One reason why torture might not work

It might mislead you into starting an unnecessary war:

The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used Mr. Libi's accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

The ticking time bomb scenario often used to justify torture generally assumes that we already know there is a ticking time bomb and that we must resort to torture to elicit necessary information to stop it without delay. The prior question, however, is where we got our understanding that there was a ticking time bomb in the first place. This story suggests that the perception that we had to go to war (our ticking time bomb) may have been generated by false information designed to escape torture (or cruel treatment), which, in turn, has led to the perceived necessity for additional cruelties. In this way falsity begets more falsity, evil begets more evil.

We are often told that cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners is justified because it produces important information that saves lives. But how many more lives, one wonders, were destroyed because of the false information that cruel and inhuman treatment elicits? And what mistakes have we been making, even to this day, on the basis of information collected through renditions to other countries that practice torture, and by cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners by our own personnel?

Thomas Jefferson, speaking of slavery, once said: "can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."

Will the consequences of our sins someday be visited upon us? I, too, tremble for my country.