Mark Bowden: Always Another Way?

AT WAR

Sometimes cruelty and coercion are necessary in dealing with enemy prisoners.
The Wall Street Journal
Sunday, November 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

The thorny issue of torture paid a visit recently to Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis), television's newest president of the United States. A terrorist plot to attack elementary schools was uncovered and a ringleader arrested, but his refusal to cooperate with interrogators placed the nation's children at terrible risk--a perfect crisis for the nation's first maternal commander in chief. Torn but principled, the rookie president instructs her staff, "I don't want to hear anything more about torture," words a hardnosed national security staffer interprets as a plea for deniability, and a green light to get tough.

Military interrogators begin torturing the captive. Meanwhile, the president launches a risky black-ops raid to a location in Lebanon, which produces intelligence that thwarts the planned attacks. Only afterwards does she learn that the same information was extracted from the captive, who is just barely alive after the torture session. Ms. Allen is so outraged when she learns of it that she fires the offending security council staffer and adopts a perplexed, angry frown.

"There is always another way to get information," she says.

Would that it were true. We like problems to have easy solutions in America, just as we like stories to have neat, happy endings. The show illustrated to me some of the wishful thinking, mythmaking and confusion that surround the difficult issues of torture, coercion and prisoner abuse, which our nation seems incapable of thinking about coherently. Sen. John McCain has tacked a provision on the annual defense budget that would ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment for anyone in American custody. Having been terribly abused himself as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Sen. McCain is a national hero, and brings a heavy load of moral authority to the table. His measure has passed the Senate, but faces trouble in the House, and a likely veto if it ever reaches the White House.

I don't understand why. The provision offers nothing new or even controversial. Cruel treatment of prisoners is already banned. It is prohibited by military law and by America's international agreements. American citizens are protected by the Constitution. I see no harm in reiterating our national revulsion for it, and maybe adding even a redundant layer of legal verbiage will help redress the damage done to our country by pictures from Abu Ghraib and reports of widespread prisoner abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. One thing it will not do, sadly, is stop the abuse of prisoners.

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The story line of "Commander in Chief" portrayed a classic "ticking bomb" scenario, in which a captive refuses to divulge urgent, life-saving information. Such instances do happen, but they are rare. The national debate over torture and prisoner abuse is about something different: the tendency of soldiers in a combat zone to mistreat enemy prisoners. This latter issue was brought to a head by the photographs from Abu Ghraib, depicting the grotesque treatment of Iraqi prisoners, and by reports of more severe abuses at prison camps there and in Afghanistan.

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One of the myths of the American soldier is that he never mistreats a captured enemy. If our enemy dead had voices, a multitude would testify to having been summarily shot, tortured or otherwise abused in every war Americans ever fought. Some of the worst examples took place when Americans fought each other--almost 13,000 Union prisoners died of malnutrition, disease and exposure at Andersonville Prison in Sumter County, Ga. As a race, we are no worse, or better, than anyone else.

Where there are prisons there is prisoner abuse, and where there are prisons in a war zone, whether makeshift ones in the field or the established ones like Abu Ghraib, such behavior is commonplace. Abuse should be considered the default position whenever one group of men is placed under complete supervision by another.

Laws and rules are vitally important, but enforcing them requires good soldiers and strict, vigilant leadership. Even in an ideal situation, say, in a civilian prison in peacetime that is well-funded and well-run, and where the guards and prisoners share the same language and culture, abuse can at best be minimized.

War is the exact opposite of an ideal situation.

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"Abuse has always gone on, but I think today we just hear about it more," says Lt. Col. Lewis "Bucky" Burruss, a retired special operations commander with wide experience in conflict, who wrote about his own abuse of a prisoner in his Vietnam memoir, "Mike Force." "I've always been surprised by how well-disciplined American soldiers are, but when you have more than 100,000 armed men in the field, and they are facing a suicidal enemy who is shooting and blowing up their buddies, not to mention their own citizens, men, women and children, you are going to have anger, and you are going to have some bad soldiers, some bad leadership and some bad treatment of prisoners."

In the vast majority of such cases, there is no justification whatsoever for breaking the rules. Apart from moral considerations, there are practical ones. In a world of digital cameras, the Internet and global telecommunications, abuses will be reported and broadcast with graphic illustrations, and deservedly or not they will color the entire war effort.

Abu Ghraib has hurt the American mission in Iraq more than any insurgent bombing or beheading. So it is terribly important that we not accept mistreatment as inevitable, and we should do everything in our power as a nation to make sure that those who break the rules are appropriately disciplined. Congress ought to pass Sen. McCain's provision and the president ought to make a great public show out of signing it. But we also need to realize that prisoner abuse, like collateral damage in a bombing campaign, is one of those things that will happen whenever the country--any country--goes to war. "Atrocities follow war as the jackal follows a wounded beast," wrote John Dower, author of "War Without Mercy," an unflinching look at racial hatred and atrocity on both sides between America and Japan in World War II.

The White House's objection to Sen. McCain's provision has little to do with Abu Ghraib or widespread prisoner abuse; it concerns the smaller piece of the torture debate, the "ticking bomb" scenario. The administration wants to protect the flexibility of the CIA, and of military special ops interrogators, to coerce intelligence from rare captives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, chief engineer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and operations chief for al Qaeda.

Despite the moral assurance of a television show like "Commander in Chief," this question also has no easy answer. If there were "always another way" to get vital, potentially life-saving intelligence, as the show suggested, or if coercion always yielded bad information, cruelty would be completely unnecessary and virtue would cost nothing. We could treat all captured terrorists as honored guests without sacrificing a thing. But in certain singular instances coercion is necessary and appropriate.

The point the White House is missing here is that even with important captives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, official authorization for severe interrogation is not necessary. Just as there is no way to draw a clear line between coercion and torture, there is no way to define, a priori, circumstances that justify harsh treatment. Any attempt to codify it unleashes the sadists and leads to widespread abuse. Interrogators who choose coercive methods would, and should, be breaking the rules.

That does not mean that they should always be taken to task. Prosecution and punishment remains an executive decision, and just as there are legal justifications for murder, there are times when coercion is demonstrably the right thing to do.

Mr. Bowden, a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War" (Penguin, 2000).