<http://nytimes.com/2005/01/23/books/review/23KAPLAN.html?pagewanted=print&position=> The New York Times January 23, 2005 'The Interrogators' and 'Torture': Hard Questions By ROBERT D. KAPLAN THE INTERROGATORS Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda. By Chris Mackey and Greg Miller. Illustrated. 484 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $25.95. TORTURE A Collection. Edited by Sanford Levinson. 319 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95. T a time when neither a large national economy nor a modern military is required to produce and deploy a weapon that can destroy a medium-size American city, a good interrogator constitutes a better defense against catastrophe than soldiers or marines. No group of people in the defense establishment get to know the enemy better on a personal level than interrogators do. As the Abu Ghraib scandal reveals, some guards and interrogators can be sadistic ghouls; but many other interrogators could qualify as the most liberal people in the armed services since, for one thing, they have spent years studying the language and the history of their captives. As one Special Forces officer told me in Afghanistan, ''In order to defeat the enemy you first have to love him, and his culture.'' Competent interrogation is less about breaking a prisoner down to learn a single fact than about engaging him in hours upon hours of conversation, and comparing his responses on seemingly irrelevant details with those of others revealed under questioning. It is about looking for one plot and finding another; or rather not finding a plot at all, but happening upon -- for example -- the travel patterns and safe houses of a group of Muslim terrorists of one nationality and deducing how that group differs from another. Real interrogation is about finding shards of evidence in a desert, in which a vital fragment will come not from a high-level Qaeda operative, but from a midlevel functionary who spends weeks in captivity before anyone realizes his importance. In ''The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda,'' Chris Mackey (the pseudonym of an Army interrogator) and Greg Miller, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, write that as a prisoner in Afghanistan reached for his glasses (by now long lost) when he went to examine a photograph, that ''absent-minded move'' alerted interrogators to the fact that he was ''accustomed to poring over documents.'' Interrogators can use many tools that do not involve actual physical abuse. They spread rumors among detainees, wear them down through repetitive questioning and threaten to turn them over to other intelligence services known to employ torture -- all of which cause interrogators constantly to ask themselves where, exactly, does the slippery slope toward real abuse begin? Sadly, it is no use saying torture never works, because as the French authorities learned in Algeria, as the Filipinos learned with their own Muslim insurgents and as the Dubai authorities learned with a Qaeda terrorist, it periodically does work, and in some instances can possibly avert a major attack. While it is true that the threat of torture, as Mackey and Miller report, induces more anxiety among detainees than torture itself, that threat over time will carry little weight if it becomes widely known that the jailers have no record of following through. ''Fear is often an interrogator's best ally,'' the authors note, ''but it doesn't have a long shelf life.'' A captured Qaeda manual even advises Muslim prisoners that people in the West don't ''have the stomach'' for torture, ''because they are not warriors.'' Machiavelli famously said that good men bent on doing good must know how to be bad. And because we all share a social world, he goes on, the virtue of a policy maker resides not in his moral perfection but in the communal result of his act. If one is not already ill at ease with such maxims, consider this: In the ultimate hypothetical case, if a terrorist with hard intelligence about an impending large-scale terrorist strike could be broken by torture, shouldn't it be used? That nauseating question forms the theme of ''Torture: A Collection,'' edited by Sanford Levinson, a professor of government at the University of Texas. What's most striking about these essays is that despite their abstract and theoretical content, they generally do not contradict the depiction of actual interrogators described by Mackey and Miller. The wall between the liberal campus and a conservative, utilitarian-minded military breaks down because the questions are so serious that few of this book's contributors want to engage in polemics, and few -- to their credit -- ever seem completely comfortable with their own conclusions. To follow Machiavelli further: it is not simply and crudely that the ends justify the means. It is that evil, if it is to be employed, should be used only to the minimum extent necessary, and then only to accomplish a demonstrably greater amount of good. As the Princeton professor Michael Walzer writes, ''It is important to stress Machiavelli's own commitment to the existence of moral standards.'' But knowing what that minimum extent is, and knowing with reasonable certainty that a greater amount of good will result, thwarts scholars and interrogators alike. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argues for legally sanctioning torture in ''ticking bomb'' cases. ''At bottom, my argument is not in favor of torture of any sort,'' he says. ''It is against all forms of torture without accountability.'' His rationale is that in ticking bomb cases the idea that torture in some form will not be used is illusory, and the government should not be able to walk away from responsibility for it. That, in effect, would leave the interrogators with all of the legal and moral blame. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, counters that torture is so extreme that it should remain ''tabooed and forbidden,'' and that any attempt to legitimize torture even in the rarest of cases risks the slippery slope toward normalizing it. Seeking a middle ground, Miriam Gur-Arye, a criminal law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues that in the absence of a concrete terrorist threat, only a specific self-defense argument can justify force in an interrogation: it cannot be justified by the more general and utilitarian -- that is, Machiavellian -- argument of necessity. Interrogators themselves are not above such hairsplitting. After an intense discussion about how humane it would be to deprive prisoners of sleep, and just how much sleep deprivation constituted cruelty, Mackey came to the conclusion that ''if the interrogator followed the exact same regime -- slept, ate . . . and took breaks on the same schedule as the prisoner -- there was no way to argue'' that such treatment was cruel. There is even a name for an interrogator staying with a prisoner until one or the other of them breaks: it's called ''monstering.'' Double-teaming a prisoner, in which different interrogators take turns sleeping, was considered immoral, Mackey says. Because monstering was so hard for an interrogator to endure, it was used only when something important was at stake and the prisoner seemed close to breaking. One interrogator kept a prisoner in a booth for 29 straight hours. It was worth it, Mackey reports: the prisoner had been a translator for Osama bin Laden and disclosed a Qaeda plot to use the chemical agent ricin. But what if the prisoner hadn't confessed? Should he have been double-teamed for 48 hours and beaten? Such questions demand answers, and yet are unanswerable. My own experience covering the military suggests a different approach to the issue. As Mackey and Miller themselves note, the effectiveness of interrogators is regularly undermined by a host of problems that have nothing to do with torture. Rarely do military interrogators get all the language training they need. Their offices are understaffed. When they walk into an interrogation room they often lack vital information about the detainee that another agency in the United States government already possesses, and won't share. Embedded with Army Special Forces in Afghanistan a year ago, I was shocked by how a creaky bureaucracy was stalling the hunt for terrorists on the Pakistani frontier. An administration that dynamically addresses such problems will provide the public with a wider cushion of protection than one that stretches the boundaries of what constitutes physical abuse. No matter how wise those drawing up the guidelines are, however, the art of interrogation does not lend itself to micromanagement from above. Interrogators will forever be forced to make split-second decisions with grave life-and-death consequences. The way toward public safety and out of the moral abyss will come less from philosophy than from sturdy bureaucratic reform: correcting, for example, the broken reserve system that contributed directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. An interrogator armed with fluent Arabic and every scrap of intelligence the system can muster, who has mastered the emerging science of eye movements and body signals, who can act threatening as well as empathetic toward a prisoner, should not require the ultimate tool. Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of many books, including the forthcoming ''Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground.'' -- ----------------- R. A. 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