There is an informative review by Gary Bass of the book Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali. Bass calls it 'a book full of facts', and they are distressing facts; but the subject will continue to demand the attention of the global citizenry so long as torture is practised. One passage from Bass's review:
Whether torture works depends, first of all, on what you think it is supposed to do. Torture is a device for terrifying a populace into submission, and it can work for that. It is a device for securing false confessions, and it works for that. And finally, it could be a device for getting accurate and actionable intelligence about security threats. Here, Rejali makes a devastating case against its effectiveness. There are, of course, non-torturing ways of getting intelligence, and the advocates of torture need to prove not just that their way works, but that it works better than the more decent methods.
Even could they prove it, the legal prohibition against torture would have to stand because the moral prohibition against it is absolute and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.
