In the ongoing debate over the United States’ use of torture in the ongoing war on terror, some of the bleeding-heart anti-torture wusses criticize our own use of a practice which we condemn when others do it, which defies the basic American principle that basic human rights are only principles that we expect our enemies to follow. Others even go so far as to claim that torture has no value, since any information gained through torture may be unreliable as victims will frequently say whatever they think the torturers want to hear in an attempt to make them stop. A recent news story shows how wrong that argument is.
The problem with the argument that information gained via torture is unreliable is that it assumes that only true information is useful. Any cop who has ever beat a confession out of a suspect knows this isn’t true. When you’re under pressure to solve a case and jail a suspect, an idealistic search for truth is just a waste of time.
This is also proven in the story about the Bush administration using statements from a prisoner who later said he fabricated them to escape torture, after we turned him over to the Egyptians for interrogation so that Condi Rice could say “US personnel do not torture” with a straight face. When you’re trying to rally your ignorant citizens around a war based on lies, the truth is an inconvenience at best. The information that the Bush gang got by outsourcing torture to Egypt may not have been true, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. In fact, it was just what they wanted.