How does our government justify its use of torture?
One of the reasons Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in his confirmation hearing last October, didn't want to say that waterboarding is torture is that the president's Office of Legal Counsel defined torture as both intense and sustained over a long period of time. Part of the legal justification for waterboarding is that it may be intense, but it's not sustained over a long period of time.

If Mukasey were to admit that waterboarding is torture, then it would call into question other techniques that have been approved, such as hypothermia and stress positions.

A famous memo by White House Counsel John Yoo in 2002 defined torture as inflicting pain equal to organ failure, which is so extreme that it allows all kinds of things. The Justice Department withdrew that in 2004 but then issued secret memos under Alberto Gonzales in 2005 that basically reopened the door.

Any time there is an attempt to outlaw torture, such as John McCain's anti-torture legislation that passed in 2006, it is undermined. When he signed McCain's bill into law, President Bush issued a signing statement that basically said, "But we can do it if we want to." As recently as March the president vetoed legislation outlawing the use of waterboarding by the CIA.

Is our use of torture something new?
It's new with regard to the legal justification. But the United States has been involved with torture for decades, at least through proxies.

In 1996 interrogation manuals from the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia came to light, and they clearly showed that the United States had been teaching Latin American military and police officers torture techniques for decades. This charge had been raised for many years, and the Pentagon finally had to admit it. But it was swept under the rug very quickly.

But there is other documentation of CIA involvement in Latin America. A CIA officer named Dan Mitrione conducted torture classes using homeless people as subjects for the Brazilian military regime, which took over in 1964. The Brazilians later had a role in instructing the Chilean military regime that took over in 1973 under General Augusto Pinochet.

There was also Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, which was fairly well documented in congressional investigations. At least 40,000 people were killed in detention centers by the South Vietnamese police, and many more were tortured. It's fairly clear that this was all done with the cooperation of the CIA.

That's one of the ironies about John McCain's opposition to torture. He says that when he was being held in Hanoi, one of the things that kept him going was the assurance that the United States would not do this to its enemies, that we're different and better than other countries. Of course, Operation Phoenix was going on while he was being held.

So is the United States for torture or against it?
There's this American exceptionalism on both sides of the issue. On the one hand we say, "We are America. We don't torture and we shouldn't." We're an exceptional country, a beacon of freedom and truth.

On the other hand the same logic is used for explaining why we need to torture. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appealed to the unprecedented nature of the United States' role in this dangerous world. Of all of the nations, he claimed, we can be trusted to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" for everyone's benefit. So you have a dual argument going on: Because we're America, we don't torture, but because we're America, we must.

Ironically, there's also the adoption of the mantle of righteousness by the torturers. Torturers justify what they're doing by seeing their actions as a righteous sacrifice of their own principles for the greater good. The secret police in Chile during the Pinochet regime had an internal motto: "We will fight in the shadows so that our children can live in the sunlight."

What is the purpose of torture?
The biggest misconception about torture is that it has to do with information gathering. The classical debate about torture is whether it's OK if there's a terrorist who knows where the "ticking bomb" is. As far as I know, there's never actually been a case like that, and I've been studying torture for years.

I have interviewed torturers, people who were tortured, and psychologists in Chile and elsewhere, and they emphasize that information is seldom really at stake. Victims report that when they would finally relinquish a piece of information-their brother's political preference or whatever-the torturers would say, "We already knew."

One man said if the torturers wanted you to admit that you had seen José de San Martín, the 19th-century Argentine general and liberator of South America, on horseback the previous day, you would say it. You'd say anything.

Even now people in the CIA admit that we haven't really gained any actionable intelligence from torture. The Schlessinger Report after Abu Ghraib found that the people tortured there were not even intelligence targets. No information was being sought.

I'm not trying to deny that there was ever a case where serviceable intelligence was gained by means of torture. But the cases are few.

Then why do people do it?
There's a way in which torture creates the kind of enemies we need to imagine. In the Abu Ghraib photos, you see people dragged around on leashes, attacked by dogs, put in sexually humiliating positions, and made to howl. These images create the kind of deviant subhumans that we imagine terrorists to be.

Torture has a way of creating this unbridgeable gulf between "us" and "them." Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman once said, "If we felt their pain, we couldn't go on living." So we pretend it's not happening. We say they must have done something to deserve it.