"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions." Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself."
Once I stumbled across a forum where somebody (possibly more than one bodies) were arguing that torture obviously works because we haven't given it up yet. Since people have been using it since the before recorded history, their reasoning went, that obviously showed that it was effective--otherwise we would have stopped using it. Which is true, to some degree--torture is very effective at what it does. What they apparently failed to understand, though, is that what torture does is force people to say what we want them to say, not give us good intelligence:
the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.
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