The Washington Post reports that the White House may release more information about the Bush administration's use of torture, which will call into question former Vice President Cheney's high-profile claims to the contrary. Greg Sargent says that the Dem sources he's spoken to refer to it as "the holy grail" because "it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works — and its release will almost certainly trigger howls of protest from conservatives."
As long as we're talking about whether torture "works" we're having the wrong conversation. A broken clock is right twice a day. There will inevitably be some circumstances in which torture "worked" by coercing someone into revealing information. What we do know is that on the whole, it's ineffective because it produces false confessions--and the regimes whose torture techniques we copied used them for exactly that purpose. The point is that torture is illegal -- it violates everything this country stands for, it undermines our standing abroad, it makes our allies less likely to share information and cooperate with us, it makes potential defectors less likely to consider talking to us, it provides a rallying cry for terrorists around the world, and it gives our enemies a substantial victory in the battle for hearts and minds where the fight against terrorism will ultimately be decided. Whether it "works" in some circumstances is ultimately irrelevant in the face of these larger concerns.
Americans have a lot of pop culture references for torture "working," and no matter what information is revealed in these reports conservatives are still likely to have a lot of sympathetic ears for insisting that torture works despite any evidence to the contrary.
-- A. Serwer
