Usually called the doctor. Or the caretaker.

Every day this week I have posted about torture. I have talked about why I think we should keep the debate alive, a little bit of the history of torture, and possible reasons that people might be continuing to support our government's use of torture.

A lot of people are confining their remarks on the subject to the idea that torture is morally indefensible. It is. It is morally indefensible. Torturing someone is as morally wrong as it gets, and I support the insistence that torture is morally wrong.

However, my morality does not preclude going on to point out further facts about the use of torture and its futility. Clearly, the people who continue to support the use of torture do so because they do not care. It is not that they have not heard that torture is morally wrong--that is the first thing most people say about torture. Hey, torture is morally wrong! They are not wandering around wearing earplugs like staff at a rock concert. They know it is wrong--they just do not care.

And to all those people who know that torture is morally wrong but do not care, I say: do not support torture. Do not support it because it is morally wrong, but also do not support it because it does not work. I quote a paragraph from my first anti-torture post on Monday:

Torture is wrong, and I know that like I know the sun will come up tomorrow. However, for the people who believe that ritualized terror directed at the human body in furtherance of a goal is morally acceptable, we must provide rational answers to cure their irrational mindset. We must show them first that torture does not work; second, that torture is patently against the ideals of this country; and third, that even if it did work and was acceptable, the practice of torture by Americans on the citizens of other countries irreparably harms our standing in the global community, and thus the personal welfare of each and every American.

Torture does not work. Torture does not, cannot, never has, and never will consistently provide timely, valuable, reliable information. Torture produces irrelevant information and lies, and the lies it provides are the lies that the interrogator wants to hear, so they are given credibility. A person can be made to say anything if they are subjected to enough pain--guilty or innocent. Either way, the interrogation session has produced a lot of nonsense, which must then be investigated fully anyway. If all information provided is not followed up, it might look like we know perfectly well that torture does not work, and are doing it anyway.

Torture is against the ideals of our country. We talk an awful lot in America about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." I think most of us believe these three things to be our rights as American citizens. They are also basic human rights; this phrase in its entirety was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, after a period of institutionalized torture so appalling that the world ripped itself apart to stop it. Torture denies these basic human rights. Torture can kill. It always wounds. Its victims are denied liberty, sometimes for years, or the rest of their lives. And in many cases, those who have been tortured will never again be able to live normal lives. I would direct you to my friend sasha_khan's post on this subject.

Torture irreparably harms our standing in the global community, and our personal safety--your personal safety. Our government has violated Article III of the Geneva Convention. We torture prisoners. No soldier, no journalist, no politician visiting a foreign theater of war, no civilian travelling can ever count him or herself truly safe until we once again adhere to the codes outlining appropriate treatment of prisoners--and probably for a while afterward. In addition, our government has opened the door to legalized torture at home.

The core of the matter is that torture is wrong. But for those people who do not care about the morality of torture, I say, pull out all the stops. There are rational, logical reasons why torture is stupid, and it is important to keep stressing them, because people who do not have morals are not impressed by arguments based on morality, and people who are not humane are not impressed by arguments based on humanity. If someone is ruled by the bottom line, tell them that torture is wasteful and expensive. If someone is ruled by concern about his or her own neck, talk about how torture impairs our ability to keep our own people safe. If someone is ruled by vanity, talk about how our image takes a hit in the global community because we torture people.

There is no shame in using the argument that works. It does not make you a less moral person to show people patiently and rationally that torture is messy, expensive, and ineffective as well as morally indefensible. A rational argument takes more time and effort than simply saying "torture is morally wrong," but it is not an effort that I grudge. It is not an effort anyone should grudge; if there is anything worth convincing people of, surely it is that we should not support torture.