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Waterboarding Update
Torture apologists are fond of telling us that "only" three 
prisoners have ever been waterboarded. Two of those three were Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Today, documents released in response to an ACLU lawsuit shed some new light on both of them:
An al-Qaeda associate captured by the CIA and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques said his jailers later told him they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization's hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden, according to newly released excerpts from a 2007 hearing.
"They told me, 'Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,' " said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
....Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times [...] said he lied in response to questions about bin Laden's location.
"Where is he? I don't know," Mohammed said. "Then he torture me. Then I said yes, he is in this area."
I'm exaggerating when I say that this is really "new" information, but it is more extensive information than we've had before. And it's not exactly a great advertisement for either the efficacy or the morality of waterboarding. Adam Serwer has more here.
I really don't think the
I really don't think the "efficacy" of torture should even be in question from a logical standpoint. There is a cognitive disconnect between the usually-twinned statements that torture is extremely effective in eliciting confessions, even false ones, but is somehow ineffective at extracting information. If you can torture someone into confessing to anything you want them to, you can torture them into babbling everything they know about whatever it is you want to know. The catch, of course, is having someone captive who actually knows what you want to know. Mohammed is undoubtedly engaging in a bit of bravado when he says that he "lied" -- of course he did, but only because he didn't know where Bin Laden was, and then he made up whatever he could to get off the damn board. And it should go without saying that Abu Zubaida's inquisitors got nothing useful out of him, given that he wasn't even who they thought he was within Al-Qaeda.
The immorality of torture isn't affected by this, but I am very tired of reading about the supposed ineffectiveness of torture. Our own troops are trained to basically go ahead and spill whatever they know if they are captured, on the assumption that the enemy will just torture it out of them eventually anyway. Smart armies just make sure that no one likely to be captured knows anything that useful, or if they do, they change plans and/or tactics once they've been compromised. Al-Qaeda isn't all that smart, but they undoubtedly did the same thing. It's Counterintelligence 101. Mohammed may once have known where Bin Laden was, but by the time the CIA (or whoever) tortured it out of him, his information was out of date and/or useless.
The myth that doesn't want to die
Ok, lets give in to your suggestion, leave aside all moral aspects of torture and only look at the 'efficacy' side of it. Your apparently so straightforward argument about the 'cognitive disconnect' between accepting the efficacy of torture when pressing for confessions and versus the inefficacy when trying to extract information is missing an important point.
The guys torturing somebody to get a confession out of that person know what they want, respectively they are in a position to decide that what they have obtained is sufficient for the purpose they want it for.
Contrary to the 24 fantasy, the guys torturing somebody to extract actual information rarely know what they are looking for, apart form a general outline of it. And they usually don't have means to judge a piece of information they have obtain as valid other than through confirming it by other means.
Persons being tortured may 'babble everything they know', but that is not all they will 'spill'. If you haven't closed your eyes and ears to what people who actually have been tortured have to say about that experience, then you will have learned that what drives a torture victim first and foremost is the attempt 'to make it stop'. And to make it stop they will say whatever they think it takes, whatever they believe the torturer wants to hear.
As a consequence, there will be nuggets of real information in the 'babble' as well as fanciful inventions to a specific question that originate from the victims desperate desire to come up with an answer that will 'make it stop'.
If you really think that torture is an efficient means to extract useful information, could you try to explain to me why the CIA felt compelled to waterboard KSM 183 times? I would suggest that was because they had no problem to get confessions out of him, but the information he 'babbled' after being waterboarded was mostly useless. More specifically, I suspect KSM easily enough confessed to a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein when they tortured him, but when he was pressed for information to support that link, what he 'babbled' all turned out to be rubbish upon attempts to confirm it.
The number 183 most likely is nothing other than a sign of how desperately Dick Cheney wanted that Al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein link to be proven, rather than any evidence that the CIA was getting much useful information. And after having waterboarded KSM 183 times, the futility of it probably became just too obvious to deny it any further.
And I'll speculate a step further. The reason why the torture tapes were destroyed was not only to prevent documentation of illegal torture getting out, but also to quash evidence that most of the information that was being obtained by it was utterly useless.
Why so combative, SRW? My
Why so combative, SRW? My original post had nothing in it that you seem to disagree with. Yes, torture has the same problems as sodium pentothal, namely that one must separate wheat from chaff. And of course, the CIA being what it always is, and the Bush administration being what it was, nobody involved was going to be competent enough to do that. But the inefficacy of torture has nothing to do with the technique per se; it has everything to do with the motives and the "professional competence", if we can throw away all moral compass and call it that, of the people involved. As disgusting as the practice may be, torture works. It didn't in the examples described here, because (1) in one case, they had the wrong guy; (2) in the other, the guy they had didn't know what they wanted him to know; (3) they were all incompetent boobs to begin with -- they were after "confessions" (of the Al Qaeda-Iraq link, mostly) as much as they were after information. One could argue that any authority that resorts to torture is at least somewhat incompetent to begin with, but that's a different issue.
I doubt that much thought was put into destroying tapes of torture. These things are almost always done with one motive in mind: to prevent further embarassment for those in power.
"Then he torture me"
Well, sure, this terrorist says he was tortured, but maybe he's not telling the truth now. We need some technique for interrogating him to find out the real truth. Maybe if we pour water down his nose. . . .
Just what we new beforehand
The whole point of teaching our military service personnel about these techniques was to inform them of techniques used by our enemies to extract false confessions.
The people our government used these techniques on provided false information.
Only idiots would have expected something different.
torture
The sickening extent of the torture will be released soon, because the old guard way of handling this is exactly the problem, and allows the sickness to fester, the rot to contaminate our name.
You are right, but of course
You are right, but of course McCain will never leave--it's his idea of Hotel California or maybe a Roach Motel.