Can't Say I Disagree

Nate discusses the secret prison system run by the CIA in Europe. Yeah, this probably isn't the best idea for promoting American values abroad. Worse is Bush refusing to sign the bill in front of Congress explicity renouncing torture. This is ridiculous.

I tend to agree with something Glenn Reynolds said months, maybe years, ago that torture should be banned absolutely as a policy. This would ensure that the practice of torture would only occur if the situation was so desparate that we would feel compelled to break with the policy, ie the typical hypothetical example of a nuke potentially going off and needing to use torture to get information. This, of course, is not a plausible scenario, but if such a scenario arose, we wouldn't care about any law or policy.

This is why such a policy is so important. It would ensure that only in the most extreme cases, torture would be used. Any systemic use of torture is plain wrong, no way around it.