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Severe interrogation techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and the exploitation of phobias aren’t just morally reprehensible, they’re based on bad science, destroying the very memories they’re supposed to recover.

“There is a vast literature on the effects of extreme stress on motivation, mood and memory, using both animals and humans,” writes Shane O’Mara, a stress researcher at Ireland’s Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. “These techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting memory and executive function.”

Some intelligence officials, from former Vice President Dick Cheney to current intelligence chief Dennis Blair, defend enhanced interrogation as an useful tool in pulling information from terrorists who refuse to talk. But many intelligence officers say that such information has little value, because people being tortured will say anything to make it stop.

A report published by the Intelligence Science Board in 2007 found that no research existed to support the use of enhanced interrogation. And O’Mara’s review, published Monday in Trends in Cognitive Science, describes a wealth of science that supports ending the practice.

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

The “ticking time bomb” argument has been used to justify torture in situations where the information it retrieves could immediately save lives. But it will be “difficult or impossible to determine during interrogation whether the information a suspect reveals is true,” writes O’Mara — and the bomb will continue to tick. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/15/AR2007
011501204.html]
There is a mountain of such evidence, and none that proves it does work. In the argument over waterboarding, those in favor of it happily gloss over these facts.

On top of which, there is McCain's own testimony that when he was tortured, he said whatever he could think of that would make it stop. Also, even RUMSFLED himself has admitted that waterboarding KSM did NOT lead to any useful information:

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The torture crowd has been hard at work the past 24 hours, doing its best to push the idea that it was the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohommed that led to the courier who eventually led U.S. intelligence to Osama bin Laden.

KSM didn't give up the courier, as confirmed by a New York Times report ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html). in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees—the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi—the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

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KSM was waterboarded 183 times and didn't give up the courier's name, the key bit of intelligence that located bin Laden (unless, as Armando jokes, those denials extracted from KSM and al-Libi were the key to figuring out this was the key guy).

Of course, if you want a real debunking, there's not a better source than one of the torture architects and apologists, one of the guys sitting in the room when the Bush administration principles choreographed torture, deciding which methods to use and how to combine various methods for maximum effect. One of the handful of those ghouls was Donald Rumsfeld, who says "harsh treatment" at CIA black sites didn't lead to bin Laden ( http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/05/02/163010/rumsfeld-bin-laden
-gitmo/). Cheney said today that “it wouldn’t be surprising” the intel came from Bush’s torture program. However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that the detainees that provided the information that led to bin Laden were subject to torture. And Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who presumably has some knowledge about what went on at Gitmo, threw some cold water on this theory:

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"The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding." ( http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/DonaldRumsfeld-gitmo-waterboarding-osa
mabinladen/2011/05/02/id/394820?s=al&promo_code=C30F-1)]
His statement should be the definitive one: torture didn't net bin Laden. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/03/972665/-Rumsfeld-confirms-Wat
erboarding-did-not-net-intelligence-that-led-to-bin-nbsp-Laden]
Most likely Rap won't like my source and will cry "lies!" That's okay; the same facts can be found any number of places, and I've provided links to the pertinent points.

Oh, and maybe this source will be more acceptable:

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Fox News Radio...RUMSFELD: NO WATERBOARDING LEADING TO COURIER; TIMELINE DOESN’T MATCH UP

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (pictured) was waterboarded 183 times, which would already signal it didn’t work. Information about the courier who led to finding bin Laden came much after the waterboarding of Mohammed took place.

…while the CIA may have learned the courier’s nickname earlier, they didn’t learn his true name until “four years ago”–so late 2006 at the earliest. And they didn’t learn where the courier operated until around 2009.

From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended.

Like Mohammed, his successor Abu Faraj al-Libi was harshly interrogated, but it is unlikely that it was that which led to actionable information.

With al-Libi, the connection between whatever torture he experienced and this intelligence is less clear (since he was first detained in 2005), but even with al-Libi, it appears clear he either never revealed the courier’s real name or only did so after he had been in custody for a year, and almost certainly until after he arrived in Gitmo.Details of timeline and more at http://radio.foxnews.com/2011/05/02/rumsfeld-no-waterboarding-leading-
to-courier-timeline-doesn%E2%80%99t-match-up/

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So next time we want to debate "enhanced interrogation" and waterboarding, it's remember IT DID NOT WORK AND IT DOES NOT WORK!

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.