Robert Baer: The Pointless Scuffle Over Torture - It Doesn't Work!

[RamboLiberal]

The CIA is still torturing, according to the New York Times, and the Administration is still denying it. "The government does not torture," Bush said Friday.

So what do you call simulated drownings — waterboarding — and slapping and freezing, techniques that were approved in a 2005 secret Department of Justice legal opinion? If the Eighth Amendment prohibits American police from waterboarding suspects, common sense tells me it's illegal.

But legal or not, the important thing to remember is that torture doesn't work. When I was in the CIA I never came across a country that systematically tortures its citizens and at the same time produces useful intelligence. The objective of torture, invariably, is intimidation.

When Stalin asked the KGB to find out how to make an atomic bomb, the KGB didn't kidnap and torture American and British scientists. It recruited spies. And Stalin got his bomb.

The Israelis figured all of this out a long time ago. For the last three years I have been in and out of Israeli jails interviewing members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Many of them had been in suicide bomber cells — just the kind of people the Israelis would want to extract every last detail out of. None of them, however, claimed to have been tortured. The Israelis found out what they needed to know using traditional, legal police methods. It simply isn't worth it for them to risk damaging their already shaky international reputation by torturing suspects on the slim hope they just may get a lead.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1668971,00.html

[angstlessk]

1. cum'on...everyone knows if you are so deep into terrorism you know

where and when a giant bomb is going to go off..you will simply tell your torturers the farthest point FROM the bomb...and giggle while they all pile into their black SUV's to go searching out the bomber...give me a fricking break!!!