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When dealing with suspects in an investigation of terrorism, as Abraham McLaughlin writes, the American intelligence community has faced the dilemma of how far to go when it comes to using intimidation, force and even deadly force to get the information that they want (McLaughlin, 2001). When terrorists are not worried about losing their lives for their cause, it becomes more and more difficult to find ways to leverage the information out of them, because they have less self-interest than suspects in prior eras.
So one answer is to ramp up the methods that have been considered acceptable for agents to use when questioning suspects. This is where the suspension of the Deutch rule comes into play – the one that forbids the hiring of any agents that have had human rights violations or similar blemishes on their records (McLaughlin, 2001). Allowing for more stringent methods, pushing suspects to the brink of their limits (one way or another), was seen as a way to bring terrorism to a halt by finding out the key information about the organizations that sponsored these types of actions.
Of course, in the years since McLaughlin’s article, all sorts of torture has taken place under the aegis of American fact-finding, and it does not sound like we are much closer to eradicating terrorism. Instead, it could be argued that our methods in the Middle East were what, at least in part, brought the new group ISIS the conditions that It needed to set up shop and start exporting its own brand of global mayhem. So while what McLaughlin explored was an interesting philosophical question, pushing those boundaries seems to have been largely fruitless.
Bibliography
McLaughlin, Abraham. 2001. A matter of ethics for cloak-and-dagger set. The Christian Science
Monitor 5 October 2001. http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1005/p2s1-usju.html
