Tortuous Sunday
Another tortuous Sunday in San Diego. Coffee and a blueberry muffin outdoors and downtown this morning. Working on some iced coffee and pecan pie for lunch during a little work break right now. As I try to do on Sundays, I found a copy of the New York Times in this journalistic wasteland of Southern California.
By design or chance, torture was a theme throughout. Two of the front page headlines mentioned the “abuse” cases arising from the U.S. Army’s prison in Iraq. More interesting though was an article on page 4 reporting that Iran’s Guardian Council had approved legislation banning torture of prisoners. Ironic that the news came on the day one of the American hostages held by Iran 1979-1981 died in a tragic accident. There will always be a part of me that will wonder if many of the problems with Islamic fundamentalists could have been avoided if President Carter or President Reagan had dealt firmly with Iran in the early 1980s. I guess it happened too close to the Vietnam War to have had public support for the solution I think would have been necessary and appropriate, but still…
The best of the torture references though was on page 5 of the Week In Review section: Torture Is Often a Temptation And Almost Never Works by James Glanz. It gets to the point of the issue: aside from the moral and philosophical objections which can be debated ad nauseum, especially when considering torture as a tool to prevent future deaths, it generally does not work. When I still conducted counterintelligence investigations for the State Department (the DSS days), I attended a seminar on certain specific hostile intelligence services sponsored by another USG agency. You can probably guess which one; it’s not a secret but I’d rather not spell it out for the ‘bots. One the points brought up several times was not only their policy of, but the advantages of, positive recruitment. Work product is better when received through positive incentives rather than draconian threats. More bluntly, torture, blackmail and other forms of fear may produce information, but not information you can rely on.
I think it’s also an issue that law school evidence classes don’t focus on nearly enough either. While the constitutional issues surrounding the exclusion of evidence obtained through police abuse or duress are appropriate legal issues and can be debated and argued from different philosophical points of view, I think the simple argument that like hearsay testimony, eyewitness identifications and voodoo expert witnesses, “evidence” produced through duress just isn’t reliable and shouldn’t be considered, is given little, if any, time.
One thing running through my mind though is the impact of these disclosures on the pending detention cases before the Supreme Court. The administration smugly argued on 4/28 that no judicial oversight is appropriate for the enemy combatants and unlawful belligerents held at various locations. Somehow I doubt the Court will agree, especially now, but I wonder if it will ever leak as to how the justices were leaning before these disclosures and which, if any, switched their vote or hardened or softened a point in the final opinion.
Fascinating post —- the whole thing just makes me sick.