Yesterday, the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the Bush administration’s use of torture

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) scoffed at what he called the “Oprah Winfrey methods” of interrogations built on long-established relationships

International lawyer Philippe Sands

replied by stating simply, “Coercion doesn’t work.”

The thinking in the British military and the thinking across the board politically — it’s really not a left right issue, it is a broad consensus in the United Kingdom — is that coercion doesn’t work. That the experience of the United Kingdom, which moved in the early 1970’s to use techniques that were very similar to those that were used on Detainee 063, putting stress positions, humiliation, and so on and so forth, didn’t not work. The view is taken in the United Kingdom that it extended the conflict with the IRA probably by between 15 and 20 years.