Do new threats to national security justify the use of torture?

Regardless of how it's proponents may posit the necessity of using torture as a means of extracting information, there is no way to justify the practice. Not only does it disgrace the country that countenances it, it inevitably undermines the country's ability to protect itself. History has thought us that the costs of utilising torture have been astronomical, for the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The French army may have won the Battle of Algiers but they soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. “You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

For the Americans, they're track record with their use of torture has shown its ineffectiveness. Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield of the massive Phoenix program, with over forty prisons across South Vietnam who systematically tortured thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong “killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level.” Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay has done incalculable damage to America’s international prestige whereas the information. In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency's multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam, pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 “summary executions” as “an inseparable part” of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that “the machine of justice” not be “clogged with cases.” For similar reasons, the CIA’s Phoenix program produced, by the agency’s own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

To reassert my answer, no, there is no way to justify the use of torture regardless of any arguments given on the security of the state. Basically torture is are always wrong, regardless of what the suspect is thought to know or to have done. It's banned absolutely under international law. Further more, the information gained is more often than not are unreliable. The practice of torture corrodes the rule of law and undermines the criminal justice system and in no way does it do not make us any safer. The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.