Ninety to Nine

The terrorist, by virtue of his modus operandi-does not wear a uniform, he plants bombs that kill civilians-does not respect the laws of war, so there is no reason why he should be protected by them."

These lines come from Roger Trinqueir's La Guerre Moderne, required reading for soldiers of subversive warfare, and the framework for post-World War II Western Alliance military strategy.

The title on the cover of Human Rights Watch's new book Torture is pinched on both ends by alligator clips, the device used by Americans in Vietnam to dispense high jolts of electricity to captured Vietcong. Since the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the respectability of coercive interrogation as a viable method has diminished. But 9/11 renewed the debate over torture's legitimacy.

The book begins with a historical examination written by senior legal advisor of Human Rights Watch, James Ross. The ancient Greeks and Romans, prizing a criminal confession as the "queen of proofs," often applied torture for the sake of reaching a verdict. Its mass appeal only faded in the late nineteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers finally eschewed it as a horrible relic of barbarism.

Now torture, as this collection of essays so carefully explains, is the defining issue of the day. While some of the writing is honest and forthright, particularly the essays by non-Human Rights Watch staffers, the book as a whole is rather pedantic. Still, it contains the expertise of lifetimes dedicated to human rights work, witness accounts in the field and victims' harrowing narratives, making it a worthwhile read even for a reader who disagrees with the conclusions forwarded.

To follow some of the authors' arguments against torture, it's best to know what the proponents say. Atlantic Monthly correspondent Mark Bowden has been a prolific advocate of torture as necessary evil. He cites the "classic situation"-what former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Sir Nigel Rodley (also a contributor) calls the "authoritarian, unconstitutional military government repressing opposition of any kind, peaceful or otherwise, by whatever terroristic mean they deem appropriate." Bowden conceives of anything less brutal than the "classic situation" as a permissible, legal form of interrogation. Bowden's justification is plain: He does not find criminals like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, exactly human. "I think that there's not a moral equivalent," he says in a September 2003 interview. Bowden draws a distinction between victims of indiscriminate torture, and those tortured with the object of intelligence; for the latter, the strike should fall hard and fast. After all, torture is a political gesture the enemy understands.

The camp that supports the use of coercive techniques often cites the "ticking bomb" scenario as reason for wandering into morally undefined territory. From a posture that would make J.S. Mill proud, they ask, what is the greater evil? The potential of saving lives always trumps the discomfiture of torture. Other parts of the civilized world seem to be following suit. A case in point: Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian heritage, was stopped in New York on his way from Syria to Canada, deported back to Syria and tortured until giving a (false) confession. Canadians and Brits are now debating whether they can accept information obtained through coercive methods.

Attorney and author Alan Dershowitz often champions the notion of "warranted torture," that is torturing for the express purpose of obtaining information that can be used to save lives immediately. What's misguided about this position, writes Eitan Fellner, executive director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights, in a Torture chapter, is the idea "that it is possible to legitimize the use of torture?and at the same time to restrict its use to exceptional cases." Furthermore, even if coercive interrogation was effective-and proof of this is specious at best-it can almost never be corroborated by an independent source. Lives are more often damaged than saved.

In the book's most engaging essay, Harvard professor and author Michael Ignatieff explains why opposing torture is no less of a "hazard" than supporting it. The essay rather reluctantly, concludes that the position of categorical opposition should be adopted not because torture can't reap safety benefits, but, as he has it, "We can't torture, in other words, because of who we are."

France and Israel come up often throughout the book as exemplary models of how the torture experiment failed. The horrific methods of the 1970s and 1980s Latin American dictatorships originate from the so-called French school, which developed during the late French colonial period to quell revolutionary ambitions, particularly in North Africa. In one of the book's most pertinent essays, Marie-Monique Robin, a French documentary filmmaker and author, traces the Algerian struggle back to a single decision made by the French government-to replace political dialogue with a strictly offensive and militaristic approach. In so doing, she argues, "the country of human rights" morally undermined itself, and ultimately lost its ostensible war.

Any viewer of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers can recognize painful resonances with the war in Iraq. The Pentagon even screened the film for troops in August 2003, during the war in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration's consent of anything that doesn't leave a scar is gruesome enough, one would think. But as Tom Malinowski notes, Rumsfeld has quietly approved third-world practices that his boss publicly condemns: the use of stress positions, nudity, sleep deprivation, the use of hoods, simulated drowning, threatened dog attacks, extended isolation and so on.

Echoing the sentiment of other Human Rights Watch contributors, executive director Kenneth Roth writes in the book's final essay that even while brandishing its moral credibility, the U.S. has also set a precedent in breaching international human rights and humanitarian law. "If the ban on torture can be flouted," he writes, it follows that other human rights and responsibilities will quickly fall to the wayside.