What problem you and McArdle have with this position, and why you think that jetissoning one plank of it, without factual reasons for doing so, would be a good idea, is beyond me, but whereas in your case I am willing to put it down to a naïvety about political tactics coupled with a lack of respect for the views of the many people who have campaigned against torture on just these grounds, McArdle’s past record makes it impossible to rule out bad faith.

I understand perfectly the meaning of McArdle’s sentence. What I think you misjudge is its intent.

McArdle is simply giving us a “provocative” warning not to base our arguments against torture on utilitarianism. Now, I realize “very likely” is a bit over the top. But who knows, with a bit of much needed funding (irony intended), my guess is the Powers That Be could study and perfect torture methods. After all, it’s not like torture can never work. I think it’s fairly well-documented, for instance, that the Gestapo was able to capture Jean Moulin and strike effectively against the French underground with information obtained from tortured prisoners (the name “Klaus Barbie” comes to mind). Simply juxtaposing the terms “Gestapo” and “US interrogation methods” ought to be enough, dammit. We don’t need to go on to say “torture is always ineffective. To me this focus on the utility of torture has always seemed an unnecessary and risky overreach. In similar fashion, I might add, to discussions about capital punishments. Opponents of the death penalty often point out its lack of effect on crime rates. While I agree with them, I’ve always found it’s more effective to focus on morality. It’s simply wrong to take a life in vengeance. Just like it’s simply wrong to cruelly treat and inflict pain on a prisoner. It’s just wrong. It’s not necessary—and ill-advised—to base one’s arguments on whether or not it works. Otherwise we risk having the anti-torture edifice undermined in the event of a change in its level of effectiveness. Why leave the door open?

No, it’s not what she is saying. What part of “torture seems to me very likely to work” don’t you understand? In any case, this would be a remarkably stupid thing to say since many people in the US manifestly do not share ‘our’ belief that torture is always wrong but the argument from its ineffectiveness might well convince them.

engels: Yes, but the view that “torture is ineffective” is not the same as the view that “torture is never effective.” Indeed one of the expert citations you provide underscore this logic. The Army manual says torture is a “poor” technique that yields “unreliable” results. It does not say that torture never works, or that it is impossible to torture a prisoner into yielding valuable information.

We can and should embrace the view that torture is a poor technique for obtaining intelligence. But why is it even necessary—or desirable—to argue about its usefulness, when we know that torture is immoral? Surely this is what McArdle is saying. A focus on the lack of effectiveness of torture leaves hanging, in the air, unstated, the implication that it just might be permissible to utilize illegal interrogation techniques if we could find a way to make them work. I don’t think any reasonable person desires this state of affairs to come about. Still, one could imagine, say, in the aftermath of a future terrorist attack on American soil, a group of hawkish legislators proposing a bill that would fund torture research. After all, if we could only get it to work…

Dismissing the effectiveness of torture isn’t so much facile, as it is a dangerous diversion.

Rethinking the Psychology of Torture
Former Interrogators, Psychologists Join to Study the Effectiveness of Torture

Torture does not yield reliable information and is actually counterproductive in intelligence interrogations. This was the conclusion released by retired senior military interrogators and research psychologists during a press conference at Georgetown University

The Torture Myth
By Anne Applebaum

Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam… says that he doesn’t know “any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think [torturing interrogation subjects] is a good idea.” [...]

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003—long before Abu Ghraib—to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply “not a good way to get information.” … Worse, you’ll have the other side effects of torture. It “endangers our soldiers on the battlefield by encouraging reciprocity.” It does “damage to our country’s image” and undermines our credibility in Iraq. That, in the long run, outweighs any theoretical benefit.

One of the most facile dismissals of torture is that it doesn’t work, so why bother? That’s tempting, but it’s too easy. Torture seems to me very likely to work provided that you can verify the information, which I assume interrogators can in at least some circumstances.

And that’s that. Case dismissed on the grounds that it “seems to me” that it works just fine (and some brief condescension towards anyone who doesn’t share this judgment). Now let’s see what U.S. Army Field Manual has to say

Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.

Now here’s Amnesty International:

High-level US officials have frequently stated that the “war on terror” is a new war that requires new thinking. In fact, these officials seek to justify old methods that have long been de-legitimized. Suspending habeas corpus, “disappearing” detainees, incommunicado detention and the legalization of torture have been used in the name of national security and do not represent “new thinking.” These policies merely recycle old, ineffective practices that violate human rights and undermine the rule of law.

And human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith:

…it would seem that for the most part torture does not work, either because it extracts inaccurate information, or information that is not subject to verification. The prisoners in Guantánamo Bay have confessed to outlandish things when tortured and abused. The young British Muslims held there who came to be known as the “Tipton Three” admitted to being the shadowy figures on the edge of a video of Osama bin Laden, taped in Afghanistan in 2000. The problem for the prosecution was that they were working in an electronics store in Birmingham at the time.

So it really does seem that far from being a “red herring” which a few moments reflection can reveal to be unconvincing, which is only propounded by “facile” people who lack McArdle’s evident moral and intellectual seriousness, the view that torture is ineffective is one which many authorititive people who are informed about realities of the practice of torture feel rather certain of, and McArdle’s unsupported assertion to the contrary is in fact rather shockingly ignorant and glib.

But anyway Radek, thanks for dispelling any doubts I had that you might have been a real libertarian (in so far as anyone can be, since libertarians are by definition fake anarchists; but I thought you might have been, as it were, a genuine fake). It is now apparent from your impassioned defence of McArdle that you’re just another schmib.

Happy days are here again…

I got nothing else to say.

Do you have a freakin’ brain? Can you freakin’ read? Everything you say is just transference of your ideological presuppositions from your cognitive dissonance so your paranoid delusions of raaaaaaaah Again, do you have a freakin’ BRAIN? Do you? Well?

Where does she dismiss some widely held and powerful argument against it? That it doesn’t work? She points out that the argument is irrelevant to whether torture is immoral or not!

Where does she call people who are against torture a bunch of cretins? Again, what freakin’ article are you reading?

Is there something in the comments I’m missing (I see that Lizardbreath makes some interesting points, but that’s a completely different line)?

Cuz seriously, I think you’re just projecting your own fantasies and delusions of what a “amateur libertarian” MUST be like to keep your fragile little ideological ego, er, id, secure.

Apparently it is. Look, what she’s saying (in two paragraphs, but then again, you gotta fill that blank space in the internets) is “who cares about whether torture works or not? Even if it did, it would still be wrong.” That does not sound like a “torture enthusiast” – which you obviously assumed she was before you got through the first sentence.

And somehow you manage to get something completely different out of it. And it’s not like it’s written in some high falutin’, mangled grammar, post modernist cant that requires some serious head scratching and three years in grad school.

We’ve seen this before in the torture discussion. Torture enthusiasts are fond of trying to shift the topic to whether behavior A or B is really torture, or of inventing fictional situations where torture-could-help. I do not read these as honest debating tactics; I read them as excuse-making and diversion. Her entire first paragraph is, in effect, the entire justification used by torture advocates. It isn’t surprising that a weak followup with ambiguous wording fails to counter this impression.