Megan McCardle:
One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn't work, so why bother? That's tempting, but it's too easy. Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances. Nor is it obvious to me that the quality of information is likely to be lower than that obtained by other means: yes, people will say anything to avoid torture, but they'll also say anything to avoid imprisonment. Maybe the lies will be vivider or more voluble under torture, but it doesn't seem necessarily so that the ratio of lies to truth will increase.
I'd rather see people take the hard stance and say "Yeah, torture may still work, but we still shouldn't use it because it's wrong." Otherwise, you're kind of stuck if someone comes up with a way to make it effective. I've been thinking about this in relation to the much vaunted lie detecting brain scans. Most people have talked about the implications for the criminal justice system--does the fifth amendment still apply? But what I wonder is, what does this mean for torturers? If you can actually tell accurately when someone is lying, torture suddenly becomes very, very effective, doesn't it? And yet, it would still be wrong. So make the case on those grounds. Efficiency is a dangerous red herring.
Katherine:
You're also making a pretty ludicrous claim about the danger of false confessions, based on approximately zero engagement with actual factual evidence of how torture actually tends to work in practice (either in the U.S.'s recent experiment, or in general). I could right pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages about this, but you might find it too depressing too bother with, so I think I'll pass. "It seems to me." Oh, interesting. But what is it based on? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
But the biggest problem, which is not one restricted to you, is that you buy into an artificial separation between the moral argument and the practical argument. You buy into this premise of sterilized, carefully calibrated torture by trained intelligence professionals who are torturing exactly the right people in exactly the right ways to prevent terrorists from murdering innocent American civilians. To your credit, you still think it should be illegal. But the whole premise is false, and having the argument based on this false premise is what has enabled the administration to get away with such atrocities. Whereas if we look, in excruciating detail at the effects, it becomes almost impossible to defend the administration's policies. That's what's radicalized me about this issue: researching the factual circumstances of US torture policy. Read up on the Maher Arar case and tell me again about how there's no particular danger of torture leading to false confessions. Read up on Dilawar, and tell me again about how our decision to abandon Geneva actually protects innocent civilians. And believe me, there are other examples.
It's not a coincidence that the U.S.'s experiment with torture (& indefinite detention) has gone so badly--that there's far better evidence of us torturing innocent civilians, in some cases to death, and helping pound some more nails into our chances in Iraq, than of saving American lives. The same thing tends to happen whenever any country tries this, and there have been plenty of experiments at this point. Their failure isn't a coincidence. It's a power that corrupts. It may start with a desire to find out accurate intelligence from high level suspects on imminent threats to save lives, but give one human being complete power to brutalize another and it takes about 5 minutes for all that nice-sounding stuff to be thrown out the window. It's ineffective *because* it's immoral, and it's ineffectiveness destroys the utilitarian moral argument that people usually make in favor of it.
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