During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, in How a Detainee Became An Asset - washingtonpost.com
I recommend reading the whole article instead of simply this out of context quote. It gets to the heart of how effective torture was (and still doesn’t answer the question.) Here’s what happened:
- KSM wasn’t cooperative. He gave bad, limited, or deliberately outdated information.
- We tortured him. During the torture, he gave a lot of information to get the torture to stop. Much of that was entirely made up and we wasted a lot of resources tracking it down.
- We stopped torturing him. He became Professor Terrorist, virtually lecturing on everything we had wanted to know.
This leaves a few questions unanswered. Was he lecturing from fear of torture, something like Stockholm Syndrome, or some kind of change of heart? Was the torture relevant to this change of heart? Was whatever followed the torture more effective? Could some other method have worked just as well? If the torture actually yielded the desired results, will the consequences of being a country that tortures prisoners outweigh any benefit? And, of course, even if torture proves to be advantageous, is it still wrong?
(via squashed)