Dorfman on torture

There is an excellent article in the Outlook section of the WaPo today.  Ariel Dorfman helpfully articulates some things that have disturbed me about the recent (and not so recent) debate about the effectiveness of torture in the war on terror.   (Bill Clinton, in what I thought was a very disappointing interview with NPR last Thursday, has also joined this farcical discussion, seeming to allow that torture can work, that  we should leave the door open for it in extreme cases, and that we just need to ensure more government oversight)

Part of the Outlook section addresses this very question, i.e., "does torture work?", but Dorfman notes:

I find these arguments [about the ineffectiveness] -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Indeed.  Surely, the right questions can't really be the ones of whether torture works and/or how we'll oversee the government administration of it?  Let's even suppose it does work.  Plenty of things "work".  Mussolini famously made the trains run on time and the Nazis made the economy hum and crime in the USSR was astoundingly low.  The debate shouldn't be about whether torture works, it should be about how in the world we can resolve the tensions between the principles on which this country was allegedly built and those presupposed in a worldview that says it's okay to torture people if you have reason to think that doing so might make you safer.    As Dorfman so eloquently puts it:

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, ..., but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, ..., all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

... Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?

Preach it, brother.