Then here, read this:
It is unclear from unclassified reports whether the information gained was critical in foiling actual plots. Mohammed later told outside interviewers that he was "forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop" and that he "wasted a lot of their time [with] several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.," according to the Red Cross, whose officials interviewed Mohammed and other detainees after they were transferred to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006.
The reference is to 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom the CIA waterboarded 183 times in a month. But of course you can’t trust the liberal Red Cross, right? It’s not like any Americans who were tortured would ever give up the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive linemen when asked for names of his squadron mates or anything like that.
Oh, and one more thing. If you want to say waterboarding works, then you should be screaming at the CIA under Porter Goss for stopping it, since the CIA officially renounced waterboarding as an interrogation technique sometime after 2005, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s torture timeline. You can’t say that Obama’s disclosures of the technique — not that he made any, since the CIA has acknowledged waterboarding for years — preclude the CIA from an interrogation option (shudder) that it stopped seeking.



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Every time you write about torture it is important to point out that it has nothing to do with interrogation. That’s just the smoke screen, and we shouldn’t ever legitimize it, even unintentionally. Torture has two purposes: to brutalize and terrorize individuals in order to subjugate populations, and to extract false confessions which can be used for propaganda. Any time we mention torture in connection with interrogation we are reinforcing their smokescreen unless we specifically repudiate the underlying lie.
Your logic is absolutely right. If they say torture (waterboarding) works, then why did they stop using it? Why didn’t they use it on all detainees?
Even a janitor may have heard something important when he was cleaning the john and some big wigs came in.