Unqualified Offerings

The Illuminated Donkey feels that the official story of the Egyptian Radio is pretty close to the actual story. The truth is, we have no firm basis to believe otherwise. Here are the outlines of the official story then:

1. A foreign-born grad student, son of a diplomat, evacuates his hotel on September 11 in the face of attacks that have left the hotel closed to this very day.
2. In October, a hotel employee tells the FBI, mistakenly, that he found an aviation transceiver in the grad student’s room safe.
3. In December, the FBI throws the grad student into solitary confinement, because he just won’t cooperate with investigators – that is, he won’t admit that the radio is his or what he was doing with it.
   

   [His lawyer] said his client wept as agents threatened to involve his family in the investigation.

   “They certainly used the skills in trying to break someone, trying to crack the nut,” Dunn said angrily.

4. On January 11, prosecutors formally indict the student for lying to investigators, successfully arguing that he is too dangerous to release on bail.
5. When the radio’s rightful owner comes to reclaim it, the FBI goes back to the hotel employee, who changes his recollection.
6. The student is freed.

Even if the above is not true, it could be. So let’s consider the case where it is. And let’s consider how the case plays out in a scenario where Alan Dershowitz has been heeded and government investigators have official sanction to torture terrorism suspects. Let’s make military tribunals available too.

The arguments for torture and military tribunals are that terrorists don’t deserve the protections afforded in ordinary criminal cases, because terrorists aren’t ordinary criminals. Torturing information out of a terrorist might, we are told, save literally millions of lives if it enables the government to foil a biological attack, or tens of thousands of lives if it stops a nuke. And letting a terrorist off because of technicalities in civil proceedings means justice denied and danger ahead.

These arguments assume that government investigators know what they are doing.

The record of, for instance, the Moussaoui case does not support the claim. Nor, it would seem, does the Higazy case. The right question is not, Are terrorists ordinary criminals? They question is, Are terrorist suspects terrorists? Clearly, the answer will be Yes sometimes and No some other times. Note that this is exactly congruent to the question of whether criminal suspects are criminals. Investigations and fair trials are the best ways we’ve come up with for determining acceptable answers.

What appears to be an unreliable witness report established in investigators minds the conviction that Abdallah Higazy, from a suspicious country in a suspicious place, owned a suspicious device. His repeated denials did not shake that conviction; they strengthened it. Absent from the reports on the Higazy case is any suggestion that Higazy’s denials inspired investigators to go back to the hotel and pursue whether its staff really knew what it was talking about. Instead, his denials represented a problem of cooperation to be overcome:

While Mr. Higazy admitted to no ill will, his lawyer said that during one interview session with F.B.I. agents, Mr. Higazy was subjected to “unrelenting pressure,” under which he may have made confused or false statements about the radio. In Federal District Court last week, Mr. Himmelfarb said Mr. Higazy had admitted that the radio was his and had told agents three different versions of how he had acquired it.

Mr. Dunn said he had been excluded from that interview, and Mr. Higazy said he was unsure what he told the agents.

It’s not hard to see what the next step is in a regime of legal or tacitly-approved torture.

So you don’t care? It’s a shame if an innocent man gets harmed, but we’re not talking burglary cases here, and the harm potential means that we have to switch the relative values we assign to letting an innocent man suffer and a guilty man go free? You’re pretty tough-minded about harms you expect will fall on other people! But let’s look at the dynamic from your perspective anyway. Suspect denies involvement, because he’s not involved, but you don’t see it that way. Under normal, acceptably-intimidating pressure, the suspect continues to deny involvement. Time keeps on tickin’ tickin’ tickin’ into the future. He won’t crack. Let’s torture him! Early on, he still denies involvement. How well-trained he is! If he can maintain his cover story through this level of pressure, he must be one tough operator. Let’s ratchet up the pain threshold. Let’s, in our frustration, ask increasingly leading questions, to the point that even Koko the gorilla would know what she has to tell us to make us happy. So he tells us, confirming in our minds whatever uselessly-garbled version of some real plot we suspected in the first place. All this while, time has kept on tickin’ tickin’ tickin’. Pausing only to drop the twitching shell of our suspect in front of a tribunal, we rush headlong down the blind alley our partial understanding and blinkered imaginations conjured in the first place.

And while we race toward Boston, Detroit goes up in a ball of fire.

A mere hypothetical? No less so than the happy-ending version of the “ticking bomb” scenario.