by ROBERT DE NEUFVILLE
Torture doesn’t work. There has never been much reason to believe that it does. Now Reuters reports that a three-year investigation by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence committee confirms what we already knew: there’s little evidence that our so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques produced any key intelligence.
The CIA appears never to have seriously studied whether torture works. But we have known for a while that the vital intelligence we obtained from prisoners—including the intelligence that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden—was primarily obtained through ordinary, non-abusive interrogations. September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, apparently talked only months after we stopped torturing him. The CIA agent who told ABC that torture got Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah to provide useful intelligence later admitted that he had no firsthand knowledge of what actually happened at the interrogation. And of course the main reason evidence is obtained under torture is not admissible in court is that it is widely considered to be unreliable.
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