A former FBI man who interrogated an al Qaeda leader said Wednesday extreme techniques used by the Bush administration were "ineffective, slow and unreliable" and caused the prisoner to stop talking.
Ex-FBI Interrogator: Torture "Ineffective" - CBS News
Moreover, Zimbardo told LiveScience that torture is not an effective way to gather intelligence. Compared with police settings, in which detectives build social rapport and often get confessions without physical force, secret interrogation squads can alienate prisoners and elicit unreliable information, he said.
(For example, a Libyan detainee linked to al-Qaida falsely revealed under torture that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — a key reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Allen said.)
Study: U.S. Torture Techniques Unethical, Ineffective | LiveScience
But it's also true that "realists," whether liberal or conservative, have a tendency to accept, all too eagerly, fictitious accounts of effective torture carried out by someone else.
By contrast, it is easy to find experienced U.S. officers who argue precisely the opposite. Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was "not nice," he says. "But we did not physically abuse them."
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Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."
The Torture Myth (washingtonpost.com)
After a contentious closed-door vote, theSenate intelligence committee approved a long-awaitedreportThursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by theCIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.
The 6,000-page document, which was not released to the public, was adopted by Democrats over the objections of most of the committee’s Republicans. The outcome reflects the level of partisan friction that continues to surround theCIA’s use of waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques four years after they were banned.
Report finds harsh CIA interrogations ineffective - Washington Post
Like I said, there are better sources in your library. Torture isn't new and has been well studied.
