holiday reading

I got Torture and Democracy for Christmas. Finished it last month. Really extraordinary. It explains why waterboarding is not simulated drowning and how so-called clean tortures do all sorts of damage. Plus it clears up misconceptions both from the right on the efficacy of torture and from the left about the U.S. dissemination of torture. One favorite anecdote was from a British officer in the thirties talking about how lazy torturers are. How they'd rather sit in the shade and torture someone for any information rather than go out in the hot sun and do the difficult work of police investigation. The other awesome point is that the so-called intelligence gathered from torture victims is never or rarely corroborated by the torturers themselves but rather by some other department who then round up more people who give more information which is investigated again by different people. The end result is that the torturers never know what is reliable and what isn't. He also takes on myths like the Battle of Algiers, in which the French successfully broke the Algerian resistance for a time supposedly with the aid of torture. But he explains the difference between that and Iraq: 1. There was a French population there that was totally loyal to the French occupying army; and 2. there was a systematic lockdown of the medinas and infiltration through informers of the resistance. It's a tome but a great read.