In Case You Still Thought Torture Worked

Though I believe that the most important debate surrounding the US torture program is the moral one, the fact remains that torture simply doesn't work. The Scientific American reports today that yet another study has come out proving that torture is counterproductive to the acquisition of meaningful information.

To quote the Scientific American article:

Proponents claim that waterboarding's effective because prisoners will tell the truth to make the interrogation stop. But O’Mara says that’s not supported by scientific evidence. Harsh interrogation doesn’t motivate prisoners to tell the truth. It motivates them to talk. Because while they’re talking they’re not being waterboarded. But that doesn’t mean that what they say is true.

What’s more, prolonged extreme stress impairs memory retrieval. American Special Ops soldiers have been shown to have trouble recalling things they’d learned before being subjected to food- or sleep-deprivation as part of their training. That’s because stress hormones can compromise brain activity, especially in regions involved in memory.

The real bombshell here is that torture in not merely inneffective but that it actually impairs memory. Despite this and many, many, concurring studies, we still get lots of opinion makers leaving us such intellectual treatises as this beauty of an editorial. Remind me exactly why torture is worth the damage to our moral fiber and international reputation?

You can read the Scientific American article or listen to a podcast of it here.

UPDATE:

Rachel Maddow covers the story in the first half of this segment:

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