One of the more admirable category errors of American politics is to confuse the moral imperative or import of a policy decision with its practical effects. It is a good thing that despite three decades of effort to the contrary, abortion policy is still freighted with moral concerns; that war is not simply the health of the State, but raises questions of collateral damages; and that the social safety net’s effects, good and ill, on the moral health of the citizenry are living aspects of our policy discussions.

Merely because it is admirable, however, does not mean that it is always right. A case in point is the so-called “torture” debate, which all too often betrays the advocate’s moral preference in his opening statement, which is either “torture works,” or “torture doesn’t work.” (Much of the current debate involves waterboarding, which anyone with any familiarity with real torture would recognize is torture like I’m an NFL offensive lineman, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume waterboarding is indeed a kind of torture.) Former Vice President Dick Cheney is engaged in a campaign to show that his administration’s use of “torture” to extract useful, necessary information was not only successful, but appropriate. Ben Smith of the Politico — whose primary use is to provide a thermometer for current left-liberal whines — is peeved with the Washington Post for running a feature that, horror of horrors, suggests that Mr. Cheney is correct.

Let me put my moral perspective out there at the start of this: My faith teaches, as an infallible principle, that torture is always wrong. It degrades both the person torturing and the one tortured. It is gravely offensive, and is a mortal sin. Unlike Senators from Massachusetts, I understand that if I cannot profess that faith, I must take another. I can and I do. I can therefore say with no doubt that torture is always wrong, and is a grave sin, that places one’s soul in jeopardy of Hell. That is true for everyone, whether they believe it to be or not. I cannot say that if the difference between my family’s life and death was torturing another man, I would not do so. I recognize there would be a cost to it.

I tell you this because the truth is that torture works, for a certain value of “works.” Whenever you read about how torture is awful and ineffective, you’ll see something about how the tortured will say anything to make the pain stop, and that’s why confessions obtained by torture are useless. (As a side note, that assumes that you care whether the confession is true or not. If you don’t, it’s a great way to get confessions.)

But this is to confuse the point terribly, and is honestly usually done out of ignorance or bad faith. Human experience — in the last century alone, I count eight regimes (the British, the French, the Soviets, the Imperial Japanese, the Nazis, the People’s Republic of China, the North Koreans, and the North Vietnamese) that fit the bill — teaches us that torture is a highly effective way of extracting information from the tortured.

John McCain, for example, though a horrible Presidential candidate, has spoken movingly of how he — a brave, decent, patriotic man — gave up more than he wanted and more than required when broken by torture. (I note that Senator McCain’s story has changed somewhat in the telling over time, which I take not to be a sign of dishonesty, but rather of a man coming to grips with trauma the likes of which most of us can’t even visualize.) While most modern American journalists probably have no idea why Camus was writing about Algeria, France carries the legacy of its actions, including its highly effective use of techniques that make waterboarding look like being tickled with feathers, to this day. In fact, we learned waterboarding from the North Koreans and Chinese, who were quite adept at extracting useful information through pain. The Soviets, Nazis, Japanese, and Brits all believed the exigencies of World War II were great enough to justify the use of torture on prisoners (especially, in the case of Great Britain, if we expand torture to include lesser things like waterboarding), and the first two happily employed the practice in day-to-day intelligence, counterintelligence, and police work.

The statement that torture doesn’t work is simply at odds with centuries of human experience. It is like those people who insist, as my friend Dan McLaughlin has said, that Derek Jeter is a great defensive shortstop: “Statistical analysts regard the debate over Jeter’s glove not as a debate among analysts but a debate between analysts and people who simply refuse to look at the evidence.” The Washington Post’s piece on Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, and the recently released CIA memos, are merely grist for the mill.

On the other side of this debate, however, is the categorical assertion that “torture works.” This is only mostly true, and is the real reason why America does not condone real torture: You have to be willing to keep going.

Torture is an information vector. Our Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school (SERE) historically taught those service members who passed through it that under torture, you will talk, and you will tell your torturer what you know. This was not in fact a decades-long quest to prepare the armed services to bend to the will of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, but a reflection of American experience in war (where we observe the Geneva Conventions, and our enemies do not). The goal was to prepare the men and women who passed through the schools for the inevitable moment when they broke, so that they would retain the sense of dignity and self-worth needed to survive and escape; if they know they’ll break, they’re less likely to commit suicide over breaking.

The problem with the image of torture we see on TV — where someone holds out indefinitely against all odds, or simply breaks and begins sharing — is that it is stupid. No information vector is perfect. One cross-checks against other sources of information. Satellite imagery is checked against human intelligence on the ground. Information gleaned through torture is checked against known truths. This is true for any method of information extraction.

When you torture someone, or befriend him, or threaten his family, or give him a cigarette, you are not making him a perfect conduit for information. Instead, you are making him a conduit for signal and noise. Befriended targets slip lies in with the truth, because only in movies does true love bloom between the beautiful (but kindhearted!) interrogator and the handsome (but vulnerable!) detainee. Tortured detainees share everything and anything they know, which means you get a great deal of dross for the pure metal you’re getting. Men who lie when they are tortured will lie when they are not, and vice versa.

And so you must cross-check and be willing to torture again. A tortured target who lies must be punished with more pain until he’s willing to identify what’s true and what’s not. (A befriended one must be cross-checked again and again less directly.) Any source of information requires man-hours spent and, frankly, wasted. You can’t befriend your target into sharing the location of the nuclear suitcase by giving him a bucket of the Colonel’s best, and you can’t torture him into it with any certainty in ten minutes.

These are not groundbreaking assertions. They are the wisdom of centuries of human experience. Men have tried everything imaginable to get more information from other men, and have found that nothing is perfect, and very little is valueless.

Without understanding this dilemma — largely because the population does not torture and the commentariat is filled with historically obtuse men and women who think thumb screws and waterboarding (and opposition to legalized abortion!) are the outer limits of human depravity — our political discussion is skewed. We are left arguing about whether we “torture” as a matter of national policy, and whether torture “works.” This is like arguing about whether we nuke as a matter of national policy, and whether nuking works: We’ve done so, and it works, but only with enormous implications that we’re not willing to accept except in the darkest of days.

The subtle online humorist Conor Friedersdorf — whose delightful, gonzo schtick is that of a bewildered “conservative” with no conservative inclinations — made one of the best satirical expositions of this dilemma I’ve yet seen:

Though I cannot say definitively whether torture is or isn’t an effective utilitarian tool, I am mightily influenced [by] Jim Manzi’s observation that “we keep beating” torturing nations. “The regimes in the modern world that have used systematic torture and directly threatened the survival of the United States—Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union—have been annihilated, while we are the world’s leading nation,” he writes. “The list of other torturing nations… has won no competition worth winning. The classically liberal nations of Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific that led the move away from systematic government-sponsored torture are the world’s winners.”

Friedersdorf is satirizing the entire debate — not only those so historically dense as to think we “beat” Nazi Germany without the aid of the torturing Soviet Union, or that our defeat of the Soviet Union was in some sort of military conflict, or that China, North Vietnam, and North Korea are historical footnotes — but by a subtle twist, those who pretend that America is uniquely willing, among the West, to apply isolated bouts of pain to achieve limited ends, thereby excising British and French amoral steel in conflict.

In a rare moment of obliviousness, Friedersdorf misses the real problem here: Because of this inability to discuss the truth about torture in any meaningful way, the partisan warfare in which we have been engaged for my entire lifetime has found a new channel to course. Ordinary, milquetoast politicians find themselves incapable of acting like adults when the topic arises.

Thus, Attorney General Eric Holder is renewing a criminal probe of CIA officers accused of torture that was shut down last year by career prosecutors, which is to say, nominally non-partisan actors. Necessarily, this was President Obama’s decision by act or omission, because DoJ is an Executive department (any talk of prosecutorial independence is laughable for anyone who knows anything about DoJ). Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former United States Attorney, has been so taken with partisanship that he is accusing John Yoo of malpractice for failing to cite irrelevant cases, and suggesting that Washington, D.C. is in the Fifth Circuit.

A few months ago, at this point, it would have been trendy to say something along the lines of “we have too many important things going on to allow this to devolve into partisanship,” or words to that effect, and then explaining why it was a good idea to allow the Obama Administration to do whatever it wanted. This is to treat partisanship as a disease rather than as a useful way to highlight policy differences for Americans so we don’t have to pay too much attention to politics. The clash of parties and inclinations and ideologies and policies and programs is vital to a healthy Republic, if ultimately fatal to any kind of democracy.

The problem is that we are treating a series of vitally important questions and turning them into a live-action version of The West Wing. On matters that literally involve life and death, our political class is more concerned with one-upmanship.

We should not care that this distracts President Obama from his domestic agenda, or makes his wavering over Afghanistan more agonized, or whatever the concern of the day might be. We should encourage that result, because he campaigned on openness in government, and on the implicit assumption that his predecessor erred badly. We should demand the release of every last memorandum and paper on the extent, nature, and effectiveness of the former Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques, because America is not the Vatican, and the American people are entitled to know not only what was done, but whether it was effective.

We are entitled to facts, and truth, and to gauge how we balance those acts and those results against the alternatives. If that embarrasses the Republican or Democratic Parties, so be it. The alternative is a politicized war over every last foreign policy action, and the last time we tried that gambit, it ended with smoking craters in the Northeastern United States.

Christopher Badeaux is a Senior Editor of The New Ledger.