Rabbis Kalmanofsky, Rosenn, and Weintraub use several arguments to make their case against torture, one of which is the proposition that "information obtained under duress is very frequently false, confessed simply to get the torturers to stop."

On the contrary, according to intelligence officials from both the US and Israel, prolonged disorientation - produced by most of the techniques under consideration - is more effective than pain at eliciting information, and has provided valuable information about networks and potential attacks.

According to some accounts, waterboarding - which is extremely frightening and physically unpleasant, but does not cause permanent damage - also seems to work very well. 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed talked after being waterboarded for 2 minutes, and other terrorists after only 30 seconds. CIA interrogators undergo these techniques to understand what effect they have, and none could hold out longer than 14 seconds even knowing they were among colleagues participating in a demonstration.

Any argument against torture has to take into account that - if intelligence sources are to be believed - skillfully applied stress and fear do produce useful results.

Furthermore, the Torah passages in the rabbis' article are as vague in reference to torture as the ones used by Rabbi Broyde. Apparently Jewish texts do not specifically address this topic, or someone would have produced the relevant passages by now. I think our sages would have had vociferous arguments about torture and produced extremely varied opinions and rulings, as we are doing now. Respected leaders on all sides of this issue have made good arguments pro and con, and it behooves anyone speaking on this issue to be sure of their facts and humble in using Torah to bolster their opinions.

(This 2003 article from the Atlantic is a very good overview of both the mechanics of successful interrogation and legal/moral approaches to controlling it. It provides some of the background for my assertion in my letter that disorientation and stress administered by skillfull interrogators can have successful results.

It also describes the environment in which interrogations are observed through one-way glass and any information can be immediately checked with informers, other prisoners, or by phone or computer to colleagues, so that the interrogator can return to the question until the prisoner tells the truth. This answers the assertion that the prisoner will just say what his captor wants to hear to make the pain stop. I didn't go into this in my letter in respect of space constraints, which leaves an opening for a rebuttal which isn't really there.)

The Jewish Week didn't print my letter, but the Jewish Week is pretty good about printing a variety of letters so I am not assuming they didn't want to air my views.

When I wrote the letter I had not yet read the Rabbis for Human Rights position paper on torture and halacha [PDF], written by Rabbi Weintraub. Unfortunately it confirms the concerns of my letter. I think it has a case to make (which I would partially agree with), but it muddies the waters by relying on guilt-mongering (check out the al cheyts), cherry-picking of Torah and Talmud verses (ironically, contrary to the Talmudic value of arriving at truth by arguing many sides of an issue), misinformation about interrogation techniques, conflation of torture-as-punishment and interrogation (the techniques themselves may overlap, but the goals are different), and slander (by treating Abu Ghraib as representative of US military rather than an aberration).

There is a genuine dilemma about torture which should be discussed in the Jewish community, and which is not clear-cut at all, and which can be informed by our sacred texts . . . . and this isn't it. This could be a respectable approach to half of it (minus the guilt-mongering), but it presents itself as the whole, and herds you relentlessly toward its conclusion. In other words, it's a typical "progressive social activist" enterprise: condescending to and manipulative of its audience, promoting an impossible perfection in a carefully constructed alternate reality, at the expense of a possible good in this one. But read it for yourself and decide.

For now the other half of the argument can be ably represented by Charles Krauthammer, who does not bring any scripture to bear, but sounds more like the unsentimental pragmatic hair-splitting seasoned old farts who wrote the Talmud than anything in the RHR position paper. (I read some of this stuff from these newly minted rabbis and I wonder just who they thought they were studying for five years. The sages were not naive idealistic people.)

I hope more study materials are produced and the discussion continues.

Our previous discussion of torture revolves around the essentially-unanswerable question: How do we define "torture"? But trying to answer it illuminates the rest of the debate.

UPDATE: I have found my slogan for my irritation at baby lefty rabbi politics: "You can't grasp onto the Tree of Life by trying to make bonsai out of it." Will that fit on a bumper sticker?

UPDATE: Soccer Dad sends me the following email:

Rabbi Broyde is an extremely formidable expert in Halacha, I didn't find either response to him terribly convincing.

For one thing the response in the Jewish Week talks about forbidding battlefiend rape. But the halacha of the Yefas Toar doesn't forbid it. It says that if it occurs, the soldier is responsible for the woman he violated; he must marry her or set her free; he may not oppress her any further. The Torah acknowledges that at a time of violence a person may not control his rage and inflict violence on even non-combatants. To be sure all commentaries conclude that this is improper behavior, something to be discouraged - but it is permitted.

The Edah response seems a bit too political to be an effective response. Rabbi Klapper takes as catechism that torture never achieves the required result; a premise clearly rejected by Rabbi Broyde. (This is a problem you point out in your letter too.)

In our modern eyes we find Rabbi Broyde's article troubling. But I'm not convinced that he's wrong either.

David

ps For more of Rabbi Broyde see here.

I would have liked to see more of Broyde's reasoning derived from specific halacha.