Torture is Not Only Immoral, It Doesn't Work

Some bloggers from the other end of the spectrum have some common sense. Tom Maguire at JustOneMinute offers some outstanding links from last June. From the NY Times:

• the experts think that the threat of physical coercion is a useful interrogation tactic but they offer few examples of torture itself providing actionable inteligence.


• The US is new to this, and not very good:



Israeli security specialists are amazed by the multiplicity of commands engaged in the American interrogation scramble, by the short tours of duty and high turnover of interrogators, by the reliance on interpreters and outsourcing to contractors and foreign governments. ''Unprofessional'' is the mildest word they use.

Now I'm pretty sure Israelis are known to torture during interrogations. This would suggest Israelis did not serve as the model in use at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the secret CIA prisons.
THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH

Michael Ignatieff writes in the New Republic:

Thinking that torture will help us in a war against terror also falsifies what our problem is. We think that our problem is information, and so we need torture to get the truth. In reality, before September 11 there was plenty of information in the possession of the American authorities (noise, but no signal). No, our problem is not a problem of knowledge. It is a problem of belief. It is not what terrorists know that makes them dangerous; it is what they believe. And beliefs cannot be changed by physical duress. Indeed, they may be reinforced. Those who survive torture become living monuments to the brutality that has been inflicted upon them. If they die under torture, they become martyrs to their cause.


Any counter-terror campaign is a battle to persuade as well as to dissuade. Terrorists do need to know that what they believe about us is false. They believe that we are weak and will not fight; and so we should prove them wrong. They believe that we are hypocrites; and so they need to know that we actually believe in the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. They need to know all this if we are to win. Winning is about not losing our nerve, about not losing control in the face of provocation. The military logic of terror is to provoke us into reciprocal atrocity that will lose us the war for legitimacy and the war for opinion.

This has always been a war for the hearts and minds of the Muslim people. A world wide Jihad can't survive long without worldwide support. We have created a new generation of highly competent terrorists who will travel the world looking for targets after the Iraqi war. From looking at the polls from the Muslim world, it appears they'll have more support than Al Qaeda had by far.
Why is this a no brainer for most people I know, yet such a reach for those at the far end of the political spectrum. All you have to do is read the news daily to get a little paranoid. All political bloggers are at risk for that malady. Is it that those on the far fringes are convinced the only way to communicate is from a position of strength using overwhelming force. While I happen to agree with the Powell Doctrine for military war, I would agree with the following quote about the public diplomacy in war time. Unfortunately, the Bush Adminstration had a "better" idea. Pere Djerejian, the Director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, yesterday wrote a guest post at his son's blog THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH.

One of the most important challenges that the United States and international community face is the struggle for ideas within the Islamic world between the forces of moderation and extremism, particularly Islamic Radical Jihadism. While our foreign policy is the major instrument to address this challenge, public diplomacy plays a very important role in this struggle for ideas. However, the United States today lacks the capabilities in public diplomacy to meet the national security threat emanating from political instability, economic deprivation, and extremism, especially in the Arab and Muslim world. Public diplomacy is defined as the promotion of the national interest by listening, understanding, and then informing, engaging, and influencing people around the world.