It's the Torture, Stupid

I think Fareed Zakaria is exactly right in this piece for Newsweek. Not only is torture morally amd ethically wrong, and not only is it ineffective at providing trustworthing intel, but it undermines our war effort at every step. Zakaria wrote:

This is a case of more than just bad public relations. Ask any soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, "Abu Ghraib." A few months before the scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to "the little people."

When you think of the victims of torture, you think of that grotesque human pyramid overseen by Lyndie England and the other "bad apples." But the fact is, as the insurgency grew, some of their recruits were people who turned against us specifically because of those practices. The very people so eager to torture to keep us safe are putting our troops in greater danger.

We can't be successful in any measure in Iraq until we hold the administrators responsible for the torture debacles of the past few years, and we come clean on the so-called "black sites" where we're holding unaccounted, unmonitored prisoners. (And, of course, the Vice President stops being the cheerleader for torture that he is today.) We have to renounce this behavior. We have to end this behavior. We have to let people know that it will never happen again.

Rob