http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20071019/sc_livescience/torturehasalonghistoryofnotworkingHeather Whipps
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Fri Oct 19, 1:20 PM ET
From the dingy dungeons of the Dark Ages to today's shadowy holding facilities, the use of torture as an interrogation tactic has evolved little and possibly yielded even less, in terms of intelligence.
Inflicting pain to get information is a practice with deep roots as well as modern relevance, in light of the recent statements by President George W. Bush claiming the U.S. government does not use torture on political prisoners, despite some evidence to the contrary.
But aside from the moral and legal implications, does torture ever produce reliable intelligence?
"That's the impossible question," said Darius Rejali, a political scientist at Reed College in Oregon.
As a rule, torture is not an effective method of extracting information from prisoners, most experts agree.
"If anything useful came out these interrogations in Iraq, we would have heard about it," said Alfred McCoy, a University of Wisconsin-Madison historian and author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror" (Holt Paperbacks, 2006).
A history of violence
The question of torture has become more controversial of late due to a report in The New York Times on memos issued by the U.S. Justice Department in 2005, effectively authorizing intelligence agencies to use interrogation methods defined as torture under international law.
Psychological techniques such as the water-boarding and sleep deprivation that American operatives are suspected of using recently have a history going back to behavior experiments from the 1950s, McCoy said.
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This isn't about extracting information that they "need." This is about having control over others.
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