Why terrorism works

Probably the most controversial chapter in your book is about torture. A lot of people will be surprised to learn that in certain situations you believe that nonlethal torture might be necessary.

It might be necessary. I hope it isn't necessary. But if we ever had the ticking bomb case -- somebody who we believed had plans with others who were out free to blow up a major city or plant a nuclear bomb -- there's no question that the Americans would do everything they have to do to prevent it.

The question that I pose is: If you're going to have torture, is it worse to do it secretly without any accountability, or any subsequent knowledge -- the way the Filipinos, the Jordanians and the Egyptians do it? Or is it worse to have a degree of accountability and control over it, whether it be congressional and judicial? I'm ambivalent about it. I wrote that chapter to raise the question. But in the end, I had to come down to a solution, and I moderately disfavor doing it off the books and under the radar screen.

Well, first of all, are you assuming that this is going on anyway? You write that we know that the CIA uses torture.

Yes, we know the three countries that they use: Egypt, Jordan and the Philippines. We subcontract torture to them and they're very good at it. It's interesting that we think so highly of the Jordanian government under King Hussein, and that's where it was perfected. When Carlos the Jackal wouldn't turn, they got his mother and threatened to torture her. We would never do that, I don't think, but we're complicit.

Any reason why you use needles under the fingernails as your torture method of choice?

A reviewer criticized me for that. I purposely wanted to do that. I don't want to be vague. I wanted to come up with a tactic that can't possibly cause permanent physical harm but is excruciatingly painful. I agree with the reviewer; he's right when he said, "different strokes for different folks." For different people, different kinds of nonlethal torture might be more effective. Obviously, to the experts, having seen the movie "Marathon Man," drilling the tooth might be better than some. But the point I wanted to make is that torture is not being used as a way of producing death. It's been used as a way of simply causing excruciating pain.

Aren't there other forms of torture that would be less painful than that, that you might have considered?

But I want more painful. I want maximal pain, minimum lethality. You don't want it to be permanent, you don't want someone to be walking with a limp, but you want to cause the most excruciating, intense, immediate pain. Now, I didn't want to write about testicles, but that's what a lot of people use. I also wanted to be explicit because I didn't want to be squeamish about it. People have asked me whether I would do the torturing and my answer is, yes, I would if I thought it could save a city from being blown up.

But you believe in torture only for the ticking bomb terrorist scenario?

Only for the ticking bomb terrorist -- if the threat is immediate, clear and mega.

And you're advocating that we have warrants for this?

Some accountability. It needn't be a warrant. It can be judicial or legislative. Something that brings it up and makes sure that the American public sees how it works. It's not just done beneath the radar screen.

Regardless, there's a serious slippery slope here.

The slippery slope is that you're making a statement that there's no absolute right not to be tortured. My whole life has been devoted to trying to prove to my civil libertarian absolutist friends that there is no such thing as absolute rights, at all, period. I don't believe that there's any right that's absolute. Torture has always been used hypothetically as the example to prove it; [the legal theorist] Jeremy Bentham was the first to make that argument in the late 18th century, arguing that if you need to use torture to stop torture, it would be permissible.

Did your feelings about torture change after Sept. 11? Is it the sense that we have a new threat on our hands that's made you consider this?

It came home after Sept. 11. I wrote an article about it in 1988 in Israel in which I urged that the Israelis not use torture unless the chief justice of the Israeli supreme court is willing to sign off on it. After Sept. 11, that came home to me. So did national ID cards. I never thought about national ID cards but after Sept. 11, when it became clear that more than half of the hijackers had it made it through security because of false identification, I began to think hard about a national ID card of a very limited nature.

One thing you repeat in "Why Terrorism Works" is that despite the concessions we may have to make we must maintain a "feel of freedom." Can you explain what you mean by that? Because if President Bush started tossing around that phrase I'd be very skeptical. It sounds like a euphemism for "we're taking away your rights, but slowly."

It's very hard to define. I think it reflects mostly our willingness and our ability to criticize, our ability to walk free without accounting for ourselves. I think we still have that. As Potter Stewart once said about pornography, "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." I've been all over the world. I was in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. It didn't have a feel of freedom. Then I crossed the border to Poland and it had it a little bit more. And then you go to Scandinavia and it has the complete feel of freedom. Israel has the feel of freedom but probably not if you're a Palestinian living there. Italy and Germany today have it and years ago they didn't. It's a sense of being able to go out on the street and know that somebody's not going to knock on your door in the middle of the night and say, "Your papers, please."

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