Recently, the Daily Cardinal spoke with UW-Madison Southeast Asian history professor Alfred McCoy, who authored the book 'The Question of Torture. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.'
DC: You were prompted into writing this book by the pictures at Abu Ghraib.
AM: [??] People looked at the most famous of photos of the Iraqi standing on the box'hooded, arms extended'with fake electrical wires and were simply repulsed. William Safire, writing in The New York Times, called the military police guilty of these abuses 'creeps,' and others called them 'recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Md.' Former Defense Secretary Schlesinger said these were abuses limited to a small group on the night shift. In short, the brutality in the photos was supposed to be the work of aberrant individuals, or just seven bad apples.
DC: You didn't believe that?
AM: I looked at that photo and saw the Iraqi hooded for sensory deprivation and his arms extended for self-inflicted pain. In sum, I saw the trademark techniques of this distinctive American torture paradigm, developed by the CIA in the early 1960s and propagated worldwide by the Agency in the decades since. [??]
DC: Many advocates of torture cite the 'ticking bomb' scenario, in which a person has to be tortured to stop a bomb from exploding in the U.S. or to stop a terrorist attack. [??]
AM: The possibility of the bomb being there and us capturing this person in the precise way that will make this hypothetical real, is extraordinarily improbable. Let's look at a real example of what usually happens.
Just days before the 9/11 attacks, the FBI's Minneapolis office had Zacharias Moussaoui in custody and sent a message to Washington asking to search his computer, saying 'we're trying to stop somebody from flying a plane into the World Trade Center.' Now we look back on this and say, 'Oh my God, how could the FBI have ignored this'? But that's not how it happens. Before an event like this occurs, there is a river of information, much of it is surprisingly accurate. But it's only after an event has occurred that we can see the significance of little pieces of information and pluck intelligence gems from the torrent of information. So in the future, lacking omniscience, we could have a terrorist who has a ticking bomb. But odds are we wouldn't know it or we wouldn't understand the significance of it until it's too late.
DC: And what about the President's assertion that numerous attacks have been thwarted by information gleamed from 'torture lite' tactics?
AM: Well let's look at the information that we know we've gotten from people we've tortured. Right after 9/11 we captured a man named [Ibn al Shaykh] al Libbi. The CIA tortured him for two weeks and he gave them information that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda in chemical and biological weapons. In Feb. 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. with this information. Now he's embarrassed by that statement. The whole country is embarrassed by that statement. And in Feb. of 2004, the CIA made a formal finding that al Libbi was a fabricator. [??]
With this administration I think it's very likely to assume that if they had tortured someone and gotten some real information that had some operational value, we would know all about it.
DC: What does this do for our standing in other countries?
AM: [??] We are defying the most fundamental principles in our culture, in our society and our modern civilization. How can we purport to be the moral leader of the international community while defying its most fundamental moral principals? It's an unsustainable contradiction.
