Elizabeth Holtzman: The Phony Debate About Torture

[ProSense]

Elizabeth Holtzman

The Phony Debate About Torture

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has triggered a roaring debate by his recent and repeated claim that torture "worked." Last week, Senator Lindsay Graham echoed the claim that torture "works" and added that is has for five hundred years (a timescale which connects us to the Spanish Inquisition).

Recent polls show a slim majority of Americans opposing any investigation or prosecution of torture under the Bush Administration, even though a majority acknowledges that torture took place. Cheney's claims may have had a major impact on public opinion.

The reliability and truthfulness of information obtained under torture is in serious doubt. But even if it weren't, the whole argument over the claim that torture works is grotesquely beside the point. The issue is not whether torture works, but whether there are other methods of obtaining equivalent or better information that don't incur the enormous moral, legal and security hazards torture entails.

Torture advocates want us to think that there is no other way to obtain this critical information in the "war on terror," but it's simply not so. Standard interrogation procedures, both in the criminal justice system and in the military, routinely produce valuable intelligence. Highly skilled and trained professional interrogators regularly get people to talk about and confess to serious crimes like murder, without using coercive techniques.

As a former Brooklyn District Attorney, I know that non-coercive interrogation works. My office was one of the nation's largest, handling prosecutions of tens of thousands of serious crimes annually, with no coercion whatsoever. Yet we videotaped thousands of voluntary confessions.

Across America, police and prosecutors handle dangerous crimes every day without resorting to waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, nudity, exposure to extremes of temperatures, slamming people into walls, or the like. Whether it involves homegrown terrorists such as the Oklahoma bombers, organized crime or "ordinary" murderers and rapists, the criminal justice system solves crimes, learns who else is involved and brings the culprits to justice -- without torturing them.

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[ProSense]

1. If and when there is a torture investigagtion, this point should be made absolutely clear. n/t