All I ever needed to know about torture: A friend of mine dealt marijuana in a white working-class suburb in Westchester County. A Jamaican gang moved in on their territory. One day a Jamaican came to my friend's boss's door and said, "Where's the herb?" The guy said, "I don't have any." The Jamaican took out a gun and shot him in the foot. The guy said, "It's in the back closet."
I just heard Jane Mayer (whose book The Dark Side my wife got me for my birthday; I'm looking forward to it) on Book TV making some good arguments against torture, but reeling out the standard liberal line that it doesn't work and we should bribe people instead. I will never believe this. Does it turn up bad information and bad confessions? I'm sure. Does it sometimes work? It sure did for that Jamaican gang. Would it work on me? Yesss!
Mayer also said that torture deforms the torturers' personalities, radicalizes our enemies, undermines our civil liberties, etc., and we should try and win Arab hearts and minds. I'm down with all that. But claiming that torture doesn't work has always struck me as liberal propaganda. Then I also believe that Bush made America safer, for the last 7 years anyway, by destroying an Arab society. And I demonstrated against this war and have sacrificed work for that position. Fitzgerald said that the mark of a good mind is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas at the same time without going crazy. Bush's war on terror needn't rubbish our intellectual life, too.
