The truth about interrogation

For years now, I've been subjected to aversively shrill auditory stimuli on an almost-daily basis – people who've claimed varying degrees of expertise whining and opining incorrectly about interrogations of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere – and I can't take it anymore. So, as a forensic psychologist, lawyer and expert on how deviant human behavior should be handled, I'm going to give in and give up the truth about interrogation. Here it is:

Physical force remains necessary to regulate human behavior even in the modern age. There will always be those in the global community, as in our local communities, whose destructive behavior must be countered and prevented by force. No matter how civilized the human race becomes, a perpetually barbaric subset of humanity will always attempt to satisfy its needs and wants by raping and pillaging rather than by creating and trading things of value to and with others. That subset of humanity will see both appeals to reason and displays of mercy as weakness and take advantage thereof wherever possible – overwhelmingly superior physical force is the only motivator to which it will respond.

There is no moral equivalence between what terrorists have done to innocent Americans and what America has done to terrorists. When it comes to the manner in which members of the global community should live amongst one another and be governed, America is right, and the terrorists who seek to harm America are wrong. Being in the right, as America is, entitles one to do things that one who is in the wrong is not entitled to do. I'll illustrate that: The police have the right to break down a drug dealer's door, put the drug dealer in handcuffs and take the drug dealer to jail. The drug dealer, on the other hand, does not have the right to break into a police officer's home, kidnap the officer and hold him or her hostage. See? Being in the right entitles one to do things that one who is in the wrong is not entitled to do.

Coercive interrogation techniques work. Non-coercive interrogation techniques will work on some individuals but not all. Techniques like waterboarding will work to extract life-saving information from some recalcitrant individuals in some cases and therefore must be kept available to those charged with protecting us for use as last resorts in cases where innocent American lives are threatened. Waterboarding, specifically, is a relatively benign form of coercion that is among the least likely of similarly coercive techniques to cause long-term physical or psychological damage to the individuals who were subjected to it.

Health professionals who've been involved in coercive interrogations have acted ethically. It's naïve and overly simplistic to say that participation in coercive interrogations violates the "do no harm" tenet among health professionals and is therefore unethical in all cases. To illustrate: If a doctor helps our military design a weapon that temporarily paralyzes the enemy on the battlefield, the doctor is helping to inflict harm on people, but it's reversible, non-lethal harm, inflicted on people who pose threats, for the purpose of protecting innocent people. We remain, and will remain for the foreseeable future, ever on the precipice of another 9/11 and must therefore weigh the potential costs of inaction to many innocent Americans against the costs of action to the individual terrorist detainee.

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America's incarceration and interrogation of detainees has not caused more terrorism. No one in the world who would otherwise have lived a peaceful life has ever become a terrorist because he heard about Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, or anything that went on in either of those facilities. Humiliating captured terrorists for entertainment is intolerable behavior for a member of the U.S. military, but it is not, as some have labeled it, an "atrocity." Nor is waterboarding an atrocity. Beheading an innocent person is an atrocity. Nothing that America has done, will do, or won't do in the future will impact the manner in which an American captive will be treated by terrorist captors. If that were true, then the worst that terrorists would have done to American hostages in recent years would have been to waterboard them.

The debate about the incarceration and interrogation of terror detainees was not settled by the 2008 election. A majority of voters last November wanted to believe – had the "audacity to hope" – that none of the foregoing was true, but attitudinal studies show that majorities of Americans and, believe it or not, Western Europeans, deep down, actually believe that it is true. People really are not that worried about a bunch of our enemies whose lives were mercifully spared on the battlefield and who are now being held indefinitely in Guantanamo, nor do they much care if interrogators get coercive with terror suspects when innocent lives are at stake. Bill O'Reilly stated the latter well when he recently said that just about any parent would be willing to do whatever it took to a kidnapper to find out where a missing child was (I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of his spot-on comment).

The continued focus on these issues by members of the Obama administration and its supporters is misguided. It's like the effort by the producers of last year's "Batman" sequel to disgust Americans with coercive interrogation. I have no doubt that the producers of "The Dark Knight" expected audiences to cringe when Batman beats the jailed Joker to a pulp to obtain the locations of two hostages. While anecdotal, it's consistent with the attitudinal findings referenced above that the audience in my local theater cheered during the "coercive interrogation" scene. I know – the Joker lies about the locations of the hostages, resulting in the death of the one whom Batman most wants to save – but there's clear evidence that in real life, terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have "broken" and given accurate information after waterboarding. The point is, these issues really are not among most Americans' top priorities for the Obama administration.

Brian Russell is a licensed psychologist, attorney at law and familiar national television pundit on psychological, legal and cultural issues.