Torture Didn't Help--It Hindered Our Intelligence Gathering

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/581222/torture_didn%27t_help--it_hindered_our_intelligence_gathering/#paragraph3

For the gazillionth time, torture doesn't work. I know that people who like torture and enjoy making people suffer really, really want to believe it does so they don't have to deal with the fact that they may be soulless psychos, but it won't change the fact that it just ain't so:

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events -- even if true -- doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

"I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden," said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

More at the link --