On Torture - Information Gathering or Anger and Revenge

I have been pondering what I want to say about this whole issue of torture for a while now. As more and more information becomes available about the plans and policies of the last administration it has become more and more clear that there was a serious effort to justify doing something that they thought could be illegal.

What would make them think they needed to justify it and turn it into non-torture?

Among other things- history. WE prosecuted war criminals for doing what we were now trying to justify. We knew from previous wars that torture does not generally produce true and reliable information. People under severe torture only give in to what their captors want them to say, not what they know to be true.

How did we know that? Because we saw what happened in the past when these techniques were used- our American POWs would either make false statements about the situation or say nothing. We knew that because the professional interrogators told us. We knew that because we were copying it from North Korea from 60 years ago.

In short we were copying what we condemned by others as torture. But when we wanted to do that, suddenly it is no longer torture. What we condemned as cruel and beyond even the standards of war suddenly becomes the answer to our national security.

Why doesn't this make any sense? Why does this sound like self-justification out of either
1) anger for revenge,
2) fear,
3) seeking false confessions for propaganda, or
4) just plain ignorance?

None of these is a good reason for torture. None of these will give us very much information that we can use to confront terrorists and stop them. The stuff we have been hearing so far from the previous administration about facts and information that helped don't jive with the actual dates they purport to verify.

As an American I want to scream like even one of the conservative commentators did:

But this is the United States!!!

We have values that cannot be compromised or we are no longer the United States we think we know. If we have given in to way that is counter to the morals of this nation, then the terrorists have won that battle. Have we in reality uncovered one of those dirty secrets of the human heart that, when something like 9/11 happens the darkest parts of who we are can take control? Have we discovered that we tortured- not for information since that wasn't promised- but out of anger and revenge, to get back at them, to express the depths of our reaction to what happened?

As a person of faith who follows Jesus, the only question I have to ask is simply

What would Jesus want us to do?