It’s difficult not to agree with David Aaronovitch:
[Y]ou can see that it could sometimes be true that torture gets results. For every ten duff confessions you might get a really useful admission, just as for every five detainees you might be holding one very dangerous terrorist. Who knows? You won’t find, I would suggest, anywhere in history a torturer — deploying any of the San Gimignano devices — who didn’t think that he was doing it for the best.
Good old-fashioned disastrous realpolitik would suggest that we turn aside while torture happens. If, in the short term, we have a chance of extracting a few key names, places and plans, then lives may be saved and we should let the renderers rend. It is precisely the same logic that led to us trade smiles and Sandhurst places with Middle Eastern dictators for years. It seemed more politic for us to support our bastards — and never mind the democracy.
But as McCain puts it now, we are in “a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists”. And we fight it — always, always, always — by being as little like those oppressors as we can possibly be. Even if torture works.
Apart from the (overwhelming) moral considerations against the use of torture, there’s also the simple point that in democracies with a free press, the use of torture is always, eventually, going to be exposed, and the damage from that exposure will always outweigh any supposed benefits from information extracted under pressure. Plus, it will always create a gap between government and governed: no regime is going to come out and admit, yes we use torture, yes, this piece of information was obtained from an individual who had been subjected to repeated waterboarding. It’s like capital punishment, in that it’s always going to poison everyone involved. But at least the debates about capital punishment, and in the US the procedures that lead up to it, are conducted in the open. Torture by its nature is always going to be clandestine, so it poisons trust as well. No democratic society is going to have signs up in its prisons: this way to the Physiotherapy Unit, this way to the canteen, this way to the Forced Information Extraction Unit. So…we shouldn’t do it.
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