Ariel Dorfman on NPR

I was just listening to Ariel Dorfman (who wrote an excellent opinion piece in the Washington Post today) on NPR, talking about the outrage of U.S.-sanctioned torture in this day and age. The host continued to ask him why he is opposed to torture, and Mr. Dorfman, exasperated, said he truly cannot believe that this is a topic that's being seriously debated in the U.S. I'm with him. I find it extremely sad that the host was hinting that there might be some sort of merit to the pro-torture argument. I cannot believe we're in the business of torture.

Excerpt of the opinion piece:

It is a story that our species has listened to with mounting revulsion, a horror that has led almost every nation to sign treaties over the past decades declaring these abominations as crimes against humanity, transgressions interdicted all across the earth. That is the wisdom, national and international, that has taken us thousands of years of tribulation and shame to achieve. That is the wisdom we are being asked to throw away when we formulate the question -- Does torture work? -- when we allow ourselves to ask whether we can afford to outlaw torture if we want to defeat terrorism.

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress -- such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 -- are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.