UPDATE: some articles that do a good job of countering a lot of the misinformation that's disseminated in the Washington Post's pro-torture propaganda piece HERE, c/o Adam Hudson
Marc Ambinder from the Atlantic is one of many to respond:
The Washington Post's intelligence and national security reporting team
make the case that, in the case of 9/11 planner KSM, enhanced interrogation techniques -- EITs --or torture -- facilitated his cooperation with the CIA.
The story has produce a violent reaction among supporters and opponents of
using the practice, with supporters crowing and opponents accusing the
Post of letting Dick Cheney man their editing desk.
Well, we know that whether torture worked should not effect the moral
case or or against it, but in the mind of the public, which seems to
look at the practice through the "24" ticking-time bomb lens, its
effectiveness does seem to be related to its appropriateness in extreme
situations where lives are at stake. Given this distortion -- most every
instance of torture did not take place with a threshold-level "24"
scenario in the offing, it is quite comprehensible why proponents and
opponents of torture are so invested in proving that it never works, or
that it almost aways works...
see Does It Matter Whether Torture Worked?
But I think the following comment answers this best:
Bottom line: If you're really against torture, it shouldn't matter if it works. To say, "torture is wrong, and besides it doesn't work" is as cost-free as telling yourself that it's okay that we tortured because, hey, look at all the lives we saved.
It's not up to torture opponents to prove it doesn't work. It's up to them to prove it's wrong. It's not up to torture proponents to prove it works. It's up to them to prove that the results it achieves could possibly be worth the diminishing of our society that results.
Torture is wrong, even if failing to torture costs a hundred or a thousand lives. To believe anything less than that is to not really be against torture, just against being grown-up enough to accept the costs that come with living in a good and just society. -Â gbarto
