No Data Behind Torture

That's the conclusion of the government's own study into "coercive interrogation techniques" deployed by the Bush administration, and approved by president Bush and defense secretary Rumsfeld. There's no evidence it works, and considerable evidence that it is actually helping us lose the war on terror. Read the full Intelligence Science Board report (PDF) here. Money quote:

"There is little systematic knowledge available to tell us 'what works' in interrogation," wrote Robert Coulam, a research professor at the Simmons School for Health Studies in Boston. Coulam also wrote that interrogation practices that offend ethical concerns and "skirt the rule of law" may be narrowly useful, if at all, because such practices could undermine the legitimacy of government action and support for the fight against terrorism...

The new study finds that there may be no value to coercive techniques.

"The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information," wrote Col. Steven M. Kleinman, who has served as the Pentagon's senior intelligence officer for special survival training.

Kleinman wrote that intelligence gathered with coercion is sometimes inaccurate or false, noting that isolation, a tactic U.S. officials have used regularly, causes "profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort" and can "significantly and negatively impact the ability of the source to recall information accurately."

But the point of torture is torture. Ask the president who authorized it.