The Workday Liberal

This post at Kos has a comment by bmaples that really clarified one of the issues about torture. Bmaples writes:

A meme I'd like to stop

Bill, as much as I absolutely love you (from afar, even), and as much as I almost always marvel at both your writing and your intelligence, you have repeated a meme that I would like to see stopped. Here it is:

The bottom line is torture doesn't work.

I know, and I know that you know, that that is not the bottom line. Torture is wrong because ... it is WRONG; it is immoral at best, and evil at worst.

We need to be very explicit on this. Otherwise we wind up with "well, yes, most torture doesn't work, but THIS new thing we've got always works, so it's okay, right?"

We are against torture for many, many reasons, and its lack of efficacy is certainly one of them. But at the root, torture is the same sin as racism, and oppression, and genocide -- the reducing of another human being to "the other." And we must always stand against that.

I really do not feel that my paltry intellect can express it better than Bmaples has. It's wrong because it's wrong. I just felt that the point was important enough to warrant a bit of echo from club lefty...