I finally got around to reading the most recent New York Times article about torture. The Times really ought to consider raising its hiring standards.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.

This doesn't pass the smell test, and the reporter should know it. The CIA doesn't have a spotless record, but every once in a while it does capture a mole. How does the Agency determine that one of its employees is passing on secrets to another government? One technique is interrogation.

Also, we are supposed too believe that while US military training includes a course on resisting interrogation -- with the mock interrogations based on former Soviet techniques -- and while many CIA agents are former military, the CIA never got around to working up an interrogation policy before 2002? And the CIA went straight to the Saudis instead of, say, the British or the Israelis? This reporter really needs to think things through before typing up a story.

The list of interrogation techniques the Times wrings its hand over is made of "slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding. ... 'We were getting asked about combinations — "Can we do this and this at the same time?"'"

Yes, slaps to the head, and hours of rock music. That's uncomfortable, sure, but does it qualify as torture? Or would it make for a decent challenge on a "reality TV show" like Survivor? What if they're combined? "It was cold, and then he slapped my head! Those barbarians."

I'll admit I'm uncomfortable with the waterboarding accusation. However, I understand that the military routinely waterboards special forces trainees. Does the military torture its own people? Besides, it's also something I can see on a "reality TV show."

Likewise, US prisons often place solitary confinement cells strategically so that the temperature in the cell will be unusually hot or unusually cold. Is that torture? Do we torture our inmates? I don't think so.

The concept of these "aggressive interrogation" techniques is that the prisoner doesn't want to talk. The prisoner's will to be quiet can be measured. If you can make being quiet cost more than that amount, then the prisoner will talk. Would you jump into a pool filled with cockroaches? No? Would you do it for $1 million? How about $10 million? At some point, jumping in that pool becomes bearable in exchange for enough money.

Would you rat out your family to a foreign military? Probably not. But history has shown that your resolve to keep your family safe has a limit. At some point, nearly everybody decides that keeping quiet is no longer worth the effort. A captured terrorist doesn't want to talk. It's not a yes/no desire, but a desire that until the cost reaches X, he will not talk. So it seems that when other techniques (PDF) have been tried, we must either accept that we won't raise the cost higher, or we must raise the cost higher. At some point, decent humans will refuse to raise the cost (we don't want to use the rack on terrorist suspects); but we won't get any results if we aren't willing to raise the cost to a respectable level.