I don’t care whether torture works. It still isn’t worth it

Torture is wrong. You can tell it’s wrong easily, not by the way it makes you feel, or by the extent to which it does or doesn’t conform to ancient moral codes made up in deserts, but by the way that, when it happens, it screws stuff up.

When Barack Obama assumed office four years ago, shutting Guantánamo Bay was one of the first things he was going to do. A whole term later, there it is, utterly not closed, full of people who can’t have a fair trial because of past torture and can’t be sent home because of the risk of future torture. In Britain, meanwhile, torture stops us from deporting Abu Qatada and assorted nasties, makes us liable to pay millions to the likes of Binyam Mohammed, and makes governments want to introduce secret trials.

Torture breaks our system. It is a square peg that will not fit — no matter how hard a chap in a mask in a Moroccan shipping container hammers it — into our round holes. It is the grit in a liberal democracy’s eye.

Depressingly enough, people are talking about torture now not because of Obama’s failure or even torture itself, but because of Zero Dark Thirty, a film by Kathryn Bigelow in which folk get tortured for America before Osama bin Laden gets got. This is depressing, actually, from two wholly different directions, because Jack Bauer was merrily torturing people for America years ago and you’d think we could have done all this then. But maybe leftist opinion writers don’t like admitting they watch 24.

The criticism, anyway, is that Bigelow suggests that torture (in the state-sanctioned forms of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and locking people in small boxes) led directly to the assassination of Osama bin Laden.