 6 years, that would be The Greatest Love Of All.
Seriously, I hope your comment was supposed to be sarcastic.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Saddam Hussein rose up in the Baathist ranks for his skills as a torturer. It’s nice to know the type of morals that the GOP is perpetuating.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:56 am
No no, it’s a mathematical increase in America love, not a geometric increase. Someone who waterboards a guy 45 times loves America slightly less than twice as much as someone who did it only 25 times.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
#12
“So after the first few dozen torture sessions, your more well-adjusted torturers are going to find themselves drifting out of the torture business and you’re left more with the people who like torturing.”
You think the “torturers” are not all torturing; that the term includes levels of management above the “hands-on” “torturer? If so, I’ll switch my complaint to poor writing.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
This, of course, is why the parties responsible destroyed tapes, and why they sought to prevent these disclosures. Their only hope was to keep all this within the realm of the hypothetical, because the reality of what they did is going to be nothing like the hypotheticals.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Almost 20 comments but none from Charles/Mixner yet?
April 19th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
No no, it’s a mathematical increase in America love, not a geometric increase.
Sorry, but no. Each torture session is a complete measure of your devotion – a complete unit of love, so to speak.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Sick sick sick.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to torture these guys. They must have found it lamentable that after so many decades of obeying the law, American interrogators had no experience at it. Whole departments had to be brought up to speed.
Also, the victims were carefully monitored by doctors and psychiatrists to certify that they weren’t suffering permanent bodily harm or otherwise blowing the “Justice” Department’s legal cover.
These men were tortured experimentally, to see how much torture Bush order without meeting his own definition of “torture.” Then, as these results became available, they were tortured as a training exercise, to bring whole departments of apprentice torturers up to speed.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Kurzleg: don’t bait the troll. Besides, it’s early, and he’s got to plan out how to fill out the whole day with the same old bullshit.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
They never hated Saddam Hussein for what he did; they hated Saddam Hussein because he was no longer on their side.
Good god, the entire American right walked around with public erections throughout the 1980s because they hoped they’d get to meet or even work with one of these Salvadoran or Honduran or Guatemalan death squad tyrants and torture leaders.
And when they got to combine Guatemalan mass civilian slaughter, baby-killing, and torture with the evangelical Christian background of the Guatemalan generals slaughtering their Mayan population, man, it was a huge fusion of sexual release for all sorts of American evangelicals, Republican hawks, and liberal hawks too, as long as after the sexual climax the liberal hawks made sure to say something about how much guilt they felt over the pleasure, I mean, horrible carnage it was necessary to enforce due to Soviet malfeasance.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Rich Lowry, defender of waterboarding Al Zubaydah and Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, on Charles Graner from Abu Ghraib:
“a remorseless monster”
April 19th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
The Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo pretty well established that almost anyone can get into the power relationship that allows torture and mistreatment. It takes either someone with an incredibly strong personality and values or someone coming in from the outside with strong values to call a halt. Otherwise everyone just kind of gets into it and accepts the unthinkable as the new normal. Read his book “The Lucifer Effect.”
He says it isn’t a problem of “bad apples” so much as bad barrels (inadequate institutional controls) and bad barrel makers (Dick Cheneys and the Addingtons and Jay Bybees) who create the conditions for bringing out the worst in people.
April 19th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
What kind of person tortures? What kind of person enables torture? What kind of person orders torture?
Well, frequently it’s the kind of person who starts off tormenting small helpless animals as a child.
April 19th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
That’s literally insane…waterboarding a guy (basically putting the fear of death into him) 6 times a day for a whole month? That’s sick. Regardless of Obama’s statement about the overall business, we need a very close investigation of excessive use of particular procedures, because at this frequency, it can’t be anything less than torture, and pure sadism to boot.
That’s evil, and we don’t do evil, and if we find out we did, heads should roll (figuratively of course).
April 19th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
What kind of person tortures? What kind of person enables torture? What kind of person orders torture?
Psychological or physical abuse during childhood can predispose people towards violence and impair their ability to empathize with others. I’m not excusing the behavior (free will does actually exist), but some people get pretty fucked up before they can do anything about it. This is why institutional design and oversight is so important. It also highlights the importance of family planning, early childhood care, education, etc.
April 19th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Mixnerspotter: I hear you. I was just surprised by the absence.
April 19th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
the torturers should be named so that we can have them identified as sexual predators when they are in our neighborhoods.
April 19th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Torturerst also take revenge when their behavior is exposed. It looks like Hayden went ahead and burned Congresswoman Jane Harman for taking a quid pro quo from an Israeli agent in retaliation for the release of the torture memos. Ruh roh.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:48 am
There’s a certain degree of stupidity indicated when you’re told that torture doesn’t work well, then you torture somebody 163 times and get nothing. Then you torture somebody else.
Clearly there’s a disconnect between reality and the people doing – and ordering – the torture here.
I say execute the lot of them. The right wing thinks execution is a valid punishment for crime. So instead of Obama letting them all walk, prosecute, convict and execute the lot of them – right up to Dick Cheney and George Bush. That will show the rest of the world Obama means business when he says we don’t do that crap.
Otherwise, Obama letting them all walk just says to the world, “We don’t give a damn about your opinion of the US and I’m just BSing about everything I say.”
April 20th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I dunno … if someone did something horrific to my son or daughter, I’d have a fairly strong desire to do some very, very, very bad things to that person.
But 260-some odd times? Over the course of months? Uh … no. That’s a bit much.
And if Obama refuses to prosecute anyone for this stuff, than he is just as culpable, IMHO. So far, his comments have been nothing but horseshit, “I’m the good guy who wants to move forward” posturing.
That needs to end and investigations begin. Period.
April 20th, 2009 at 11:28 am
[...] 20, 2009 · No Comments i dont dig yglesias anti-torture snark but i think this is just right: Marcy Wheeler offers some close reading and observes that “According to the May [...]