Torture has been in the news a lot lately, and it's a touchy subject with a lot of people. One argument against the use of torture by the CIA or whomever to get information from prisoners is that torture doesn't work. I keep hearing this from people, "Experts say torture doesn't work." What experts? Have these experts ever actually been involved in an interrogation? Do you think Saddam Hussein, able to do whatever he wanted, was unable to use torture to get information? And what is torture, exactly?

My understanding is that effective torture involves same pain or bodily harm, combined with the realistic threat of much more pain and/or bodily harm. Give them a sample of what might happen if they don't cooperate. Well what happens when you're walking down an alley and someone pulls a gun on you and demands your wallet? Most of the time you hand it right over for fear of being shot. The mugger just used torture succesfully to get you to do what he wants you to do. Torture works, pure and simple. I'm not saying it's something that should be used lightly, but that old conundrum about whether you should torture someone who has information that could save millions of lives seems instructive to me. Save the lives!

I'd imagine any US senator, put in a position to decide between torturing a captured terrorist to get information, or doing nothing and allowing millions to die in a nuclear bombing, would go for the torture. There's some sort of disconnect if they care more about the terrorist than the citizens they were elected to serve (and protect), yet they are passing the McCain anti-torture bill. One of the guys at Powerline speculates that this is the kind of law they pass to look good, but when it gets to the nitty-gritty, they expect law enforcement to do what it takes to save lives, and ignore the law, much like the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence. Do you really think that any Senator would really have wanted an intelligence group like Able Danger, allegedly discovering a credible threat to blow up a skyscraper, to not share it with the FBI and save a lot of lives? The Senate probably expected that in certain situations the law would be ignored. The problem is that we're talking about beauracracies here, and they tend to follow laws and regulations, no matter how dumb.