Richard Cohen’s Torture Fantasyland   Yet the debate over
torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility:
whether it works or not. Of course it works–sometimes or rarely,
but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one
time it works. I refer you to the 1995 interrogation by
Philippine authorities of Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda
terrorist who served up extremely useful information about a
plot to blow up airliners when he was told that he was about to
be turned over to Israel’s Mossad. As George Orwell suggested in
1984, everyone has his own idea of torture.  If the threat of
torture works–if it has worked at least once–then it follows
that torture itself would work. Some in the intelligence field,
including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they
say this on the basis of evidence. They can’t all be fools or
knaves. This is also the position of Dick Cheney, who can
sometimes be both, but in this, at least, he has some support.
If something “sometimes or rarely” work