enabling our president and Attorney General to close their eyes to its use, while being able to
deny it categorically - - the kind of willful blindness condemned by the courts in other contexts.
With no limitations, standards, principles, or accountability the use of such techniques will
continue to expand.
These are the issues I addressed in my book Why Terrorism Works. These are the issues
about which I have tried to begin a reasonable debate in the United States, as I had previously
done in Israel. But unlike in Israel, where the debate did take place, in our country its terms were
often distorted into a traditional discussion of the pros and cons of torture. Perhaps the most
extreme example of this distortion took place at a conference held at John Jay College in New
York, to which I was invited to deliver a keynote address about my proposal. The conference
began with an emotional speech - - replete with candles - - delivered by a victim of torture who
described how innocent people are tortured to death by brutal regimes around the world. The
intended message of this introduction was that torture of the kind experienced by the speaker is
bad - - as if that were a controversial proposition. It was calculated to make it difficult, if not
impossible, to conduct a rational discussion about ways of limiting and regulating the use of nonlethal
torture in the context of terrorism prevention. Anyone who expressed any skepticism
about simply reiterating a total ban on all torture was seen as the enemy of civilized human
rights, even though the total “ban” now in effect has been a license for hypocrisy and pervasive
torture with deniability.
Instead of engaging me in a nuanced debate about accountability and choice of evils,
critics of my proposal have accused me of “circumventing constitutional prohibitions on
torture,”5
giving “thumbs up to torture,” “proposing torture for captured terrorist leaders,”6