Reed and Torture

It is always nice to see Reed Profs in the paper, and this Washington Post article from Darius Rejali is well worth reading. It is just over a year old, but "Five Myths About Torture and Truth" contains information that undermines the very foundation of the debate about torture in America. The debate has been framed by politicians and the traditional media as a balancing act between keeping the country safe and keeping our principles. A moral debate would be perfectly reasonable if torture actually extracted accurate information, but makes no sense on this issue because torture is not effective. If fact, it is completely counterproductive, not only because it creates more enemies, but because informants giving actual information are much less likely to cooperate with torturers. The moral debate is a totally irrelevant because the very debate relies on a false premise, so don't use it when talking to Jack Bower lovers like Rudy Juliani; instead read Darius' article and make the unassailable pragmatic argument.

On a related note, I would love to hear either Cheney or Bush asked in one of their end-of-wrecking-the-country exit interviews whether the false confessions extracted under torture by the North Vietnamese from John McCain would have qualified as actionable intelligence for the North Vietnamese army, and if not how that would be at all different from our acting on the false statements that Iraq had active weapons programs and close ties to Al Qaeda, 'information' that the US received from waterboarding Abu Zubaida.