How effective is torture in gathering information? Under what circumstances, if any, should the United States use it?
Well, first of all, torture is extraordinarily effective in gathering information, and anybody who tells you that it’s not is just lying through his teeth. That doesn’t mean that it always or often works, but it does sometimes work and there’s just no dispute about that. There is absolutely the widest range of evidence supporting that conclusion. I wish it weren’t so, but it’s true. During World War II the Nazis managed to get everything they needed from the French Resistance, including the names of brothers, parents, loved ones and children. You can get information from torture that you can’t get in any other way. Anybody who denies that is desecrating the memory of hundreds of people who died under torture and gave information. It’s one of these myths that torture never works and therefore we don’t have to even consider the issue. In my view torture works and we should never use it. We have to understand that we are sacrificing very important information in the name of perhaps a more
