It is hard to believe that in this day and age, you can turn on your television and see two prominent politicians debate whether or not the government should be allowed to torture people.

Despite your feelings about whether a nation should or shouldn’t, the United States government has clearly been torturing people off and on since at least 2002. At least, we can say with the tiniest breath of relief, the nation seems to have stopped debating whether or not the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were torture. They were. To a society steeped in the psychotic violence of movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the intense and righteous anti-terror violence of TV’s 24, and the sadistic machinations of franchises like Saw or Hostel, the Bush team’s actions seemed more like pillow fights than what we know as “torture”.

Some might say “so what? Why do you want to protect the terrorists?” But that’s part of the problem: almost none of the “terrorism suspects” who have been detained by the US were ever found guilty of a single crime. Sure, they were accused of being terrorists, but the reality is that we don’t know if they were innocent or guilty, because the US never gave them trials. Hundreds of people were simply rounded up, and have been held in prison for as many as six years, with no trial, no charges, no nothing. So maybe the US has been torturing the worst villains of all-time, or maybe they’ve been torturing innocent fathers and sons, ruining their lives and the lives of their families. We don’t know, and we won’t as long as the White House thinks it has the right to select anyone in the world, capture them, and hold them as prisoner for as long as they like (unfortunately, President Obama has recently announced that he plans to continue this Bush-era practice during his own term).

But the most powerful argument that torture-proponents trot out is the terrifying hypothetical: “what if terrorists had planted a nuclear bomb in the middle of Los Angeles, and it could go off at any minute, and you had one of the terrorists in custody? Wouldn’t you torture him to try to save the lives of millions?” Which is a difficult question, but THIS DOESN’T EVER HAPPEN. We never see a situation where there is an immediate threat, and we happen to have the responsible party handy, and we can torture our way to safety. Does it make sense to plan our national security around outlandish and unrealistic scenarios?

But despite the morality and need for torture as a method of saving American lives, we have two other key points: 1) it doesn’t work, and 2) it creates new enemies.

Almost any interrogator or intelligence analyst will tell you that torture is not a reliable way of getting useful information from a suspect. The reason is that when a prisoner faces such pain and fear, they will say what they think their tormenter wants to hear, not what is actually true. In fact, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem Witch Trials to the Korean War (and there is some evidence it was even used this way during the Bush years), torture has been used primarily to coerce false confessions. In other words, you tortured people so that they would confess to heresy, or admit to committing atrocities on behalf of “Western Imperialists”, not because you wanted to give up their military secrets.

Second, when Muslims around the world see the US abusing their brothers and sisters, it often creates anger and sometimes turns neutral people into haters, and haters into threats. I heard an interview with a journalist (sadly, I can’t remember his name) who had spoken with one of the Iraq insurgency’s top makers of the IED devices that have killed hundreds of American soldiers; the man had had no interest in fighting the Americans until he learned about the treatment of his fellow Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. It is possible that if there had been no Abu Ghraib torture, this man never would have made these bombs, and those soldiers would still be alive today.

Thankfully, it appears that Barack Obama has prohibited the continued use of torture on terrorism suspects. However, he does seem to be preventing any investigations into the past use of torture, prosecution of anyone found to have been involved in the illegal torture, and has actively prevented the release of photographs of alleged abuse of detainees. Torture is a war crime, and covering up for people who have committed war crimes is also a war crime. Maybe someone ought to tell the president that.