Reporting on the Bush administration’s use of torture to extract confessions from terrorism suspects, Vanity Fair’s David Rose reminds us that in addition to the moral considerations, torture is not effective. For example: “The unreliability of intelligence acquired by torture was taken as a given in the early years of the C.I.A., whose 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual stated, ‘Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex “admissions” that take still longer to disprove.’”

Tortured Reasoning (by David Rose, Vanity Fair)