Via MaxSpeak, former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, in an essay published by the Washington Post, explains how torture destroys the intelligence services that use it, to the extent that even Stalin, that master of torture, could not control it once it became the modus operandi of the NKVD. Every Czar, he notes, abolished torture at the beginning of his reign, but every successor found it necessary to abolish it once again.

The use of torture internationally carries even greater liabilities in the long run:

If America's leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID [cruel, inhuman and degrading techniques], has historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to "legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn't stopped, torture will destroy your nation's important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

The article is not a pleasant one; Bukovsky describes in detail his treatment in captivity when he went on a hunger strike demanding a lawyer of his own, rather than the one the NKVD had appointed him. It is a grisly story of prison doctors force-feeding him through the nostrils.

We, fellow Americans, have a stake in this controversy. We elected a president in full knowledge of what went on at Abu Ghraib, naively assuming that the torture of Iraqis, many of them perfectly innocent, was the work of over-zealous underlings. Now that the torture memos of Gonzales and other lawyers in the executive branch have been revealed, we have no such excuse; the torture was approved and encouraged at the highest levels of the government, including President George W. Bush

By what political and psychological process have we come to the point that Congress is debating whether or not to prohibit torture by our security forces? As I mentioned before, the propaganda mill that is the mainstream media for years preached that torture was one of the things that distinguished us from the Soviet Union. In the '50s the family-friendly pages of the Readers Digest carried some of the most explicit, X-rated, descriptions of communist torture imaginable. The message was clear: governments that torture are evil. The Russians torture, therefore they are evil.

Now the United States Government tortures. Complete the syllogism. Welcome to the 21st Century.