Ramesh, I don’t really think it’s different in kind (in degree, yes, but not in kind) from other methods of squeezing someone for information. Accomplices, for example, are offered lenient plea deals, and some other informants are offered money, to provide intelligence that will result in the apprehension of other crooks. Since the extent of the benefit hinges on the information’s usefulness, there is a powerful incentive (as there is with torture) to tell the interrogator what he wants to hear — i.e., to make up incriminating stories. Juries (and common sense) reject this argument in the real world because it is too facile. The interrogee does not always know what his questioner wants to hear; even when he does, it is usually a simple matter to investigate his claims and either corroborate them or prove them false. Bottom line: an incentive to make up stories, even a powerful one, does not necessarily mean a person will make up stories. Sometimes they do, often they don’t.

What makes me nuts about McCain’s arguments is that there is a perfectly reasonable anti-torture position — which is one of the positions he sometimes takes (and took in the op-ed I cited in the previous post). I don’t happen to agree with it, but it may well be the best way to minimize coercive tactics. It holds that we should maintain a categorical ban against torture/coercion because if we legalize it, even narrowly, government always pushes the envelope so we will get more torture than we thought we were reluctantly allowing. To minimize torture, so the argument goes, it would be better to ban coercive practices outright but expect, in a true emergency, that interrogators will ignore the ban and do what they have to do to get the information.

Someone of McCain’s giant stature on this issue could take that position in a principled way without all the nonsense about how coercion is never necessary, coercion never works, and our treatment of prisoners somehow affects how al Qaeda treats its captives – all of which he must know is nonsense. By doing that, he would do a great deal to undercut the scurrilous claim that anyone who acknowledges coercion may sometimes be appropriate is perforce in favor of green-lighting torture.