Tortured logic.

A number of journalists, as well as witnesses at recent U.S. Senate hearings, have described how the U.S. came to adopt torture as a so called "weapon" in the war on terror. After 9/11, the military reverse engineered techniques that had been intended to harden U.S. military personnel against interrogation methods North Korea used in the early 1950's to elicit false confessions.

The problem is that most professional intelligence officers don't believe that torture is the best way to get reliable information from a suspect. Persons being tortured often will say whatever they think their torturers want to hear. This is the reason U.S. courts do not allow the admission of confessions obtained by torture in criminal trials. It's not about compassion for the tortured - it's about ensuring that the criminal justice system is based on truth. If there is one place where we need facts rather than fiction, it's in fighting terrorism.

A determined criminal facing life in prison or death from a military tribunal knows he only worsens his situation by confessing while being tortured. He gets nothing in return other than a certain conviction. He is more likely to cooperate if he gets something of long term value in return, such as better food, reading material, a cell with a view, a shorter sentence, life rather than execution, etc. Indeed, that is exactly how the CIA "broke" the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

What about the "24" scenario? Some believe the Hollywood scripted nightmare that the U.S. might capture a terrorist who knew the location of a nuclear bomb set to explode in a few hours inspired the adoption of torture after 9/11. With no time for tried and true psychological interrogation methods, desperate officers might attempt the Jack Bauer approach. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said that no one would convict a torturer of a crime in such a scenario. We don't need a national policy permitting and encouraging torture in order to deal with this extremely unlikely situation.

As is clear from Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, a few powerful people in the Bush Administration made the decision to use torture without a careful analysis of its potential effectiveness for eliciting true information. The sudden adoption of torture might have been because Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted false confessions from alleged terrorists in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and the civil rights of U.S. citizens. Indeed, a false confession about an imaginary link between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein was a key element in the case the administration made for the invasion of Iraq.

Now come calls for a general amnesty or pardons for those who illegally justified the use of torture and did the torturing. One of the arguments made for amnesty is that it is the only way to learn whether torture in obtained accurate information about terror plots. Finding out whether torture provided any useful information is pointless because there are more effective methods to obtain the truth that rely on psychology alone.

No other single proposal could be more damaging to the health of our democracy and our credibility in the world. We need to ensure that this cancer is rooted out of our institutions, and that we send an unmistakable message that systematic torture and abuse of prisoners will never be tolerated again. Otherwise, we risk again being dragged into a war abroad or at home on false pretenses, and being forever compromised in our ability to end human rights abuses by our post 9/11 image as hypocritical fascist nation. Oh yes, and we would have no standing to demand that our soldiers not be tortured if captured by an enemy. We and the rest of the world deserve much better from our democracy.