How Far Can You Go?

This is an interesting post comparing the total rejection of torture as a method with a vow never to yield up one's fellows, no matter how terribly one might be tortured. Fernandez' point is that no one knows what he can really take until he's in the situation. Maybe if Boston were really threatened with a nuclear attack, and the police had someone in custody who knew how to stop it, maybe Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe would change his mind about never, ever, condoning the use of torture.

On the other hand, I tend to think, and Fernandez' examples don't change my mind about this, that that sort of extreme situation is unlikely to arise. While torture will work, given time and resources, and may allow the torturers to round up dissident organizations, I don't see it working in a sufficiently timely fashion to be our salvation in a really critical situation. So, why should we reduce ourselves to the level of criminal sadists in order to obtain some marginally useful information?

Read Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana for more on the subject of torture and its uses in different societies. And then let's think about why we had allied countries to which we were able to send suspected terrorists to be tortured. Maybe we should reconsider allying ourselves with geriatric dictatorships and their machinery of torture.