Torture Has a Long History … of Not Working

From the dingy dungeons of the Dark Ages to today's shadowy holding facilities, the use of torture as an interrogation tactic has evolved little and possibly yielded even less, in terms of intelligence.

As a rule, torture is not an effective method of extracting information from prisoners, most experts agree.

"Torture during interrogations rarely yields better information than traditional human intelligence, partly because no one has figured out a precise, reliable way to break human beings or any adequate method to evaluate whether what prisoners say when they do talk is true," - Darius Rejali, a political scientist at Reed College in Oregon