I get frustrated with the frequency with which people write about the treatment of detainees without getting their facts straight. But let me just make a little aside here. I am not one of the people that utilized the argument that torture doesn’t work. Torture can work, in certain limited circumstances. If your subject has the information that you are seeking, torturing them may hasten the divulgence of that information. Think about a bully on the playground. If he threatens to beat you up unless you tell him where you hid something, you may very well tell him what he wants to know to avoid a beating. Or, you may tell him to get him to stop beating you. So, yeah, threats and torture and other forms of coercion can work.
When knowledgeable people say that torture doesn’t work, they mean something different. If you don’t know what information your subject has, you are likely to ask questions that they don’t know the answers to. When you subject them to torture or the threat of torture they will make things up that they think will make the pain or the threat of pain go away. This creates false leads.
Experienced interrogators are fairly united in their opinion that torture is not an effective means of obtaining good information. They are mainly in agreement that it is more effective to establish some rapport with the subject and to use a lot of patience. If speed is your only consideration and you know exactly what you want to ask and you know that your subject has the information you are seeking, then torture can be the speediest way to learn what you need to know. But, in the real world, those situations are exceedingly rare.
So, setting aside momentarily the moral issues with torturing detainees, the idea that some good information was obtained through torture (if true) would not be all that surprising. In order for a prosector to show discretion in the face of prima facie evidence of lawbreaking, they’d need to see evidence that the torture was effective in yielding time-sensitive information that resulted in averting some disaster. The same would be true for a jury if they were considering nullifying the charges.
But the Bush administration has around 100 dead detainees’ blood on their hands. As of early 2006 (PDF), there were forty-five cases of suspected homicide or mistreatment that led to death. There were eight cases of people who were tortured to death. I don’t know why these facts are so consistently ignored, but they are central to the historical record. When will Dick Cheney write an opinion piece explaining why these 45 people were killed and what intelligence was gained by killing them?
The national media, in collusion with this government and the last government, have created a false narrative where all we debate is the mistreatment of a small number of high-value prisoners. Even when we stick to those limited cases, the record warrants prosecution. But at least there is the semblance of a legitimate debate on those cases. The real records shows, however, that people were tortured to death. Lots of them.