Pre-Emptive Lessons of the Torture Report: It Doesn’t Work, Is Bad for Morale, and Shouldn’t Be Repeated. Until It Needs to Be.

The long-delayed “torture
report” is expected to be released today. It details interrogation
methods in use a decade ago by the U.S. and other allies and is
widely expected to cause a spike in anti-American sentiment, if not
an increase in violence against Americans, throughout the Middle
East and elsewhere.

Without the benefit of actually reading the report (not a small
detail), experts are already outlining three big takeaways,
including:

1. Actions from a decade ago will become the focus
rather than ongoing policy. The report, rather than
ongoing policy screwups and bad decisions, will be used to justify
ongoing policy screwups and bad decisions. The Obama administration
is already talking about how the
release of the report may likely spark violent protests:

“There are some indications that the release of the report could
lead to a greater risk that is posed to U.S. facilities and
individuals all around the world,” White House spokesman Josh
Earnest said Monday. “So the administration has taken the prudent
steps to ensure that the proper security precautions are in place
at U.S. facilities around the globe.”

That makes sense and is a welcome change from the admin’s
unwillingness to commemorate anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks with
heightened
security in Libya and elsewhere. 

2. This will not resolve the debate over whether torture
“works.” The “widely leaked” conclusion of the
report, which apparently finds that torture produced no useful
information, will be hotly contested.
It already is:

“The report’s leaked conclusion, which has been reported on
widely, that the interrogation program brought no intelligence
value is an egregious falsehood; it’s a dishonest attempt to
rewrite history,” Rodriguez wrote in an op-ed published
in The Washington Post on Friday. “I’m bemused
that the Senate could devote so many resources to studying the
interrogation program and yet never once speak to any of the key
people involved in it, including the guy who ran it (that would be
me).”

The problem for the CIA (and
the government in general) is that its reliability is shot to hell,
not simply by legendary intelligence failures over the years but
the willingness of its past and present leaders to lie when
convenient. Also not helping: The agency’s willingness to spy on
the Senate, including members of the commitee investigating it.

3. This should never happen again. Yesterday in
the Wash Post, Tufts political scientist Daniel Drezner noted the
widespread agreement among people and groups that rarely agree on
anything as a sign
the report is important:

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if Dianne
Feinstein, Lindsey Graham, and the director of Human Rights Watch
all think the report is necessary to prevent the United States from
committing the same egregious mistakes in the future, then that
countermands the magical thinking needed to accept the worst-case
scenarios regarding its publication.

It’s a small step forward that our country’s leaders now have
enough perspective to say that the U.S. should never, ever torture
again (whether we’re simply outsourcing the dirty work like so many
other production processes is another matter). Expect that
iron-willed resolve to last right up until the next big crisis when
the always phony “ticking
time bomb scenario” comes back into play.

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