Torture doesn't work: or, why James Delingpole is a morally bankrupt moron

I would hope my readers agree that torture is, in all circumstances, a moral atrocity. For as long as we wish to claim to be a free society, we should never descend to the level of authoritarian regimes by legitimizing torture, by whatever name. Speaking for myself, despite the Daily Mail's best efforts at scaremongering, I'm considerably less worried about the danger of dying in a terrorist attack (an eventuality far less probable than my dying in, say, a car accident) than about the serious moral evil of entrusting our government with the power to abuse and brutalize those in its custody. The appalling evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay - including the indefinite imprisonment and torture of the demonstrably innocent - ought to illustrate, even to the most illiberal reader, the perils of trusting the state with unlimited power for our "protection".

Unfortunately, the odious James Delingpole, writing in the Telegraph, jumped recently on a classic authoritarian bandwagon - invoking the old "ticking time-bomb" canard, and accusing his straw-liberal of elevating the wellbeing of "murderous al-Qaeda terrorists" over the lives of the innocent.

Even if one descends to Delingpole's level of moral bankruptcy, however, it's also clear that, if one's goal is to obtain accurate information, torture doesn't work. From time immemorial, authoritarian regimes have tortured people: and in the process, they have discovered that torture is a very effective means of extracting false confessions, but a very ineffective means of extracting truth. People being tortured typically say whatever their torturers want to hear, in the hope of getting them to stop. Hence why evidence obtained under torture is rightly regarded, in the courtroom and elsewhere, as inherently unreliable.

Which brings me to the point of this post: Brian Michael Jenkins, an intelligence and counter-terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation - hardly an organization renowned for its liberal pacifistic inclinations - also opines in the LA Times that torture doesn't work. (via Ed Brayton)

I don't think torture belongs in the American arsenal. I think torture is illegal, is immoral, but I would go further and argue that it doesn't work.


These silly scenarios [in which] the terrorist knows where the bomb is that's about to go off in 30 minutes -- that's not reality. Further, you have to judge what you get in information versus the strategic loss that you take when it is revealed, as it will be inevitably, that a country is employing torture.


In Madrid, [I chaired] a working group on intelligence at the time of the revelations of the abuses in Iraq. I was being pummeled by men who are not squeamish, not hand-wringing compassionate folks, [who said] it was worse than immoral -- it was stupid. The information really had very little value, and yet the loss that we took strategically to our reputation is tremendous. This is like going to Las Vegas and throwing down a million dollars to win a nickel.


Finally, you take into account that [using torture] changes the nature of our own society, and that is a tremendous cost.


[As for legal justifications], I would find a legal brief more compelling if I knew the lawyer had witnessed an actual waterboarding -- more so, had the author been waterboarded. Let's waterboard a panel of lawyers and see where they come out.

Delingpole is welcome to assert that he knows more than Jenkins about what works, and what doesn't, in interrogations. I know who I'm more inclined to believe.