Spook says waterboarding isn't a nice thing to do

Even former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who believes that waterboarding is an effective interrogation technique, admits that it's torture and shouldn't be used to gather information. Kiriakou says, "It was like flipping a switch," about the use of the torture technique on Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, a high-ranking al-Qaeda member. Once abu Zubaida was subjected to the simulated drowning, he spilled his guts on command. Nevertheless, Kiriakou believes that waterboarding should not be used.

The former interrogator came forward in the midst of a furor over CIA defiance of court orders to preserve all records of its interrogation sessions. Instead, the agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations "to protect the identities of CIA employees who appear on them."

Well, yes, concealing the identities of the participants in a crime would tend to "protect" them.

Kiriakou's entry into the debate needs to be addressed. Specifically, he denounces waterboarding as torture, but says the technique actually works. This raises both possibilities and pitfalls for people who oppose using discomfort and pain as means of extracting information.

I've never been completely comfortable with the argument against torture on the grounds that inducing pain is ineffective and extracts, at best, bad information. While many studies do support this contention, it's always vulnerable to refinements in torture techniques that make the use of pain an effective tactic. If Kiriakou is to be believed, waterboarding is such an effective refinement, and therefore trumps the "ineffective" anti-torture position.

But Kiriakou still opposes the use of torture. Why? Well, without going into much detail, he says, "Americans are better than that" and "It may have compromised our principles at least in the short term."

These statements are shorthand moral arguments, which can be much stronger than pragmatic arguments, because they aren't rendered irrelevant by increasing the effectiveness of torture techniques. If you believe that inflicting pain on a helpless prisoner is inherently wrong, that it discredits your own cause, violates the rights of the person at your mercy, and implicitly makes your own people the target of similar treatment at the hands of the enemy, then it doesn't matter if it works -- it simply must not be done.

But moral arguments often involve more reasoning than people are willing to pursue, and the consequentialist subset of such arguments largely revolve around the vulnerable notion that torture is ineffective.

To me, the most convincing case against the use of torture lies in the fallibility of the people who would be given formal license to inflict pain. Knowing, as we do, that government agencies already misuse the powers they have; that they kill without just cause, imprison the innocent, deny due process, spy on opponents and destroy evidence of their transgressions, then permitting torture will open up a whole new realm of inevitable abuses. Human governments produce bullying cops, power-mad regulators, corrupt legislators and mission-creep. Delivering into the hands of such people the authority to inflict pain on people they have at their mercy guarantees that pain and discomfort will be used against innocent people, in unimagined ways under circumstances never intended by even the best-intentioned architects of legal torture.