The Moral Failure and Rational Politics of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”
Regardless of the threats posed to the next generation, America should not repeat its past mistakes. By learning from history—even history as recent as the Bush administration just two decades ago—Washington can find moral clarity and avoid further damage to America’s credibility and values.
Image adapted from a photo of the “Torture, Never Again” monument in Recife, Brasil. (Original photo by Thombr via Wikimedia Commons)
Despite prior warnings in the President’s Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, the White House failed to prevent the most horrific terrorist attack in United States history. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and crashed them into New York’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania. Killing 2,977 people and injuring thousands, including firefighters and police officers who rushed into the burning skyscrapers in Manhattan, 9/11 sparked a seismic shift in American foreign policy and national security strategy. In response to the unforgivable assault on American lives and domestic tranquility, President George W. Bush initiated the “War on Terror” to eliminate terrorist groups that employ Islamic jihad extremism to target and harm Western democracy. As Bush sought to uphold homeland security and root out future threats to Americans’ safety, the White House explored new means of intelligence gathering. Ultimately, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) outlined a proposal to pursue “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) reverse-engineered from the training provided to US military personnel in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program. The techniques proposed included severe sleep deprivation, stress positions, confinement inside boxes with insects, and waterboarding.
The CIA pursued the review and use of EITs after a covert memo from President Bush on September 17, 2001 authorized Director George Tenet to “undertake operations designed to capture and detain persons who pose a continuing, serious threat of violence or death to U.S. persons and interests or who are planning terrorist activities.” Following the capture of multiple members of Al Qaeda, the Bush administration sought to extract any knowledge they may hold of future terrorist operations against the US. As a result, the CIA began using EITs in secret detention centers created to hold enemy combatants, known as “black sites.” At these prisons, the CIA exploited EITs and subjected prisoners to forced nudity and repeated waterboarding most notably waterboarding Abu Zubaydah a total of 83 times.
Originally outlined as an effective policy based on prior research of US military training, the CIA practices devolved into an immoral and legally dubious use of torture. The Bush administration’s decision to use EIT stained American history and undermined the foundation of Bush’s foreign policy in the War on Terror: upholding the legitimacy of US intervention abroad to defend democracy and human rights. With the evaluation of EITs’ success remaining inconclusive and circumstantial, the US must recommit the CIA to upholding the moral high ground of just warfare and not employ the use of EITs. Amid ongoing conflicts in Israel and Ukraine, American leaders may feel inclined to pursue any means necessary to decisively quash Hamas terrorists or a Russian invasion. But to do so would erode America’s commitment to basic Western values.
“American leaders may feel inclined to pursue any means necessary to decisively quash Hamas terrorists or a Russian invasion. But to do so would erode America’s commitment to basic Western values.”
In pursuing the use of EITs, the Bush administration leaned into the national security threat of terrorism and public fear following the 9/11 attacks. The President defended the CIA’s practices as militarily necessary to extract intelligence by invoking an open interpretation of what “necessity” may constitute and the discretion afforded to the presidency to preserve American security interests. In a 2002 memo by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, the administration specifically outlined the goal of using EITs to “quickly obtain information from captured terrorists” in order “to avoid further atrocities against American civilians,” directly challenging the Geneva Convention’s guidelines on the treatment of prisoners. In the infamous leaked “Torture Memos” by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, the White House aimed to limit the interpretation of what constituted “torture” to only acts equated to organ failure, severe bodily harm, or death. Emphasizing the President’s authority and America’s pressing security needs, the American public grew in support of the War on Terror in 2002, and later, even after the Senate Intelligence report on EITs, a majority still supported the use of such tactics in some circumstances. A frequent defense of employing EITs or torture, both in US public discourse and around the world, relies upon the “ticking time bomb” scenario. The hypothetical dilemma defends the tactic of torturing prisoners in cases when doing so could extract life-saving information to diffuse a bomb. While the Bush administration did not directly appeal to the “ticking time bomb” scenario, various defenders of EITs—including prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz in his analysis of American and Israeli interrogation practices—invoked the moral imperative of preventing such catastrophe by any means necessary.
Given the ambiguous intersection of federal and international law, however, the exceptions argued by the Bush Administration against the prohibition of torture were legally dubious. As defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT), “torture” is the “cruel, inhumane, or degrading infliction of severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, on a prisoner to obtain information or a confession, or to mete out a punishment for a suspected crime.” As a result of the Supreme Court case Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, the US follows the CAT definition of torture. In turn, the “enhanced techniques” used by the CIA under Bush were strictly in violation of a ratified US treaty previously upheld by the Supreme Court. The White House sought to suspend CAT standards by redefining who the convention applies to and when. Specifically, the Bush administration categorized Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorists as unlawful “enemy combatants” afforded equal rights under CAT or the Geneva Convention. An effort to recategorize the situation also defined “failed states” like Afghanistan, which were not ensured rights by the CAT or the Geneva Convention. The executive branch also lobbied for wartime exceptions to these treaties, even though the UN convention does not afford an exception in the case of war or national emergency. Legal arguments in defense of EIT fundamentally rested on the Bush administration’s publicly articulated rationales of presidential authority and circumstantial discretion to minimize concerns about abuse and misuse.
Yet the covert operations of the CIA inhibited public challenges to military “necessity” determinations and the verification of victims’ accusations of excess punishment. Rather, allowing the CIA to use EITs grants permission for abuse and misuse of various practices with little potential for accountability. By the Bush Administration creating a new “parallel justice system” for the military to deal with terrorists, and with the Pentagon already laser-focused on obtaining “results” from interrogations, the president built a system of unchecked power and deficient justice. Moreover, the Justice Department offered a rebuttal to the claim that EITs were being used based on cost-benefit analysis while failing to provide a tangible metric that could be consistently applied to assess the need and value of EITs. Disregarding the techniques’ blatant violation of various US treaties, the Eighth Amendment, and even the 1899 Hague Convention, the Bush administration backed up the continued use of EITs as necessary to prevent future attacks on America and to root out terrorism in the Middle East. Yet, in attempting to extend the Bush Doctrine to a more robust, asserted national security strategy, the use of EITs contradicted the moral underpinnings of defending democracy through foreign intervention.
In addition to degrading the credibility of the US as a beacon of human rights, the use of EITs represents a blatant contradiction of American values and is ethically reprehensible. It represents an abhorrent pursuit of political expediency and ruthlessness over moral consistency. Enhanced interrogation, more frequently described as torture, violated various civil liberties afforded under the US Constitution including the right to not self-incriminate and protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Furthermore, the use of EITs goes against numerous basic principles of humanity. The exhaustive, degrading, and violent interrogations violate the agency and autonomy of detainees through the use of force on the defenseless. In turn, the CIA breached the principle of non-combatant immunity and the traditions of just war. The Bush administration’s use of EITs in the War on Terror resulted in over 200 estimated deaths and many more serious injuries in custody due to the unhealthy, unregulated practices at black sites. As the Senate Report on the CIA Detention Interrogation Program publicly revealed, the CIA’s use of EITs included repeated use of waterboarding and other methods for several months while failing to invoke a confession from detainees. Unsafe conditions, including severe temperatures, inadequate diet and ventilation, and a failure to treat illnesses, ended in detainees dying before revealing any valuable intelligence. Costing the US critical assets, the use of EITs also violated unalienable rights under the pretenses of national security and emergency. The Bush administration provided faulty legal justifications and invoked a time of war argument to defend EITs, which countered the original ideals of the American founding. Paramount to civil liberties in the US is always the guarantee of certain natural rights and protections, without the government being able to suspend them.
Central to the justification of EITs lies the supposed effectiveness of aggressive interrogation to produce intelligence needed to subvert future terrorist attacks and pinpoint the activity of terrorist organizations. By and large, however, the jury remains out on the efficacy of torture. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings on the CIA’s use of EITs found a serious gap between the proclaimed success of the techniques and the tangible intelligence results obtained. Psychological studies and reports by military interrogators and intelligence experts corroborate the Intelligence Committee’s report, showing traditional interrogation techniques as far more effective than “torture.” Although the secretive nature of EIT and ethics of zero-harm research leaves little direct study into their results, research shows that methods vastly less coercive than EIT frequently produce false confessions. For example, the CIA originally cited the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the source leading to the capture of Osama Bin Laden’s courier. But the Senate report details that this was a false attribution and the intelligence derived from electronic signals data.
Nevertheless, defenders of the Bush administration refuted critiques of EITs’ effectiveness, arguing that the critiques lacked credible sourcing from within the CIA and were factually wrong about the valuable intelligence collected. Supporters of the president’s policy attribute EITs to preventing any major terrorist attacks on American soil by foreign Islamic militant groups since 9/11. The Senate report refutes that claim, finding no strong evidence that enhanced interrogation techniques helped gather intelligence to thwart terrorist attacks. With additional information on the effectiveness of EITs remaining redacted and classified, specific operational details in particular, the published Senate Report, and various Bush administration memos provide the most comprehensive publicly available information challenging the claimed value of EIT. Regardless of the policy’s effectiveness or the rampant security fears after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration’s decision to use enhanced interrogation techniques was a mistake and eroded America’s moral credibility on a global stage.
Following the release of the bombastic Senate report on EITs, Congress passed the “McCain-Feinstein Amendment”—named after Senator John McCain, who was brutally tortured as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War, and after Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Senator Dianne Feinstein—which codified rules on interrogation outlined in the Army Field Manual (AFM) in an effective ban on EIT “torture.” While the Obama administration ended the use of EITs and closed black sites in his first term, the amendment further extended transparency by mandating access to US detainee facilities for the International Community of the Red Cross. Nevertheless, throughout the 2016 election cycle, Donald Trump pledged to undo Obama’s executive order and the McCain-Feinstein amendment, offering the outright defense that “torture works” in order to revive the use of EIT tactics. Yet Trump’s plans did not come to fruition during his turbulent presidency, failing to reverse the codification of the AFM guidelines and reopen CIA black sites. Since then the Biden administration has abided by the same principles as those instated by Obama, releasing a public statement in recognition of International Day in Support of Victims of Torture and describing torture as “an ineffective method for gaining reliable intelligence.”
Yet Trump’s promise of sweeping administrative reform, should he return to the White House, might extend to the intelligence community, including a revived attempt to employ EITs. As the United States and Western allies face a new terrorist threat from attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, Trump and allies may invoke EITs as a critical element of his “strongman” diplomatic posturing. But a second Trump administration’s counterterrorism and intelligence strategy using EIT would depend upon Congressional support to overturn the McCain-Feinstein amendment and other laws. The haunting memories of the Senate report still hang over members of Congress, as seen by Republican Senator John Thune’s insistence that EITs and black sites are “a debate we’ve had already.” Likewise, the growing influence of the “restraint and realism” movement—those seeking to limit America’s role in international affairs—poses an internal challenge to Trump’s push to expand intelligence efforts using EITs. Overall, any revitalization efforts by Trump appear unlikely barring severe national security threats or attacks on American soil.
Today’s efforts to defend the US and American troops abroad cannot rely on the use of EITs and other inhumane means of intelligence gathering. Lawmakers and bureaucrats must remember the moral failure of the War on Terror techniques and invest in research on interrogation practices. Ultimately, the last line of defense for using EITs often looks back at the “ticking time bomb” scenario offered by Dershowitz. While pulling on the emotional heartstrings of decision-makers, most likely the president, this hypothetical fails on two fronts. First and foremost, all declassified intelligence shows that such a “do-or-die” situation has not come to fruition. But more importantly, such extreme hypotheticals should not dictate the USA’s moral judgment and application of the law.
The fundamental principles of basic human rights and civil liberties, including due process and justice, must always be guaranteed in America. The US government, in particular the presidency and intelligence agencies, must retain the moral high ground in combating the extremism of terrorists, authoritarian dictators, and other enemies of democracy. By sanctioning tactics like waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation, the United States abandoned its ethical standing. Ceding such clarity gives groups like Al Qaeda a permission structure to inflict equal damage on captured American soldiers. Any American who finds the torture of US soldiers unacceptable should apply the same principles to the operations of US intelligence. The incoming Congress, should Trump return to the White House, needs to recount the enduring legacy of Feinstein’s report and McCain’s service in Vietnam when discussing the means of CIA interrogation. Additional legislation must consider the value of transparency and oversight to prevent future abuses of power by CIA operatives. This could include the creation of an independent inspector general role to oversee the review of intelligence methods to ensure adherence to the AFM. Regardless of the threats posed to the next generation, America should not repeat its past mistakes. By learning from history—even history as recent as the Bush administration just two decades ago—Washington can find moral clarity and avoid further damage to America’s credibility and values.