I twitter

Hey, dear Real History afficianados. I wanted to tell you that I do Twitter, occasionally. I expect to do that a little more, mostly because it's a quick, fast way to share a link or two that isn't worthy of a blog entry.

If you want to 'follow' my 'tweets' you can go to www.Twitter.com and look me up. I'm there as lisapease.

I hope people caught Rachel Maddow tonight on MSNBC. She quoted testimony showing that the "ticking time bomb" scenario really never works, in reality.

As she also pointed out, torture doesn't work because most people committed to terrorism are going to just wait it out if an attack is impending.

While I have enjoyed numerous seasons of the show 24, I believe it has done incredible damage in causing people to believe torture really works, when the record shows the direct opposite. In most cases, first, you can't know that the victim of torture really has the goods to confess. And if they do, will you know the truth if they tell it? Or will you torture them further, believing it to be a lie? Or will they just say anything? In the end, torture simply isn't effective.

But it's a shame that the debate centers around that.

I wish the debate was about who we are as a country, and, frankly, as a species. Since when is torture acceptable on any level? If we get to that point, we've taken a wrong turn long ago.

Why do you think terrorists attack us? Because of serious, prolonged actions by our country. If we want to be safe from terrorism, a better international policy will be far more successful than torture. And guess what? It has a preventative effect. Torture has the opposite effect. It just makes us more reviled around the world, not less.

We don't want people to fear us. People will work to overcome what they fear.

We want people to love us. And that means behaving very, very differently on the world stage.

I hope we're up to the task.