McCain on Torture's Practicality

[jenk]

In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear—whether it is true or false—if he believes it will relieve his suffering. I was once physically coerced to provide my enemies with the names of the members of my flight squadron, information that had little if any value to my enemies as actionable intelligence. [...] I gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse. It seems probable to me that the terrorists we interrogate under less than humane standards of treatment are also likely to resort to deceptive answers that are perhaps less provably false than that which I once offered.
- Senator John McCain, writing in Newsweek
-o-
"I will tell you nothing more than I have told you; no, not even if you tear the limbs from my body. And even if in my pain I did say something otherwise, I would always say afterward that it was the torture that spoke and not I."
[...] I had always supposed that torture brought out the truth - everybody supposed it; and when Joan came out with those simple common-sense words they seemed to flood the place with light.
- Joan of Arc and the narrator, from Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain.
-o-
"[Torture] in cases where the patient doesn't know the answer is always a fatal mistake. As men of humanity we should neither of us ... and then, if you do go on, the patient naturally does not recover ... and if you stop, even the experienced examiner is haunted by the fear that perhaps he did know after all. It is in every way unsatisfactory."
- Wither in That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis.

There are other (and some would argue better) reasons not to use torture. However. The fact that it's damn unreliable at doing its supposed job seems pretty good right there.