According to the Guardian, Pakistani intelligence agents used torture to break Rashid Rauf, one of the plotters involved in the plot to attack transatlantic flights and kill thousands of travelers. Not surprisingly, the newspaper decries the use of this intelligence by Western forces and accuses the British and Americans of outsourcing torture in order to keep our hands clean:

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. "I don't deduce, I know - torture," she said. "There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all." ...

But none of this stops governments acquiescing in torture to acquire information, rather than secure convictions, as British as well as American practice has shown. It has been outsourced to less squeamish countries and denied through redefinition: but it is still torture and still illegal. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan has provided disturbing evidence of the uneasy boundary between benefiting from torture and encouraging it; so did the Council of Europe's report on rendition in June. The defence, to the extent that anything other than evasion has been offered, is no better than the one provided by Colonel Mathieu in Algiers: it works. But does it? Torture and other illegality can offer authorities a short-term seduction, perhaps even temporary successes. Information provided by torture may have helped foil the alleged airliners plot. But evidence provided uder torture is often unreliable, sometimes disastrously so - and its use always pollutes the broader credentials of torturers and their allies. This battle must be won within the law. Anything else is not just a form of defeat but will in the end fuel the flames of the terror it aims to overcome.

The Guardian gets it wrong here in the specifics, but perhaps not philosophically. Rashid Rauf did not get sent to Pakistan by the British or the Americans; he went there on his own, and the Pakistani authorities arrested him as part of the investigation. The Guardian attempts to turn this into a case of "extraordinary rendition", for which it doesn't qualify. One wonders what the Guardian would have security officials do with the information about the terror plot -- ignore it? Allow thousands of travelers to die as the uncaptured and unmolested terrorists already in place simply passed off the project to others?

This falls between the law-enforcement model and the war model, and it shows why using the former leaves the West vulnerable to attack. In some cases, we may not care about gaining convictions as much as identifying and detaining the terrorists and stopping their attacks. We aren't choosing the battlefield, a fact that the Guardian and many others seem to forget. Our enemies select the battlefields, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should allow them the advantage they seek by allowing them access to our civil justice systems. This is war, not crime, and it needs to be handled in the proper fashion.

The larger point, though, still holds. Strategically, supporting regimes that torture their captives makes little sense if we want to transform the region. Part of the reason we needed to eject Saddam from power was to allow democracy and respect for human rights change the Middle East from a powderkeg of suppressed and radicalized rage to a region of responsible self-government. Our alliance with Pervez Musharraf paid off in the protection of perhaps three thousand lives now -- but how long will we tolerate his form of oppression, and the radicalized anger it produces?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. However, ignoring intelligence on acute and critical threats hardly seems to be the correct decision under any circumstances. The Guardian uses the wrong example for a good point and winds up burying it under incoherence.

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The Guardian is reporting that the London terror plot may have been foiled as a result of intelligence gained through torture. Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it ... [Read More]

Tracked on August 16, 2006 7:08 AM