Post Tries US Torture - Israel Incriminated as Usual

Our friend Leo wrote to Glen Frankel regarding his recent article about Israel's use of moderate physical force, which the Post calls 'torture'.

For a paper that refuses to use the t-word for terrorists, they seem quick to describe Israel's use of physical force as 'torture.'

I thought Frankel's reporting mostly vindicated Israel's use of physical force against known terrorists and as our friend Leo notes, was sensitive to Israel's dilemma, but you have to read it carefully.

Frankel or his editors implicitly make the false comparison of Israel's professional police practices with those US servicemen's amateurish and sadistic practices used at Abu Ghraib. Frankel kinda makes the point that the US practices are mostly wanton and against common prisoners. Israel's practices are against terrorists planning their terrorism. But why, when the differences are so great, compare them in the first place?

As our colleague wrote in our media alert, the scandal in the reporting is the use of the photo, the use of the word 'torture', the comparison with Abu Ghraib and the placement of the article on the front page when there was no news.

Also, Frankel's attempt to link Israel's use of physical force to the occupation or to a prison warden's unchecked power is way off base. Hmmmmm......do you think Frankel has a political point of view, especially when the thrust of the balance of the article is that Israel's practices are deliberate and effective, not the unchecked use of force? It seems, no article at the Post is complete without some jibe at Israel's administration of the territories.

.....and anyway, WHAT IF THE ISRAELI or US PRACTICE SAVES LIVES...isn't that what is important?

Prison Tactics A Longtime Dilemma For Israel
Nation Faced Issues Similar to Abu Ghraib

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A01

Dear Mr. Frankel:

You did a commendable job with you article about the dilemma Israel faces about how far to allow abuse and/or torture of Palestinian terror suspects at a time when it is the target of a brutal terror campaign. Like you, I believe there can be no moral justification for torture. But I tend to disagree with you when you end your piece with a rather simplistic conclusion that, once you have a military "occupation" and give prison wardens unchecked power, such abuses are inevitable. It ain't that simple, as even your own reporting makes clear.

The question you apparently didn't ask -- and it may not be answerable -- is whether use by Israel of questionable interrogation tactics works and to what extent. We know that Israel has far more accurate and precise intelligence about terror groups in the West Bank and Gaza than the U.S. had about Iraq before the war or has now about insurgent forces rampaging across much of the country. Israel has an unrivaled record of terrorism prevention (by some accounts it now foils 90 percent or more of all terrorist attempts -- wish we could duplicate this in Iraq!) and, with an amazing intelligence capacity, can take out terrorist kingpins as they drive around Gaza, Nablus or Ramallah, or emerge from a mosque after prayers.

What makes the difference? Human intelligence. The Israelis have it in ample forms. We still don't in Iraq. We also know that Israel compiles its intelligence from agents posing as locals in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as from Palestinian collaborators.

What we don't know (or at least I haven't seen anything detailed published on this point) is to what extent Israel also garners critical and actionable intelligence about terrorism through coercive interrogations. In other words, is there a demonstrable payoff from abusing prisoners? Are lives saved because a prisoner, under tough questioning, spills the beans and lets Israel prevent a suicide bomber from blowing up dozens of civilians in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv? Has it helped save Palestinian lives if it creates a paradoxically "virtuous" cycle of fewer successful suicide attacks and thus fewer reprisal raids? I don't know the answer. And again from a strictly moral standpoint, it shouldn't make a difference.

And yet, might your piece not have been more enlightening if you had pressed former or retired Shin Bet officials and other potential sources to what extent coercive interrogations pay off? I wouldn't expect current Israeli officials to divulge such information. But as you well know, Israel is a very open place where leaks occur even more frequently than in Washington.

Suppose you had looked far and wide for such information and reached the conclusion that torture is not productive. If that were the case, the immorality of this practice would be even more damnable. But suppose it is productive, at times perhaps vitally so. Then, can you just confine yourself to an easy moral indictment that it's the inevitable evil of superior military power, or do you have to confront a much more difficult question: If hateful tactics save many lives, can we avert our eyes from a seemingly callous cost-benefit analysis, or should we find solace in an absolute moralism that opens the door to greater carnage? I would suggest that Israel's dilemma, which you depict with commendable sensitivity, is nothing less than the same dilemma that confronted Harry Truman on a much greater and terrifying scale with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even six decades later, we can debate whether Truman was right or wrong. What is less debatable is that he was not simply wreaking nuclear destruction just because he had the power to do so. He was convinced he was saving tens of thousands of U.S. -- and Japanese -- lives by shortening the war. Means and ends. Quite a dilemma!