Does torture work? That is the question being debated by the hosts of cable news channels (I call them 'the pack of yapping jackals) and the radio talk show hosts (I call them 'rats who like to gnaw on the social fabric'). Does torture work?
Gee, I don't know. Does assassination work? Does lying work? Does carpet bombing work?
Let's not forget that this debate began over whether or not waterboarding, electric shock, hanging suspended by the arms, etc. constituted torture. It even got down to fine-tuning parameters, such as how long the condition lasted or how often it was repeated, and so on. It was like reading a Kafka novel, or a policy paper from the Soviet Politboro.
Finally, even the most obtuse, even the most shifty-minded of the supporters of this practice had to accept that it was torture.
But now it's okay to torture because 'it works'. That is the party program now.
Well, I'm sorry, but it is not OK. Never has been, and never should be.
Even if it works, it is wrong.
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I remember this episode of The Unit that I saw just last week, where Dennis Haysbert's character explained something to young revolutionary. He said something like "You can pull off a man's fingernails, you can bring him to his knees, you can break him down, but will that man tell you that the enemy is 30 miles away when they are in fact just 5 miles out? Will they tell you the absolute truth, or just what you want to hear so that they can escape the pain?"
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