What about that episode of 24 where torture worked? Isn’t that evidence of liberal spinelessness in the face of people who want us to DIE?!

Heh. The use of ‘24’ as justification by the wingnuts is simply a textbook example of the human capacity for conflating fantasy and reality.

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There is a strong utilitarian argument against torture; namely, that there is simply no scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness.

The lack of scientific basis for the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation techniques is summarized in a 2006 Intelligence Science Board report titled “EDUCING INFORMATION, Interrogation: Science and Art, Foundations for the Future”. The report is currently hosted in the FAS website.

I’ve skimmed a little of the “Educing Information” report and it is an interesting read.

The pre-history of the United States includes well-known instances of the use of pain by officialdom against those less powerful. The Salem witchcraft trials used water and burning to elicit confession. The trials ended only when they were deemed ineffective and counterproductive. The documents that brought the U.S. into being were conceived with awareness of the European history noted above, and were a product of learning from it. The Founders’ clear purpose was to protect human dignity by restraining government from the abuse of power.

If there was any case whereby harsh interrogation practices would seem justified, it may have been World War II. The world was aware of the atrocities of the Nazi regime and “eye for an eye” seemed to be the rule of the day. The actual record is somewhat surprising: The Western world was so repulsed by the Nazi spectacle that the “high ground” seemed the safest. In fact, the most successful British interrogator was reputedly “Old Tin Eye,” Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stephens at Camp 020, Latchmere House at Ham, on the edge of London. According to his biographer, Alan Judd, his success was a result of thorough preparation by the interrogators, linguistic fluency, and the right mixture of firmness in questioning and sympathy in handling. Violence of any sort was forbidden. The interrogators who worked at Camp 020 knew the difference between “talking” and “truth.”

Chapters 5 and 6 of this book describe how current eduction is conducted and note that although there is no valid scientific research to back the conclusion, most professionals believe that pain, coercion, and threats are counterproductive to the elicitation of good information. The authors cite a number of psychological and behavioral studies to buttress the argument, but are forced to return to the statement: “more research is necessary.”

An account of the conditions in one notorious 13th century inquisitorial prison and their impact on the “truth” paints a grim picture:

Some of these cells are dark and airless, so that those lodged there cannot tell if it is day or night… In other cells there are kept miserable wretches laden with shackles… These cannot move, but defecate and urinate on themselves. Nor can they lie down except on the frigid ground… And thus coerced they say that what is false is true, choosing to die once rather than to endure more torture. As a result of these false and coerced confessions not only do those making confessions perish, but so do the innocent people named by them… [M]any of those who are newly cited to appear [before the inquisitors], hearing of the torments and trials of those who are detained…assert that what is false is true; in which assertions they accuse not only themselves but other innocent people, that they may avoid the above mentioned pains… Those who thus confess afterward reveal to their close friends that those things that they said to the inquisitors are not true, but rather false, and they confessed out of imminent danger.

Sadly, the conditions described above, although 800 years in the past, are direct antecedents of conditions experienced by Iraqi prisoners confined in Abu Ghraib prison during 2003 and 2004, and perhaps by other prisoners in U.S. custody. The results of interrogations conducted under these conditions were just as unreliable as those in the 13th century. Why, in the 21st century, with all our accumulated knowledge about how human beings think and interact and function, are we still repeating costly medieval mistakes? “The problem,” according to Dr. Robert Coulam, “is that… there is little systematic knowledge available to tell us ‘what works’ in interrogation. We do not know what methods or processes of interrogation best protect the nation’s security (emphasis in the original).”

Of course this only addresses the efficacy of torture and not the ethics.