1. Torture is wrong. It’s a serious capital crime. In the fog of war, it happens. But that’s not what happened here, not just bad apples. It was a systematically organized program authorized at the highest levels of OUR government, IN OUR NAMES, and it was wrong.
2. Torture is not effective from an interrogation perspective. False confessions and bad leads. The ticking bomb scenario assumes you know what they know and you don’t. Read the reports. Ask anybody who knows of these matters. It’s marginally effective.
3. Official U.S. Torture Programs severely undermined our moral imperative in the War on Terror. We cannot sustain the effort required to prosecute this conflict from the moral low road. The American people will not allow it, and the rest of the world will not support it.
4. This torture issue has been a recruitment poster for anti-American extremists. Whatever dubiously asserted tactical gains were acquired were vastly offset by the damage done to our overall strategic position.
People who supports the Bush Admin’s torture program are stupid.
