Gourevitch on Torture

Philip Gourevitch, in a discussion on the New Yorker website, counters Dick Cheney's argument about torture's effectiveness:

It’s effective to assassinate people. They’re dead and they’re no longer a problem. The effectiveness debate is a false debate.… And I think slowly what’s changing is that we are starting to realize that when we commit torture, it’s something we are doing to us. When you look back five years ago at the Abu Ghraib pictures, everybody said, why are our soldiers doing that to those people? But the important question, too, is why are we doing that to our solders, turning them into torturers? Why are we doing that to our nation? Why are we doing this to our laws? Why is this what we are doing to our political institutions and to our standing in the world? And I think that that’s a debate that Dick Cheney knows perfectly well he’s lost catastrophically and cannot win on any grounds.