Torture: Does It Work?

IMHO - and more importantly, the opinions of those who specialize in this field - torture is by no means a useful means of obtaining information from detainees and other types of prisoners, whether the intelligence sought is part of an active war or not. So let's read what WaPo has to say on the subject:

MIAMI Afew years ago, as I worked on a documentary film about torture survivors in exile from my native Haiti, I met a young woman who under questioning by a military officer was slapped until she became deaf in one ear, was forced to chew and swallow a campaign poster, and was kicked so hard in the stomach by booted feet that she kept slipping in and out of consciousness in a pool of her own urine and blood. Another woman had an arm chopped off and her tongue sliced in two before she was dumped in a mass grave, miles from her home.

When I met these women, some time had passed since their ordeals. But they could still feel the hammering of the blows and hear the menacing voices, threatening to drown them, dismember them and set them on fire. The younger woman, Marie Carmel, remembers thinking about her mother. Manman will surely die if I'm killed, she thought. I have to stay alive for her. Alerte, whose arm and tongue were severed, kept thinking about her children as she climbed out of the corpse-filled pit and crawled to the side of the road where she found help. Both had no idea how much pain they could endure until then. They wanted to live, they remembered, to defy their torturers, to tell their stories.

"There is no need for torture," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. "Hell is the other." Those women saw hell and came back. However, neither one told their torturers what they wanted to know. Marie Carmel did not reveal the names of her fellow pro-democracy activists. Alerte did not divulge the whereabouts of her husband, who was the real object of her captors' search.

For many who remember -- just as these women do, and my own parents do -- what it means to live under a dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must leave work or school to witness public executions, torture is not just an individual affliction but a communal one. And now, when political leaders in the United States are asking us as a society to consider not only the legal and moral ramifications of torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer to these regimes than we may think. If we are part of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it is done in our name.

Torture aims for a single goal -- obtaining information -- but it achieves a slew of others. For one thing, it martyrizes the tortured. Think of the old Christlike images of Che Guevara's corpse in Bolivia -- or even of Christ himself.

While working on the documentary and researching the novel it eventually inspired, I interviewed torturers as well as their victims. I realized that torture diminishes us all by numbing us to human distress; the level of callousness in the society rises, with once unimaginable acts suddenly charted and rationalized.

"This is why we have this proverb," one repentant torturer told me, " bay kou bliye pote mak sonje ." The one who strikes the blow might easily forget, but the one who wears the scars must remember.

When seemingly noble ideals -- after all, what can be nobler than wanting to save lives? -- lead us to torture, the path to the torture chamber can find its way to our front door, just as it did for Marie Carmel, Alerte and countless others before them.

Catch the rest here.