useful sources for the torture debate

This is by no means finished. Please suggest other important articles, resources and postings in the comments.

Sen. John McCain, Newsweek, Torture's Terrible Toll
"To prevail in this war we need more than victories on the battlefield. This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas. They inevitably become public, and when they do they threaten our moral standing, and expose us to false but widely disseminated charges that democracies are no more inherently idealistic and moral than other regimes. This is an existential fight, to be sure. If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort."


Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, ABCNews, "CIA's Harsh Terror Techniques Described"
"Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors."


Jean Maria Arrigo, member of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, "A Consequentialist Argument against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists"
"Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale. Further, a legal, regulated program cannot eliminate use of rogue torture interrogation services, because they still serve to circumvent moral and procedural constraints on the official program."


John B. Roberts II, Washington Times, "School for scandal"
"Because the Guantanamo 'emerging strategic interrogation techniques' appear to have become the baseline for military intelligence interrogations worldwide, what is urgently needed is an independent evaluation of the value of the interrogation techniques being used at Guantanamo. They may be less valuable than was originally believed."


Julian Sanchez, Reason Magazine, Habeas Corpses
"Of course, in the absence of any judicial review, not only will we remain in the dark about how well interrogators are sticking to the rulebook; we also can't know how many of our detainees are hardened al-Qaeda killers and how many are Afghan farmers who'd been conscripted by the Taliban, or targeted at random by bounty hunters eager to reap a reward for catching terrorists, or singled out by informers who happened to be personal or political enemies, or simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time."


Editors, The Economist, How to lose friends and alienate people
"Mr Bush would rightly point out that anti-Americanism is to blame for some of the opprobrium heaped on his country. But why encourage it so cavalierly and in such an unAmerican way? Nearly two years after Abu Ghraib, the world is still waiting for a clear statement of America's principles on the treatment of detainees. Mr McCain says he will keep on adding his amendment to different bills until Mr Bush signs one of them. Every enemy of terrorism should hope he does so soon."


Mark Olson, Pseudo-Polymath, Torture and Cultural Norms
"IAs we deal with “torture” as defined with respect to our foreign affairs, one might wonder if “cruel and unusual” or “torture” should be defined relative to the cultural norms of the people we are dealing with and not the culture of the beltway. One does not have to be an advocate of moral relativism to admit that there are cultural norms regarding comfort and how one defines unusual treatment."
(See also A Final Comment on Interrogation, Is "Perfect" Interrogation Torture?, Clarification (yet again) on Torture, Zero Sum Assumption and a Note on Torture, and Clarifying Torture.)


Jim Anderson, decorabilia, the ends justify the mean
"This is moral calculus of the lowest common denominator, and a wholesale rejection of the purported moral role of this nation in its war on terror. Apparently "moral clarity" applies to all subjects except torture."
(see also the efficacy of torture)


Jason Kuznicki, Positive Liberty, Torture Yet Again
"I argue here that torturing detainees is not only morally wrong, but that it is far more likely to elicit false information than true, and that separating the one from the other is a task that few torturing regimes have ever performed successfully. Indeed, I will argue, the mere use of torture makes them ill-equipped to do so. It’s not so much that “forceful interrogations” will “never” produce correct information, as Mark Olson somewhat inaccurately distills my position, but rather that any true information is almost certain to be mixed in with and outweighed by a consistent narrative that matches the torturer’s own expectations."
{See also Truth Serum and Read This.)


Edward_, Obsidian Wings, The Bush Legacy: America's Human Rights Record is Now a Subject of Legitimate Debate
"If, as we're told again and again, this is a war of ideas and values, then there's no room for this sort of misstep. Forget whether Bush and Cheney's personal definitions allow them to baldly declare that we don't "torture"; through sheer stubbornness, one must assume, they're undoing hundreds of years' worth of human rights advances right before the entire world's collective eyes. The civilized world is dumbfounded. The terrorists' recruiters are delighted. And increasingly the citizens of the United States are being shamed by this incomprehensible, treacherous policy."


Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Inside Outside U.S.A.
"It's easy to get distracted by the semantics and immorality of it all, but the ABC News story suggests a very pragmatic rebuttal to the administration: By whatever name or euphemism, water boarding seems like one of the worst methods possible of obtaining quality information. And treating water-boarded data either as a strong basis for policy, or as a prop to make a political argument, seems unwise at best."