Torture and the unimportance of outcomes

It shouldn't surprise me by now, but it does, that outcomes have so little bearing on policy. Crucial policy decisions are made for reasons ranging from media attention to ideology or the vested interests of campaign donors, but results hardly seem to feature. The decision makers go ahead anyway. You might think that ethically questionable policies are subject to more scrutiny than routine budgetary appropriations, but you'd be wrong:

President Bush has ...promised to veto a bill that would bar the CIA from using techniques such as sensory deprivation, water-boarding and temperature extremes, arguing they are needed to gain information that protects the public from terrorists. Such an 'end justifies the means' argument might sound persuasive to some, but it is worthless unless such techniques actually work. A report on this subject was released [in 2007] by the Intelligence Science Board.... The message it repeated over and over was that there is virtually no evidence to show the effectiveness of any of the interrogation techniques used by the US. The authors expressed 'surprise and concern over the lack of rigorous scientific examination....' (my emphasis) Modern barbarity, 'New Scientist', 23 February

This is policy as the rationalisation of what people feel like doing, and it's no basis for an efficient bureaucracy, still less an ethical one. I shouldn't be surprised of course. I have quoted before from Why states believe foolish ideas by Steven van Evera:

[G]overnment bureaucracies non-self-evaluate. At a minimum, agencies with evaluative responsibilities are not invited to evaluate - they are kept out of the loop, their opinions unsought. At a maximum, government agencies actively suppress their own internal evaluative units and are discouraged from evaluating the beliefs and policies of other agencies.

Whatever you might think about Social Policy Bonds, it's surely time to look at subordinating policy to transparent, meaningful outcomes, rather than continuing to have critical decisions made for us on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.