Torture has been in the news since 9/11, most recently regarding the U.S. military’s practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Politics isn’t my area of expertise, and I don’t want to debate the politics of the scandal. I don’t even want to debate the moral issues: Is it moral to torture a bomber to find a hidden ticking bomb, is it moral to torture an innocent to get someone to defuse a ticking bomb, is it moral to torture N-1 people to save N lives? What interests me more are the security implications of torture: How well does it work as a security countermeasure, and what are the trade-offs? This is an excellent pair of essays[1] about how ineffective torture really is. Given that torture doesn’t actually produce useful intelligence, why in the world are we spending so much good will on the world stage to do it.
I haven’t read these — as described, they run counter to popular myth — so if Schneier says they’re worth the time, they’re at the links below. So why are we doing it again? Oh, yes, for revenge.
fn1. Torture’s dark allure and Does torture work? There’s another — Of Human Bondage — by the same author that spells out the various forms of torture, where they were devised and how they have been used.