Torture Does Not Work

That is the assertion of this piece in the Times of London.

The Allies in the Second World War learnt that lesson early on. While the Gestapo employed verschärfte Vernehmung (“enhanced interrogation techniques”, the term favoured by the Bush Administration) British and American interrogators adopted far more sophisticated methods, using psychological pressure that produced extraordinary results.

“Violence is taboo,” wrote Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, the fearsome monocled martinet who ran Britain's wartime interrogation centre in London. “Not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.”

That torture not only does not work, but produces even more determined enemies once knowledge of it leaks, has also been proven in conflict after conflict.

The most troubling thing about this whole sordid affair is that there is ample evidence that the conservatives, from Dick Cheney to Justice Antonin Scalia and, of course, all of the lockstep GOP congresscritters and the propagandists at Fox News and elsewhere, have been taking their talking points from a fictional television show. That is far more insane than taking away medical advice from M*A*S*H.

The idea that our government took policy and interrogation advice from a fictional TV show is both rather depressing and it speaks to the lack of any intellectual depth in the Bush White House. Bush may have not been the retarded loon that many of us suspect he was (and remains), but it is clear that he was profoundly incurious about anything and everything that went on during his tenure in office.

It probably would have been better for the country if the Bush Administration had taken this from M*A*S*H:



and just offed themselves.