On Torture

Moral stances aside, the sad fact is that in the end it simply does not work. Moi, back in 2008:

The thing about torture to me is that UNFORTUNATELY, I live in the real world - a world that does shit I don't really wanna know about, as long as the end result actually works without me finding out the details. In other words no, I DON'T want to know how the sausage is made; but I DO want the sausage to taste good.

For years now I've been yammering that as immoral and wrong as torture is, if it actually WORKED I could be swayed to "look the other way" - if wars could be over with in minutes, if real information was given, if torture made the price of McNuggets come down I might be okay with being willfully ignorant. Hey, a lot of shit goes on that we're better off not knowing about...but enough about Star Jones' shower.

But where torture loses me is that it just does not work. For fuck's sake, I said this a year ago:

...if you’re going to do shit that’s immoral and illegal and repulsive to anyone who’s even part human, at least make sure the shit works! Water-board my ass and within seconds I’ll tell you I shot Kennedy, fuck little boys and have never watched all of Caddyshack. Torture does not work; is it worth being morally bankrupt?

Torture is like shooting a deer, skinning it, and then leaving the meat in the forest. Wtf? If you're gonna shoot Bambi, you better fucking make some venison stew that can feed a whole neighborhood.

Also on torture last year I wrote about the absurdity of our "thirst for information!" when I wrote about Saddam's hanging:

How come we love torturing whatever low-on-the-totem-pole terrorist there may be, these are the people we use to justify water-boarding...but we couldn't fucking wait til Saddam Hussein was executed? If torture is so effective, if torture is the key, then why the fuck wouldn't we have tortured him?

Didn't we go to war under the presumption that Saddam had WMD? And...did we not capture Saddam? So, if we thought Saddam had the capability of destroying the USA...I mean, if anyone had info on the whole war it'd be him, right?...and if we were into torturing people...why were we so excited about the execution of Saddam; if he really was the master behind WMD, wouldn't we have wanted to keep him around for awhile?

Hasn't the execution of Saddam belied our whole philosophy on torture?

Still a mystery to me.

But now we find out that torture DOES work...IN FUCKING OURSELVES OVER!!!!

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

That's nice, right? While not being effective in any way, we morally bankrupt ourselves AND make the very problem we were looking to solve a thousand times worse. Hmm. Seriously, is there ANY other way we could fuck ourselves over with torture while we're at it? I mean, can we give away the cure for cancer in this equation somehow? Maybe find out a way to eliminate the NFL while we're at it?
For fuck's sake. Torture: like a Sarah Lawrence graduate, it just don't work.