Amateur Hour

Adam Serwer, responding to Ali Soufan's article from last weekend, is on point:

We're not seeing too many "professionals" argue the case for torture--instead we see those who believe fighting terrorists is about some kind of contest of will between Islam and the West romanticizing criminal behavior as "necessary" because, for some reason, they think protecting American society requires that take our cues from those we're fighting.

The only reason we know anything substantive about the torture-and-abuse era is because of people on the inside - the professionals at the CIA and Pentagon and FBI who were as horrified by Cheney's amateur and counter-productive thuggishness as many of us were. But the Soufan piece deserves being re-read. It calmly rebuts all the hysterical and unproven claims that torture somehow "worked" in a way that traditional, ethical American interrogation could not have achieved.