Somewhere in the distant recesses of my mind is a passage from Reef Points, a.k.a. the Plebe's Bible, that we were required to memorize during our first year at the U.S. Naval Academy. "When principle is involved," the saying went, "be deaf to expediency." The latest firestorm over interrogation and torture of enemy combatants captured in the wrongly named global war on terror brings this tension between principle and expediency front and center.
In December 2007, after CIA Director General Michael Hayden announced the agency had destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking member of al Qaeda to be captured after the attacks of 11 September 2001, former agency employee John Kiriakou came forward to reveal his own role in the capture and questioning of that detainee. Kiriakou claimed that waterboarding had broken Zubaida in under a minute. While the intelligence breakthrough "probably saved lives," said Kiriakou, he now regards the technique as torture.
Unfortunately, this issue is far from being resolved, despite the Bush administration's pledge that "We do not torture." That lack of clarity was demonstrated at the Senate confirmation hearings of Michael Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General when the former judge declined to say whether he considered waterboarding to be torture. It is still an open question whether, under the most dire circumstances—a term that will be difficult to define—this administration (or a future one) will authorize harsh techniques or not.
Proponents (usually civilian) of aggressive methods of interrogation, including waterboarding, argue that when the nation and its people are at risk, averting attacks that kill or maim Americans justifies using any effective means to obtain that vital information. The nightmare scenario supposes a prisoner knows the location of a nuclear weapon set to detonate in a U.S. city. Who would not employ any means available to get that life-saving information?
Critics including the military and former prisoners of war such as Senator John McCain take violent exception. Torture does not work and any "confession" is likely to be unreliable at best. Furthermore, by employing torture, the United States loses the moral high ground while also exposing American prisoners to similar treatment.
Missing from this controversy are the long-term effects of the clash between principle and expediency. A parallel lesson from history suggests how explosive these consequences can be. In November 1956, Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" exposed the worst excesses of Josef Stalin's gulags and mass executions of Russians and many others.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev often recounted how shocked and disaffected elite members of his later generation were by the horrible revelations. Indeed, the disillusionment was so great that Gorbachev believed it planted the seeds that ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union. Whether the torture issue will rise to that level here is unknowable. But judging from the damage done to the U.S. image abroad, the effect has been considerable so far. So can we balance "principle" and "expediency" in an era defined by radicalism and terror in which chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons are within reach?
Take this argument a step further. If we are to use extreme interrogation techniques against enemy combatants, why not have the police employ them with criminal suspects whose information could save lives? Or in court cases where testimony is vital even to civil cases, why not subject witnesses to waterboarding? The answer is blindingly obvious—these techniques destroy our moral fiber, values, and the basis of justice and civility that form the soul of this nation.
The Constitution forbids "cruel and unusual punishment." Rather than debate what is or is not torture, we need to apply this constitutional standard to everyone, enemy combatant or not. And if certain circumstances are so exceptional that our security and safety are at grave risk, then presidents must be prepared to break the law and suffer the consequences. Otherwise, everything we have stood for will be held hostage to expediency.