Editorial: Torture tactics cost US moral high ground

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Opinion

Brutal techniques failed to elicit reliable intelligence.

It might be assumed that a practice which has endured since the Dark Ages must have some usefulness. Certainly, that was the view of Central Intelligence Agency interrogators who chose to torture terror suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. That decision has now been damned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which says the spy agency brutalised scores of detainees in ways that turned secret prisons into chambers of suffering and did nothing to make Americans safer. Unsurprisingly, it is a claim rejected by the CIA. It maintains that "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding saved lives and stopped terror plots by eliciting information that could not be obtained any other way.

That argument is at the core of the committee's report. It concludes that the most accurate information from interrogation was provided by detainees before they were subjected to these "techniques". In that, it can call on much research as well as its own five-year investigation. The former has found that information obtained by torture is usually unreliable. When people are in pain, they will say virtually anything to get the pain to stop. Often, this will be intentionally incomplete and is said to appease the torturer, not to reveal the truth. Interrogators cannot know which bits of the information are true and which are false.

It is relatively easy, however, to see why the CIA resorted to such brutality. When people are placed in situations of extreme duress, they do sometimes provide accurate information that would not otherwise be disclosed. As difficult as it is to separate this from other garbled outpourings, it provides a temptation to use torture. That is increased by the "ticking bomb" scenario in which the CIA found itself. Former directors of the agency say they believed al-Qaeda was planning a second wave of attacks on the US and that they felt a deep responsibility to prevent this. They lacked intelligence and did not have the luxury of time to respond in any other way.

That scenario is revealing. It suggests their behaviour mimicked other occasions in history when torture has been used widely. As much as anything else, the practice satisfies the psychological needs of the interrogators in times of stress. It counters their sense of desperation and reassures them that they are in control. In the case of the CIA, there was also the small matter of revenge for the thousands killed in the World Trade Centre and at the Pentagon.

The agency, therefore, used its "enhanced" techniques even though it must have recognised that it was not producing much, if any, reliable information. The critical situation in which the US found itself provided plenty of licence. Once the agency had been given new authority by President George W. Bush in a secret memorandum, it saw a green light and the use of torture spread. This process was aided and abetted by CIA officials' willingness to deceive the White House and members of Congress about how the interrogation programme was being run and what it was achieving.

That makes the response of the former CIA directors to the report all the more lamentable. Not only did their approach produce information that was unreliable but they cost the US the moral high ground that it occupied immediately after 9/11. America's standing in the world plummeted.

Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says she hopes that the report will prevent the US contemplating such tactics again. But history suggests that torture, however unjustified, will continue to be practised in times of desperation.