http://votersthink.org/?p=573

Brad Sherman agrees with her. Marcy Kaptur kind of sounded like she did too. And it all fits with the brazen contempt for democracy we've seen throughout the Bush administration.

I wonder if there's a way to prove the truth of all this using Bush Cheney's own legislative weapons (i.e. the Patriot Act): they're the terrorists.

...is cheating. I kind of think Obama and co. have this covered, but I'm still scared of the scary party. As someone else said in a similar context in one of these threads recently, a cornered rat will jump at your face.

for the mythic sixties, when these things were given due media attention, were inspiring and, most of all, worst of all, were fun. That's the problem with every protest I've been on. The people on them are looking to them to give their lives meaning far beyond the purported cause. The fumbling, unglamorous version of protest we get now, like the embarrassingly impotent posturings of now lardy old hippies in unflattering velveteen tracksuits and Indian beaded wastecoats in general, is wrong-footed by its own nostalgia for fullness, a sense of urgency and virtue and, hell, never mind the cause, whether it's actually true that the pope smokes dope or we're all Hezbollah now, at least you've got something (Anything's better than nothing! At least they're, ugh, trying - to get off) to shout about. This version of protest - the one where you act flamboyant to get the attention of the media - is a flush as busted as the political system itself. I never go on protests anymore. They're pointless. If we're going to revive the sense that it's possible to engage, it's not going to be like this.

Does it matter whether torture works? Why do we keep getting bogged down in having to refute this idea?

Answer: because of the 'never again' factor. 9/11 is seen as an atrocity of such gigantic proportions that anything we have to do to prevent another such is supposed to be acceptable. The problem with this line is that it depends, at its dark heart, on the idea of a clearly identifiable group of enemy others whose lives we can wreck with impunity in order to prevent further harm to our own innocent citizens. However, since the burden to prove the enemy status of these others is thrown out, torture simply ends up ruining the lives of (thousands) more innocents.

And what if that burden was not thrown out? What if we were only torturing people we knew knew? Well how do we know they know? Can't we use the means by which we've proved they know to know what they know? (all this knowingness might be referred to as 'intelligence'). But here I'm already getting sucked in the bilious Dershowitzian question myself.

Two points:

One, it's not just that torture doesn't work. It's that it's disgusting. It's that, if we're supposed to be fighting for any principles at all, they must surely include the right not to be tortured. Stupidly obvious, but it's not being said much and not in this article.

Two, doesn't it rather seem as if the Bush administration didn't really care whether it worked anyway? You say their real aim was a restored Nixon Whitehouse (the wiretaps, among other elements, seem to back this up), then debate issues like whether torture works - as if they care whether it works or not for the purpose you mean - preventing another 9/11. They don't because, for their purposes - eroding basic democratic freedoms - it works very well indeed. The very fact that we end up debating torture on their terms is an indicator of how well.