Who wants to think about torture, especially on Sunday? Let Philippe Sands explain how it doesn't work, and added 15-20 years to the I.R.A. conflict

And watch for Philippe's "Monty Python moment"
during his House subcommittee testimony!

"What do we do in the face of evidence that [torture] works? But there isn't evidence that it works. The British experience is that it doesn't work, the Spanish experience is that it doesn't work, the Egyptian experience is that it doesn't work -- in the sense of producing meaningful information that is going to protect a country. Sure, it produces information. But as John McCain said in his interview in 1997, it produces the wrong information. Because someone who's subject to that sort of pain and suffering is going to do anything they can to stop it from happening. And they will tell the person who is abusing them what the person wants to hear, and nothing more and nothing less."

-- Philippe Sands, on Friday's Bill Moyers' Journal

Yesterday I promised some backup for the blunt proposition advanced by super-lawyer Philippe Sands -- author most recently of Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values -- that torture doesn't work. (Again, you'll find the whole of his remarkable 40-minute interview with Bill Moyers on the Bill Moyers' Journal website. The video of the Sands interview, with transcript, is here, and just the transcript is here.)

To round out his powerfully Moyers-esque opening, Bill showed a clip from Professor Sands's testimony this week before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee:

BILL MOYERS: Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana chided critics who questioned using tough interrogation such as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also known as KSM.

clip of REP. MIKE PENCE: Some, of course, have suggested that relationship-building interrogation techniques are preferable and even more reliable in the long-run than stress methods. They raise the question, though, what about the hard cases? And I can tell by your grin you acknowledge the somewhat absurd thought that you could move people who have masterminded the death of more than 3000 Americans by Oprah Winfrey methods."

PHILIPPE SANDS: I did smile because, frankly, the image that weeks and weeks of rapport-building with KSM is somehow going to produce results is counterintuitive. But the reality is we don't know. And I spoke in my investigation to a lot of interrogators -- military, FBI -- who basically said, "Coercion doesn't work. You get information that they want to give you that they think is going to stop the pain from happening."

In the course of the interview, they got to the heart of the matter:

BILL MOYERS: Did you learn that people will say anything to stop the torture?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, actually, I think it's self-evident that that is what happened. If you speak to interrogators, they will tell you that aggressive techniques of interrogation don't work. They don't produce meaningful information. And just the other day, I was listening to a very interesting tape of John McCain. And he explained how he, in the end, had signed a confession, owning up to crimes against children and women in North Vietnam, basically because he had reached a point, he thought he wouldn't be broken, where he had reached a point where he simply couldn't bear it any more, and he wanted the pain to stop. And the only thing he could do was to tell them what they wanted to know. And that's, that's what interrogators will tell you. Abuse produces information that is the information the detainee thinks you want to know, and nothing more than that. It's not reliable.

BILL MOYERS: Going back to the hearings, one member of the committee, Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, a Republican, said, and I quote: "The results of a total of three minutes of severe interrogations of three of the worst terrorists were of immeasurable benefit to the American people. A full 25 percent of the human intelligence we've received on Al Qaeda came from just three minutes worth of rarely used interrogation tactics."

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I remember that very well. And I appreciated very much everything that Representative Franks had to say. But I've described that to my friends in London as a sort of Monty Python moment in the hearing. Because he alleged that there had been three individuals waterboarded. They had been waterboarded for no more than one minute each. And they had spilled the beans. And I was sitting there watching him and thinking, well, that's new information. I've never heard that before. Where on earth does that come from? Counterintuitively, I can't imagine how a waterboarding of one minute is suddenly going to produce useful information. We don't even know if it is useful. But also, imagine the scene. You've got guys there with stopwatches. We're gonna waterboard him for one minute, and then we will stop. And in that one minute, everything will come up. I don't know where he got all that from. I thought he sounded as though he made up on the stop. We don't have any objective evidence that any of these interrogation techniques have produced any useful information. KSM, you've referred to, has owned up to virtually everything under the sun that has happened that is bad for the United States in the last five years. And I find that counterintuitive to common sense. I would say I don't have actual information on KSM. I do have actual information on detainee 063. I spent time, as I describe in the book, with the head of Mohammed al-Qahtani's Exploitation Team. And the bottom line of it was, contrary to what the administration said, they got nothing out of him.

BILL MOYERS: There's another witness who appeared this week when you did, David Rivkin, a lawyer, lots of government experience, lots of experience in the law. And he directly challenged you in his testimony.

clip of DAVID RIVKIN: I think that it is a moral copout to argue that coercive techniques did not work. Because if they don't work, there would be nothing to debate. Coercive techniques do work. There's plenty of evidence to that effect.

PHILIPPE SANDS: Look, Bill, I've spent 20 years during courtroom work as a litigating lawyer. I like to see evidence on things. I like arguments to be based on evidence. David Rivkin is unable to provide any evidence. I have honed in on the interrogation of one man, detainee 063. The administration has publicly declared they got a mass of information out of him that related to all sorts of extraordinarily important things to protect the Americans.

I then spoke to the people who were involved in his actual interrogation and the head of his Exploitation Team. That's not what they told me. If the evidence I had been given had been different, then I would reach possibly a different conclusion. Not as to the legality or the utility of torture, but what do we do in the face of evidence that it works? But there isn't evidence that it works. The British experience is that it doesn't work, the Spanish experience is that it doesn't work, the Egyptian experience is that it doesn't work -- in the sense of producing meaningful information that is going to protect a country. Sure, it produces information. But as John McCain said in his interview in 1997, it produces the wrong information. Because someone who's subject to that sort of pain and suffering is going to do anything they can to stop it from happening. And they will tell the person who is abusing them what the person wants to hear, and nothing more and nothing less.

HOW TORTURE EXTENDED THE I.R.A. CONFLICT 15-20 YEARS

"The thinking in the British military and the thinking across the board politically -- it's really not a left-right issue, it's a broad consensus in the United Kingdom -- is that coercion doesn't work. The view is taken in the United Kingdom that it extended the conflict with the I.R.A. probably by between 15 and 20 years."

-- Philippe Sands, in the Bill Moyers interview

Here are Bill and Philippe talking specifically about the British experience with I.R.A. terrorism:

BILL MOYERS: You told the committee this week that the British experience in fighting the terrorists of the I.R.A. actually extended the conflict 15 to 20 years. What's the evidence for that?

PHILIPPE SANDS: The story's a simple one. Back in '71, '72, the British moved as the United States has done now, to aggressive techniques of interrogation. They used pretty much the same techniques: hooding, standing, humiliation, degradation. Five techniques, they were called. And --

BILL MOYERS: What kind of techniques?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Five. They're known as the Five techniques. [After the British domestic law-enforcement-and-spying agency MI-5, one presumes.--Ed.] They went up to court, actually, and they were ruled to be illegal -- in 1978 by the European Court on Human Rights. But there was a bigger problem, even beyond their illegality, in my view. And that was this: That what the use of those techniques did was to really enrage part of the Catholic community, who felt that I.R.A. detainees alleged to be terrorists, were being abused. And it turned people who were perhaps unhappy with the situation into being deeply and violently unhappy with the situation. And if you speak to British politicians who were involved in that period, and the British military, what they'll tell you is that there is a feeling that the use of those types of techniques extended the conflict.

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