This was last night's news, but it bears repeating. When Dick Cheney or any other torture apologist tries to say that breaking the Geneva Convention helps procure good intelligence, they are lying. Recently released information from the White House adds to the overwhelming evidence that torture does not work, just ask one of the guys they tortured.
From ThinkProgress:
The Bush administration has long justified its use of torture by claiming that it obtained valuable information from torturing 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Late last year, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “Did it produce the desire results? I think it did.” He explained:
I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information.
But according to documents released by the Obama administration in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Cheney was lying. Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture:
“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA that concerned the location of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me,” Mohammed said. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’”
Interrogation experts have always maintained that torture does not work, and actually hinders an investigation because of false information being told to make the pain stop. The very fact that we are having this debate is bad enough, but at least the truth can come out that shows people like Dick Cheney, John Yoo, George Bush and the rest of them are full of it when it comes to fighting terrorism with torture.
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