Lies and Torture

Torture does work. Not that it necessarily extracts useful or true information. But it does reliably get the victim to say what you want him or her to say. This was important to the Spanish Inquisition, it was important to Stalin, and evidently, to George Bush and Dick Cheney. The SI wasn't that fussy about whether or not Jews really ate babies and worshipped the devil. The important thing was to extract a confession so that the Crown and Church could sieze their property and execute the wretches. Stalin had somewhat similar motivations.

George and Dick, it seems, had a slightly more complicated plan: they wanted a justification for their Iraq adventure. Atrios has tracked down the story.
A recent Times article pointed out that the methods for torture we used were taken adapted from tolitarian communist techniques valued not for their success in obtaining the truth but in their ability to obtain false confessions.

Apparently that wasn't really a bug, but a feature. The Times also recently pointed that even though the Bush administration was warned that one of the information sources, al Libi, was full of shit they kept on using his information to justify the war.

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