Why the McCain amendment is wrong

This editorial pretty much sums up my feelings about the anti-torture McCain amendment.

Sen. John McCain says that allowing torture would ruin our image. Is that worse than terrorists ruining our landscape? We want them to fear being tortured, not know they have the right to an attorney.

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We do question his attempt to pass legislation banning the torture of prisoners of war and detainees captured on foreign battlefields. It's not because we advocate torture, but because the benefits gained by telling the world we have a law that bans it are outweighed by terrorists' and enemies' knowing we have such a law.

I don't advocate torture either. But I do object to opening up our interrogation techniques for the world to see. In Mark Bowden's October 2003 article for the Atlantic, "The Dark Art of Interrogation" (subscription req'd), he suggests that fear is the most effective interrogation technique.

Fear works. It is more effective than any drug, tactic, or torture device. According to unnamed scientific studies cited by the Kubark Manual (it is frightening to think what these experiments might have been), most people cope with pain better than they think they will. As people become more familiar with pain, they become conditioned to it. Those who have suffered more physical pain than others from being beaten frequently as a child, for example, or suffering a painful illness may adapt to it and come to fear it less. So once interrogators resort to actual torture, they are apt to lose ground.

"The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself," the manual says.

The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain ... Sustained long enough, a strong fear of anything vague or unknown induces regression, whereas the materialization of the fear, the infliction of some form of punishment, is likely to come as a relief. The subject finds that he can hold out, and his resistances are strengthened.

That fear is bolstered by uncertainty, according to Michael Koubi, the former chief interrogator for Israel's General Security Services, whom Bowden interviews in the article.

"People change when they get to prison," Koubi says. "They may be heroes outside, but inside they change. The conditions are different. People are afraid of the unknown. They are afraid of being tortured, of being held for a long time. Try to see what it is like to sit with a hood over your head for four hours, when you are hungry and tired and afraid, when you are isolated from everything and have no clue what is going on." When the captive believes that anything could happen--torture, execution, indefinite imprisonment, even the persecution of his loved ones--the interrogator can go to work.

I have no objection to Congress and the President setting limits on what interrogators can do, though as Bowden points out even techniques such as sleep deprivation are forbidden under the Geneva convention. I do have a problem with broadcasting those limits to the greater world. And I don't believe we should unnecessarily tie the hands of interrogators: Too much is at stake.