Spreading Ignorance, One Broadcast At A Time

In the midst of one of his spasms of free association about health care, TARP, General Motors, and Kin Jong-il, Rush Limbaugh compressed four decades of urban deterioration into one entertaining paragraph. He ranted:

I don't care where you go, whatever they call themselves, progressives -- go to Detroit -- what do you see in Detroit? Abject poverty. What do you see in most of Michigan? Abject poverty. What do you see where liberal Democrat socialists anywhere in the world have total unchecked power to run things, be it a country or be it a city or be it a state? You see abject poverty. Marxism, socialism, create poverty. I know it's hard to believe that this is somebody's design. But it is.

He then went on to blame this on Barack Obama, having blamed a moment earlier the nation's ills on Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and unions, who "are scheming against the American people, as they have been all along."

If you're reading this blog- not just this post, but this blog at any time- you're interested enough to have heard along the way some of the explanations for the decades-long urban decay in the U.S.A. In the recent past, political corruption (of which Detroit has had its share), drug (including alchohol) use, street crime, poverty, poor education, and more.

There are deeper causes of the ills of urban America. Cities were flourishing when, according to Bradford Snell, president and general manager Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors had other ideas:

In 1922, according to GM's own files, Sloan established a special unit within the corporation which was charged, among other things, with the task of replacing America's electric railways with cars, trucks and buses.

A year earlier, in 1921, GM lost $65 million, leading Sloan to conclude that the auto market was saturated, that those who desired cars already owned them, and that the only way to increase GM's sales and restore its profitability was by eliminating its principal rival: electric railways.

At the time, 90 percent of all trips were by rail, chiefly electric rail; only one in 10 Americans owned an automobile. There were 1,200 separate electric street and interurban railways, a thriving and profitable industry with 44,000 miles of track, 300,000 employees, 15 billion annual passengers, and $1 billion in income. Virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system.

General Motors sought to reduce competition from electric railways through a variety of measures, including the use of freight leverage. GM, for decades, was the nation's largest shipper of freight over railroads, which controlled some of America's most extensive railways. By wielding freight traffic as a club, GM persuaded railroads to abandon their electric rail subsidiaries.

With a pack of notorious mobsters, GM helped purchase and scrap the street railways serving Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Members of GM's special unit went to, among others, the Southern Pacific, owner of Los Angeles' Pacific Electric, the world's largest interurban, with 1,500 miles of track, reaching 75 miles from San Bernardino, north to San Fernando, and south to Santa Ana; the New York Central, owner of the New York State Railways, 600 miles of street railways and interurban lines in upstate New York; and the New Haven, owner of 1,500 miles of trolley lines in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In each case, by threatening to divert lucrative automobile freight to rival carriers, they persuaded the railroad (according to GM's own files) to convert its electric street cars to motor buses -- slow, cramped, foul-smelling vehicles whose inferior performance invariable (sic) led riders to purchase automobiles.

A few decades later, President Dwight Eisenhower would launch the interstate highway system, enabling the middle class to flee cities for more pastoral areas. This increased competition for the limited number of jobs in urban America. And the white middle class, lured to the suburbs by the mortage interest tax deduction, was encouraged to flee by private actors aiming to maximize income and only inadvertently helping destroy the city. Wendell Cox (pdf), who (over-) emphasizes the impact of urban renewal, attributes the description of the process to a W. Edward Orser, who explained

First, real estate operators would try to find a house for sale on an all-white block, often specifically alluding to the prospect of potential racial change in the area and to the threat of lowered property values for those not wise enough to see the handwriting on the wall. As an inducement to sell, the agent typically offered a buying price at or above the current market value. Second, having secured the first house by such means, he quickly installed a new African-American tenant in the house --- renter or buyer … Third, as soon as the new tenant had taken up residence, if not sooner, the operator moved on down the block, alerting homeowners to the initial sale, warning them of the prospect of increased African-American settlement and offering to buy their houses as well. Those who were among the first to sell might be offered prices above the market value; the next several sales might approximate the actual worth of the house; those who sold later suffered a considerable loss.

Not surprisingly, this tactic had a destructive influence on racial harmony as most homeowners suffered a financial loss and tensions among homeowners, and between races, suffered.

The decline in the nation's manufacturing base, particularly devastating in the early years to cities (now harming entire metropolitan areas) has been facilitated by outsourcing of jobs to the private sector, offshoring of jobs abroad, the euphemistically termed "free trade," and favorable tax treatment of corporations which engage in one or more of the above.

This decline, reflected in the near-dissolution of the domestic auto industry (before President Obama and the Democratic Congress recently revived it), is particularly obvious in Detroit, Michigan. Powerful demographic trends have played a role for generations,as Time Magazine, talking about the African-American migration northward, pointed out on October 27, 1961:

With little education or training, Detroit's new arrivals have had to scramble for any job they could get. But in their desperation to find work at any wage, they have crowded out thousands of the city's longtime residents; more than 70% of the 61,692 persons on relief have lived in Detroit since before 1950.

Disagree if you will, about the role of General Motors, the real estate business, white flight, or the federal government, but the deterioration of the American city was not precipitated by "liberal Democrat Socialists." This much is obvious.

The operative term is obvious. Obvious to anyone interested in public policy. Obvious to you, to me, and to Rush Limbaugh.

It is incomprehensible that Rush Limbaugh would be completely oblivious to all of these factors. Incomprehensible. Rush is not ignorant- merely manipulative and dishonest and completely contemptous of his listeners, given that he expects most of them to believe what he's selling.

There really are facts supporting the conservative worldview. There must be. But apparently the right-wing talkies believe conservatism cannot survive absent an atmosphere of ignorance. Their listeners, and American society, only suffer as a consequence.

Incredibly, Not A Joke

Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine recently interviewed Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State, in the GW Bush administration, at the close of that magazine's Most Powerful Women Summit. Inferring that Rice, with her "eloquent and elegant figure," would be a formidable contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Easton gushed

As Bush's national security adviser at the launch of the Iraq War, she will never appeal to hardcore Democrats. But to those millions of independents and soft Republicans who pulled Obama over the top in last year's election -- a familiar brand of voter at this Fortune gathering -- Rice has allure.

At the end of our interview, as I stood to shake Rice's hand, I glanced over my shoulder at this audience of women-CEO's and senior business and government leaders, media opinion-makers and entertainment stars, ground-breaking academics and committed philanthropists. It was an audience I knew, first-hand, viewed the Bush administration with doubts and, in some cases, outright hostility. So what I saw was telling.

Every single woman in that San Diego hotel ballroom was on her feet-giving Condi Rice a standing ovation.

This couldn't be the same Condoleezza Rice who told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on September 8, 2002

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought -- maybe six months from a crude nuclear device. The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

This couldn't be the same Condoleezza Rice who pretended, testifying before the 9/11 Commission, that she was unaware that the Iraqi regime had destroyed its cache of biological and chemical weapons.

This couldn't be the same Condoleezza Rice who skillfully ignored warnings about the threat of terrorism, according to the New York Time's Phillip Shenon, author of THE COMMISSION: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission, who observed

Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president. Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.

No one ever alleged that Miss Rice's area of expertise is economic policy. Or trade policy. Or health care policy. Or anything but foreign policy (Russian studies, specifically). Nonetheless, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in September of 2001 at the World Trade Center. Far more than that now have been killed in a war (Iraq) that shouldn't have been launced and in a war (Afghanistan) which was thoroughly bungled by the administration she served as Director of the National Security Council and as Secretary of State. She was, and remains, a complete failure, as well as someone with nary an acquaintance with the truth. And any suggestion that she would be a legitimate candidate for a major party's nomination for President of the United States is, really, fairly disgusting.

Prospects: Not Bright

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, was blunt, and starkly realistic, in the 66-page document he submitted to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 30. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward reported McChrystal arguing "failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)-- while Afghan scurity capacity matures-- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."If he doesn't receive the increase in troop strength he is requesting, McChrystal contends, the mission "will likely result in failure." He concludes

Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure.

General McChrystal implies that if additional soldiers are not committed to the war, the mission will fail. If proper resources are committed, it may fail. With Republicans poised to charge Obama with having "lost Afghanistan," the President is left with no good options.

How did we get to this place? Defense Secretary tells us in this exchange on Sunday with CNN's John King:

GATES: Well, I will tell you, I think that the strategy that the president put forward in late March is the first real strategy we have had for Afghanistan since the early 1980s. And that strategy was more about the Soviet Union than it was about Afghanistan.

KING: You served in the Bush administration. That's a pretty broad damnation of the Bush strategy.

GATES: Well, the reality is, we were fighting a holding action. We were very deeply engaged in Iraq. I increased -- I extended the 10th Mountain Division the first month I was on this job in January of '07. I extended -- I put another brigade into Afghanistan in the spring of 2007. And that's all we had to put in there. Every -- we were -- we were too stretched to do more. And I think we did not have the kind of comprehensive strategy that we have now.

KING: And if it comes to the point of sending more, this time, if the president agrees and General McChrystal gets -- maybe it's 20,000, 30,000, or 40,000, do we have the troops now? If you needed 40,000, could you find it?

GATES: Well, I think, if the president were to decide to approve additional combat forces, they really probably could not begin to flow until some time in January.

Having toppled a genocidal dictator in Iraq, George W. Bush had a choice: commit adequate resources to fight a war in a nation strategically nearly irrelevant- or to fight a war on terrrorism in Afghanistan. He chose the low-hanging fruit. Barack Obama, and the nation, are now left suffering the consequences of appallingly bad judgement.

Double Standard In Awarding Contracts

If you missed this last week, watch it. In its entirety. On Friday, Rachel Maddow continued her series on the trumped-up war on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. A partial transcript of the segment is here; the video is below; transcript of the program is available here. She began by noting that the amendment to the bill recently passed by Congress defunding ACORN is probably unconstitutional because, as an apparent bill of attainder, it targets one specific organization. She continues

So giant government defense contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, it looks like you‘re out of luck. Lockheed Martin has been forced to pay at least $68 million for getting caught 11 separate times committing government contract fraud. Northrop Grumman has had to pay around $500 million for getting caught nine times for contract fraud. Sorry, guys, but if we‘re going to nail ACORN here, you‘ve got to go.

And if—and if fraud is going to be the new issue in our newfound enthusiasm for defunding people, then Blackwater is going to have a problem, too. In just one of Blackwater‘s many government contracts, they were recently found to have defrauded the government to the tune of $55 million. And that‘s just one Blackwater contractor, and they‘ve got lots of contracts.

But if fraud is not bad enough for you, how about murder? Because five Blackwater employees have been charged with murder during the course of their government contracted duties in Iraq. Is murder enough to defund Blackwater?

How about if people they‘re killing, the contractors killing aren‘t just Iraqi civilians or somebody else we don‘t know, how about if they‘re U.S. troops? Because KBR, with its government contracts, is under investigation for killing 16 American troops who were electrocuted through KBR shoddy works supposedly building and maintaining living quarters for our troops in Iraq.

I mean, to be fair, I will admit that if we are talking about behavior by contractors that warrants them being defunded by an outrage Congress, none of those things I just described from those other contractors are prostitution specific, like the Republican and conservative media ACORN case has been. Ever since two activists dressed up in pimp and hooker costumes and then went from ACORN office to ACORN office with a hidden camera until they got a reaction out of ACORN employees that would play well on FOX News.

If the hidden camera stunt induced prostitution angle is what it takes to get a government contract defunded, then I guess we‘re going to have to talk about prostitution broadly and the government contractor known as ArmorGroup, part of Wackenhut, in Afghanistan. Their employees, you‘ll recall, were made famous earlier this month after the release of these pictures that show the contractors barely clothed and shooting vodka out of places you wouldn‘t expect.

The same ArmorGroup personnel who, again, were being paid by you and me were also allegedly engaged in a prostitution ring in Kabul. That‘s according to an ArmorGroup whistleblower. The State Department is investigating ArmorGroup now.

But if we‘re going to talk contractors and prostitution, we‘re also going to have to talk about DynCorp, which is always been one of those horror movie U.S. contractor cases. In the year 2000, at least 13 DynCorp employees were sent home from a U.S. government contract in Bosnia after they were found to be taking part in a Bosnian sex slave ring involving underage girls, not a fake prostitution ring that never actually existed like the one in the activist hidden camera costumes stunt, but an actual forced child prostitution ring, an actual U.S. government contractors from DynCorp.

In the absence of any defund DynCorp uprising, DynCorp still gets a lot of government money. In fact, today, DynCorp landed a brand new $230 million contract with the U.S. Air Force. That‘s on top of the $915 million contract they got from the State Department in June.

ArmorGroup, the prostitution/vodka-shooting contract in Afghanistan at the Kabul embassy, they still got that nearly $200 million contract in Afghanistan with the State Department. But that is currently under review.

Blackwater still has multimillion dollar contracts with the State Department, the Defense Department, as well as the CIA, even as five of their employees face murder charges.

KBR was just awarded a new $19 million army contract in February, despite being investigated in the deaths of those 16 U.S. troops.

Not only have these contractors not been defunded by outraged members of Congress, they all continue to get spectacularly lucrative government contracts even after all of these things have been exposed. I‘m not reporting any of these things for the first time. They‘re all known.

So, sure, if you want to defund ACORN, go for it. ACORN has definitely done some indefensible stuff over the years. They are an imperfect organization, to be sure. But if this isn‘t just a witch-hunt against ACORN, if Congress is actually just going after government contractors who commit fraud and worse, then we can all look forward to the explanation from the fake outrage Republicans and the cowering Democrats about why nothing ever inspired them to defund anyone before ACORN. After that, by all mean, cut them all loose.

In politics, it is often said, once you start to defend yourself, you have lost. So it probably will have no effect on media coverage or public opinion to explain that singling out ACORN is illegal; that the video "evidence" against ACORN consists of one tape which has not been released in its entirety and which resulted from the visit to one of the many ACORN offices (perhaps after no one took the bait at any of the others visited); or even that the Repub campaign against ACORN is aimed at stopping its efforts at registering poor voters, disproportionately minority, who inconveniently vote Democratic. Unfortunately, the only viable option, as this installment, at least, suggests, is to remind voters that there are far, far greater crimes being committed in government contracting.

Finally, on one program on one cable network, some context is brought to the hand-wringing over (sarcasm alert)the evil behemoth ACORN. Elsewhere? The "liberal media" once again is playing its role as front man for corporate and GOP interests.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Iran Defies Buchanan

File this one under: I couldn't make this up if I tried.

Our conservative pundit, more trusting of Tehran than Jerusalem, wrote in Tell Israel: Cool the Jets! on July 31, 2009:

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of "Bibi" Netanyahu, warns that if Iran's nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it....

America's policy of patience is working....

Why does Israel insist that America has only five months to halt Iran's nuclear program, or Israel must attack?....

Now, Iran's nuclear "production facilities" may be "churning" out the low-enriched uranium of which it has produced enough for one test bomb.

But IAEA inspectors still have their eyes on this pile. None of the LEU has been diverted anywhere.

There is no evidence Iran has built the cascade to raise LEU to highly enriched weapons-grade uranium, or that the facilities even exist to do this. The Iranian regime has declared it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, indeed, that their possession would be a violation of Koranic law.

And the United States has not rescinded its own National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that Iran, in 2003, abandoned its weapons program.

Israel has been saying for years an Iranian bomb is months away.

Where is the proof? Where is the evidence to justify a new U.S. war in the Middle East to destroy weapons of mass destruction that may not exist in Iran, as they did not exist in Iraq?

That's right. Iran does not want to build nuclear weapons- they said so themselves. And now the news that Patrick J. Buchanan figured he would never read:

The leaders of the United States, France and Britain announced Friday morning they have disclosed intelligence information to the IAEA that confirms an underground nuclear facility has been built into the side of a mountain near Qum and demanded an in-depth investigation.

Iran's decision to start building the nuclear facility years ago, without notifying the IAEA represents a direct challenge to the non-proliferation regime, U.S. President Barack Obama said Friday at the G20 meetings....

Iran did not disclose existence of the facility, 160 kilometres southwest of Tehran, to the IAEA until Monday after Tehran reportedly became aware that Western intelligence had already discovered it.

The size and configuration of the facility is inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear program and the IAEA must immediately investigate it, Obama said....

Iran's letter contains no details about the facility's location, whether operations have started or what type of centrifuges it will use, according to the IAEA.

Iranian officials had previously acknowledged having only one enrichment plant — which is under IAEA monitoring — and had denied allegations of undeclared nuclear activities.

A U.S. official who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity said the facility has 3,000 centrifuges that could be operational by next year.

Given that 3,000 centrifuges is not enough to produce nuclear fuel to power a reactor but is enough to produce material used for a nuclear bomb, it is clear that Tehran's intentions are malevolent.

Darn those paranoid Israelis!

Also on July 31, Mr. Buchanan assured his readers "And when one looks to U.S. and Iranian interests, they coincide as much as they conflict." Someone must alert President Obama, who on Friday declared "Iran is on notice that when we meet with them on Oct. 1 they are going to have to come clean and they will have to make a choice," one of which is to “continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation.”

The newly-revealed facility near Qom is not expected to be operational for approximately a year and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon sometime between 2010 and 2015 (inclusive, I presume) holds. Today, though, Iran ominously tested a long-range missile, which could reach Russia, Israel, and U.S. bases in the Gulf. Even before the latest threat, the warning issued by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations on Thursday was self-evident: "The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

It's not only the former Nixon speechwriter, though his constant attacks on Israel, and occasionally on Jews, harkens back to the 1991 statement of the late William F. Buckley Jr. regarding Buchanan's criticism of prominent supporters of Gulf War I. The National Review publisher wrote in his publication "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament."

There have been, recently and over the years, plenty of individuals on the left- especially bloggers- reflexively hostile to Israel (and especially to Netanyahu), including the ever-consistent and misguided Juan Cole. Even now, as one administration official told The New York Times, the Iranians "have cheated three times. And they have now been caught three times,” these critics have at least one thing in common with Pat Buchanan: they were wrong- about Israel and about Benjamin Netanyahu. And another thing: they won't admit it.

Article Of The Week

Don't go to salon.com and read David Sirota's "Obama crushes Democratic dissent." Not that Salon isn't worth reading regularly and certainly not that Sirota's piece isn't worth reading. It's only that he links to it in his 9/27/09 post, "Denver Post: Obama Aide Messina Caught trying to But Off" Primary Challenger, on openleft.com. And then you can get two for one.

In Salon, Sirota notes the effort of the Obama administration to block primary challenges to: New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Hillary Clinton's replacement; Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who became a Democrat when he realized he would not survive a primary challenge as a Republican; and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, supporter of a public option now that he faces a primary challenge from the left. Sirota recognizes

this Colorado example is a replica of that now-famous Illinois contest in 2004. Bennet, like one of Obama's toughest opponents back then, is a millionaire who has never run for public office. And as in 2004, that millionaire is being propped up by the establishment against an Obama-esque state legislator who has oodles of experience and grass-roots support. The hypocrisy, of course, is that Obama is now backing the tycoon instead of his former self.

No doubt, if I devoted this column to any of that history, presidential aides would respond (if at all) by saying Obama is only aiming to preserve Democratic Party strength. And then I would publish an even easier-to-write follow-up reminding those aides that last year, Obama said primaries like his 2008 presidential campaign have helped the Democratic Party because they have "engaged and involved people like never before."

But Sirota sees at work something more serious and damaging than standard hypocrisy:

At a moment when Obama's agenda is acutely threatened by congressional Democratic recalcitrance, the president's anti-primary posture tells all Democratic incumbents he will defend them, regardless of their position on issues. And that message blunts Obama's most powerful instrument of legislative leverage: fear of contested elections.

Without vigorous primaries forcing Democratic legislators to face Democratic voters, those legislators feel free to defy the president's Democratic agenda. Alternately, with primaries, Democratic lawmakers typically compete to show who is more committed to the Democratic agenda. As two examples, Sens. Specter and Bennet went from mealy-mouthed equivocation to strong support of the public healthcare option immediately after opponents announced primary challenges to them.

Hence, in trying to prevent or weaken primaries against incumbents, Obama is not merely signaling a royalist's disdain for local democracy. He is exposing a corrupted pol's willingness to prioritize country club etiquette over policy results. If his agenda ends up being killed, that cynical choice will be a key cause of death.

The Denver Post (to which Sirota links from the openleft post) suggests that "Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop" dangled the possibility of a job in the administration to Andrew Romanoff, when rumors began that the latter was considering a primary challenge to Bennet. Romanoff reportedly declined, announced his candidacy, and the following day Obama endorsed Bennet.

Sirota accurately, if grammatically awkwardly, summarizes this as "the power-worshiping, incumbent-protecting country-club etiquette at work" and identifies the main culprit as "President Emanuel" (are the quote marks really necessary?). Sirota makes no excuses for the guy who technically is Emanuel's boss: Emanuel would not be throwing his weight around if it did not meet with Mr. Obama's approval, in a Washington version of good cop- bad cop. Which brings to mind a statement Howard Dean recently made at an appearance in Philadelphia, Pa. The physician and former governor, expressing optimism that meaningful bill health care reform will emerge from Congress, assured the sympathetic audience "Barack Obama is from Chicago." Unfortunately, Rahm Emanuel is from Chicago. Barack Obama is from Hawaii.

Torture Thrown Into Doubt, Again

Torture is illegal under international law and United States law; generally no more effective than conventional interrrogation techniques; a swell recruiting tool for Al Qaeda; and encourages subjects to lie. But at least sometimes the subject decides to spill the beans.

But wait. He may think he's giving out correct information but may be deluding himself. In newsweek.com, Sharon Begley summarizes a paper entitled "Torturing The Brain" written by neurobiologist Shane O'Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin and appearing in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. Here, she quotes O'Mara and explains:

"information presented by the captor to elicit responses during interrogation may inadvertently become part of the suspect's memory, especially since suspects are under extreme stress and are required to tell and retell the same events which may have happened over a period of years." As a result, information produced by the suspect may parrot or embellish suggestions from the interrogators rather than revealing something both truthful and unknown to the interrogators. Second, cortisol-induced damage to the prefrontal cortex can cause confabulation, or false memories. Because a person being tortured loses the ability to distinguish between true and false memories, as a 2008 study showed, further pain and stress does not cause him to tell the truth, but to retreat further into a fog where he cannot tell true from false.

O'Mara concludes

the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is demonstrably incorrect. Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or 'enhanced' interrogation.

Torture is necessary in the rare "ticking time bomb" scenario. But it is illegal, usually unnecessary, frequently counter-productive, and a gift to jihadists. Otherwise, it is a fine idea.