And, It Doesn't Work

One more point to add to the responses to Ross Douthat's musings on torture; torture doesn't work, as this article by David Rose (via Spencer Ackerman) makes clear through several real-world examples. Even if we established a limited regime of legalized torture that somehow didn't turn into a 24-hour torture-mart, it would in all likelihood produce little more than a stream of useless "intelligence" that only served to prevent our law enforcement and intelligence agencies from following legitimate leads. I won't quite claim that torture never produces valuable intelligence, but it's quite safe to say that it rarely does, and only then at a significant cost of valuable time, as well as our integrity and moral standing in the world.