On September 28, the House approved legislation giving President Bush broad authority to decide techniques U.S. interrogators can use while interrogating terrorist detainees. At his discretion, U.S. interrogators can continue to use techniques which violate the Geneva Conventions and are considered to be torture by its signatories.

I am a retired army intelligence officer, trained as an interrogator, including methods used to avoid providing useful information under torture. I want to discuss two aspects of torture: why intelligence professionals and military lawyers oppose it and why widespread conventional wisdom that it is effective is incorrect.

Torture is uniformly opposed by our military leaders, military and civilian intelligence personnel and military lawyers (Judge Advocate Generals-JAGs) as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which in June 2006, ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applies to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda.

In 2003, the senior JAGs of all our uniformed services issued memos which opposed the use of torture, as defined by the Bush administration, because it violates the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and domestic criminal law.

In an August 2005 article, Karen J. Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, provided an additional reason. She observed that the JAG memos' criticism is not so much moral as strategic and that in 2003 they suggested that a policy of torture is sure to constitute a “fatal flaw in any war against jihadi terror.”

Greenburg further described the “fatal Flaw” in one of the 2003 memos, by USMC JAG, Brigadier General Kevin M. Sandkuhler, who wrote "The authorization of aggressive counter-resistance techniques by service members will adversely impact …Human Intelligence Exploitation and Surrender of Foreign Enemy Forces, and Cooperation and Support of Friendly Nations." She noted that put simply, Sandkuhler was saying that the systematic practice of torture threatened to impede the collection of useful information and so had the potential to deliver a harmful blow to the U.S. war against jihadi terrorism.

On September 6, 2006, Lieutenant General John Kimmons, the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, echoed Sandkuhler’s sentiments. On the day the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual which strictly limits how interrogators can question military prisoners, including those that the Bush administration calls "unlawful combatants”, Kimmons stated “I am absolutely convinced [that] no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that. Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, through the use of abusive techniques, would be of questionable credibility, and additionally it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there.”

Torture proponents seem to accept conventional wisdom that it works and the Bush assertion that it has prevented terrorist attacks and saved thousands of lives. Regarding this assertion I would like some specifics from the man who, starting with the claim that Saddam had WMD, has provided us with some 27 justifications for invading Iraq.

Torture sounds effective - people think about how they would react to extreme pain or prolonged sleep deprivation. Ask yourself, "Wouldn’t I admit to ANYTHING if I was tortured?" I know my response is usually, "I’m afraid so!" Aside from seeming to be intuitively true, however, the idea that torture consistently produces reliable intelligence is considered doubtful by experts who understand the practice and its results.

Torture is an effective technique to make people say whatever you want them to. Unfortunately, it frequently elicits lies which satisfy the torturer, thereby ending the pain. The information that comes from torture, especially of individuals trained to withstand or counter it, such as terrorists, must be considered of questionable reliability, and there are great risks of diverting attention from accurate information through chasing down false leads from people who lie to escape the pain.

Having studied how Stalin and Hitler used torture against real and imagined enemies, I am convinced that legalized torture exacts a heavy toll on individuals who inflict it and societies that condone it. It is also likely that its use, even when initially limited to a select few “high value” prisoners, will soon become widespread. This, unfortunately seem to be the case in Afghanistan and Iraq as witnessed by events at Abu Ghraib and numerous reports of mistreatment of prisoners.

The United States has never found it necessary to legalize torture. In fact, it has honored Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions for more than half a century. Why is it now suddenly necessary to legalize torture?