by Cheryl Rofer
This New York Times article has it all wrong.
At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?
Yes, the headline accurately describes what's in the article: an argument about whether the interrogation methods used by the Bush administration were effective in extracting information. But both are wrong: that's not the core. That's a subsidiary argument that ensues when proponents of torture argue that it's the only way to get the information, usually depending on some variant of the ticking-bomb scenario.
It's not the core. The core is that we are the United States, and we don't torture. Shepard Smith of Fox News, of all places, gets that right in a couple of videos.
And something that is probably worth saying again: If you have a terrorist and you know that that person possesses information that will prevent many deaths, then be enough of a patriot to take a chance on doing what you have to and take the consequences. No changes in laws needed. But look at the qualifications on that: you know that that person possesses information that will prevent many deaths. That wasn't the situation described in any of the documents released so far, and it doesn't look like it will be.
My blogfriend helmut has had many wise things to say about torture, and I've been trying to get him to say more. One of the most important is that torture typically collects bits and pieces of information, rather than that one dramatic revelation. So many people must be tortured, and the laws or policies must be changed to allow that. That seems to have been the case in the Bush administration.
Helmut summarizes the relevant law here. Click around his site for more. Here's just one post.