Excellent post, BSB. A little whiff of reality for our torture enthusiasts, some of whom appear to be sorely in need of it. Torture’s a tactic - - like bullying or seduction, albeit the most reprehensible tactic available. Like any tactic, sometimes it works, sometimes not. The issue of torture isn’t really whether it “works” or not, any more than the issue of crime is whether it pays or not.
I’ve followed this thread with interest and it seems the best argument that the pro-torture side can muster is the old “ends justify the means” stuff - - the “terrorist” outrage narrowly averted by the timely application of the blowtorch to the soles of some poor bugger’s feet.
The argument is usually embellished by (a) magnifying the horror of the “catastrophe” to be averted and/or (b) demonizing the poor bugger whose soles are being blowtorched.
Consider that:
1. There is no historical record of any major catastrophe having been averted by information gained from torture;
2. Among the duly demonized torture victims there would have to be a broad spectrum of evil or culpability, from the guy holding up Daniel Pearl’s severed head to the sympathizer who let a couple of fugitives hole up on his dad’s farm for a couple of days;
3. Many torture victims, whether good guys or bad guys, just don’t have the information to give to their torturers, whether they want to or not;
4. Some torture victims will take their secrets through torture to the grave, or better yet, produce misleading information that when acted upon will actually damage the torturers’ cause;
5. Some unknown percentage of torture victims are just innocent people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, often “sold” to the Americans because of personal feuds between neighbours or named by other torture victims in sheer desperation.
Of course, despite all of the above, torture can work in breaking up or at least temporarily disrupting Resistance networks, plots, underground movements, etc. It’s not totally useless. Just ask any former Gestapo agent.
In the end, torture is the measure of the man and the nation. One either practices torture or does not. In either case, enemies will still strike, catastrophes will still occur. The difference that torture will make is noted only in the good name of the individual or the nation. The individual torturers, of course, as they have since time immemorial, will continue to hide their faces and deny their deeds. No welcome-home parades for them, unless the day comes when the nation is willing to honour anonymous men in black masks riding up Main Street in convertibles, waving their cattle prods at the cheering throngs. Nations don’t have that luxury - - they initially deny, then blame it all on “a few bad apples,” and when finally forced to admit what they have done, resort to the kinds of justification that we’ve seen in this thread, perhaps a little less hysterically - - but no amount of justification changes anything, the stain is permanent, the moral rot irreversible.
Torture as a tactic is a mark of desperation and worse yet, it’s the mark of a loser. Regimes that torture earn the revulsion of mankind, at least the decent portion of mankind, those that know right from wrong, and in the end - - they fail as Hitler and Mussolini failed, not because torture didn’t work but because their evil was demonstrated unambiguously for the entire world (including their own citizens) to see. Nothing can save them.
I’m more than happy to note that for the U.S.A., the writing is already on the wall, the collapse already underway. They deserve it.
