Reminder: Torture Does NOT Work

It is well known that confessions obtained under severe duress, like under torture, are very unreliable. At a point most people will confess to anything once the duress gets to a certain point. This basic fact was well known as far back as the Spanish Inquisition. Such confessions, clearly false, were obtained from the Knights Templar and from the Albigensians when the Catholic church and French kings wanted to suppress them.

Most modern police forces know that duress is a bad way to get a confession. It is a delicate balance between using duress properly and using it improperly. But by the time you get to torture, that balance has long ago been violated.

Bush and the Republicans argued that America had to us torture (illegally) to protect Americans from terrorists. Ignore for a moment the stupidity and Orwellian doublespeak in this and the fact that violating one's own morals to feel marginally safer is immoral. The simple fact is that the premise behind this, that torture could be used to make us safer, was false.

So keep this in mind: (from the Washington Post)

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources....

Abu Zubaida is not a good man. He deserves to be captured, inetrrogated legally, and procecuted for terrorism. But we did not stop there. When we used torture, we broke the law, broke basic codes of morality, and used improper interrogation techniques. At that moment we lost our moral high ground, lost the sympathy of many in the world, and, in essence, misled ourselves.

The use of torture by the Bush administration, far from being effective, almost certainly MISLED officials, making us LESS safe. This error is so basic that most law enforcement agencies in the nation know it. Yet the Bush administration, fully supported by the Republican Party, violated basic American morality while also making us LESS safe. Furthermore, it has since been well established that our use of torture was one of the factors inspiring NEW recruits to al-Qaeda. We violated our own laws and codes of morality, we allowed ourselves to be misled by information we should have known was wrong, and we gave our enemies on of their best recruiting tools ever. THAT is the Republican legacy.

Torture is seldom used as a genuine tool to get information, and when it does it often leads to false information. Torture is generally used primarily as a tool of oppression. That is how Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, and a whole host of others used it. Even, I should think, the ancient Roman law that required testimony of slaves to be obtained under torture to be admissable was mmore a way of keeping the slaves in their place than an effective way of obtaining information. The Republican support of torture will go down in history as one of their worst atrocities and their worst blunders.