But the President said we were safer, so really, isn't that all that matters?

Too Much Information

Say what you will about Joseph Stalin, but at least the man ran a top-notch crime control apparatus. Freed of the petty constraints of due process and human rights, the crack investigative team at the KGB ran down leads swiftly and diligently. When they found someone with information, they tortured him, quickly generating accurate information and keeping the authorities ahead of the curve. Stalin's Soviet Union had its problems, to be sure. Bad weather, economic deprivation, a certain absence of political freedom, etc. But the criminal justice system -- that was solid.

Well, no.

It wasn't like that at all. Pervasive surveillance, an absence of due process, and widespread use of torture, shockingly enough, didn't actually create an effective law enforcement system. Instead, you got the madness of the Great Purge. Thousands upon thousands of supposed traitors and saboteurs were arrested and sent away to the GULAG for, essentially, no reason at all...

From the regime's perspective, this arrangement wasn't pointless by any means... And while the widespread deployment of torture didn't generate anything in the way of accurate information, it did generate confessions by the bushel. Confessions were, of course, precisely what Stalin was after, as they validated the existence of the alleged conspiracy that justified the purge. The system worked, after a fashion, but it certainly didn't work as a system for solving crimes or cracking conspiracies. It worked as a component of the dictator's imposition of totalitarian rule on the country.

Which is all just to say that there are two closely related reasons we find the idea of torture depraved. On the one hand, the deliberate infliction of cruelty is simply a depraved act. On the other hand, though, it's simply the sort of thing that only depraved people do -- as an actual investigative technique, it sucks. It's a way of encouraging people to tell interrogators whatever it is the interrogators already happen to believe.

This is why you don't see torture associated with low-crime jurisdictions. You see it associated with brutal dictatorships seeking to cow the population into submission. You see it associated with purges, witch hunts, and inquisitions. Wherever phony confessions are required as an instrument of policy, you'll find your torture chambers.

Under the Bush administration, we've seen much the same thing. Contrary to what the president claimed last week, torturing Abu Zubaydah hasn't made the country safer from terrorism. Rather, it made the president vaguely safer from public embarrassment. When Zubaydah was captured, Bush proudly claimed it as a crucial win in the war on terrorism. It turned out that he just wasn't very important -- he was kind of crazy, handled minor logistical matters, and didn't know anything about terrorist plots. But that’s not what his interrogators thought, so they tortured him until he told them about plots. The leads were duly tracked down and resulted in . . . nothing.