WASHINGTON -- President Bush is lobbying Congress to make "clarifications" to its interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, alleging that "alternative tactics" are sometimes necessary in order to extract information from terrorist suspects. One reason for this "clarification" is that the Geneva Conventions are vague on its definition of torture -- and let's be clear about this. "Torture" is what Bush and Cheney want to do. Given all of the puzzle pieces -- (1) the Abu Ghraib scandal; (2) the existence of secret prisons out of the reach of U.S. law; (3) the president's signing statement attached to the Detainee Treatment Act, where he said that his authority as the president gives him the ability to ignore certain non-torture provisions -- it is quite clear that the Bush administration wants to be able to torture detainees. Whether it's shrouded in euphemisms like "alternative," "tough," or "enhanced," the idea remains the same: President Bush wants the legal authority to torture suspects.

John Negroponte, Director of National Security, argues in a USA Today op-ed that the Geneva Conventions need "clarification" so as to protect interrogators: "Thus, the president has asked that Congress clarify our treaty obligations just as it has done on so many other occasions. Absent such clarification, our intelligence professionals would be subject to unpredictable legal interpretations, including those of foreign courts." A wonderful sentiment, but this is exactly why the United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The U.S. refuses to join the ICC because it is afraid of the authority the ICC would have over its military operations. If the U.S. were a party to the ICC, American servicemen could be prosecuted under international law for war crimes or violations of international war treaties. Negroponte's argument fails to convince because it addresses a situation that doesn't exist.

But we already know why torture is bad from an ethical standpoint: torture is wrong. Period. But does torture actually work as a method of gathering intelligence? Perhaps the show Twenty-Four -- probably one of the most pro-government shows on TV -- is the most guilty of inspiring the notion that torture is necessary for instances in which there's a bomb somewhere right now and only this guy knows where it is so we need to beat that information out of him!. These instances -- like aborting a fetus or embryo to save the life of the mother -- are rare and apocryphal. In his Sept. 11 speech last week, Bush insisted that torture of detainees held in secret CIA prisons has stopped terror plots from being executed, but how are we to know that he's telling the truth?

There are far better ways to get information than by torture. Scotland Yard and MI-5 foiled the British liquid explosives attacks through old-fashioned policework: they went through the arduous process of obtaining wiretapping warrants (amazing, isn't it? A terror plot foiled even though they got warrants!), listened on the phone, got names and addresses, and then arrested people. A simple interrogation of those people -- without torture -- yielded more names and more information. Perhaps the U.S. is just lazy; we have fewer undercover operatives around the world than we ever have. (Of course, it's hard to spy on the enemy when conservative columnists publish the names of covert operatives and the Army fires homosexual Arabic translators because it's more important to enforce Jerry Falwell's morality than it is to have competent people who speak al-Qaeda's language.)

(Incidentally, the British terrorist plot wasn't nearly as ready as the news made it out to be. The terrorists didn't even have passports yet, so it wasn't something that was going to happen even in the next month.)

Experts in the field of torture have come to realize the same thing: torture is ineffective as a means of obtaining information. Israel, the world's expert when it comes to anti-terrorism, takes a dim view of torture for precisely this reason. The assumption made about torture is that the person being tortured is telling the truth; but the torturee's goal is not to tell the truth, but rather to stop the torture. For this reason, he is all the more inclined to tell the torturer what he wants to hear in the hope that the torture will stop. This is why a slew of military officers -- including Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured in Vietnam -- has spoken out against torture, citing not only its inefficacy, but also its dehumanizing nature.

But interestingly, notes Naomi Klein in The Nation, getting information may be only ancillary to torture's true goal:

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Torture thus sends a message to potential terrorists: if we capture you, you'll get the same treatment, so don't even think about becoming a terrorist. Torture comes from the same machismo that inspired Bush to tell terrorists, "Bring it on." In economics, this is called the Jackie Chain fallacy: what is good for Jackie Chan is not necessarily good for everyone.

And, at its heart, is torture not also about that most ubiquitous of human emotions -- revenge? The desire to see the enemy injured in the same way -- indeed, in a worse way -- than one's dead compatriots must surely be a part of it. The Geneva Conventions are our attempt to take war and make it more civilized. As humanity has become civilized, our baser instincts have not, and even though we've tried to create rules to control them, they come out, anyway. And now we have an administration that attempts to use rational justifications to legalize an irrational and barbarous practice.