Senate Found Torture Did Not Stop Plots

A Senate review found no relationship between information obtained through harsh interrogation and the stopping of terrorist plots.

Research on interrogation offers one explanation for why. It finds that torture creates stress that impairs recall in those under questioning, and frequently drives them to offer false information to get the pain to stop.

That pattern showed up inside the CIA's secret prison program after Sept. 11, 2001. Even as President George W. Bush, the American president at the time, publicly said, "The United States does not torture," agency officers were using methods including waterboarding, a technique that creates the sensation of drowning by pouring water over a cloth covering the mouth. Many staff members withdrew from the sessions, some in tears after seeing them, and a memo noted the interrogations had been left to the agency's worst people, producing mediocre or useless intelligence.

The practical failure was stark. The admitted planner of the Sept. 11 attacks was waterboarded hundreds of times until he supplied names for a pair of suspects. The CIA spent time hunting them down, only to learn the pair were uninvolved in al-Qaeda or terrorist activity.

When the Senate investigated, it went case by case through claims that torture had thwarted plots. It found that useful intelligence did come from prisoners, but not from torture. It came from separate tips or was material officials already possessed. The agency had never actually studied whether the techniques worked.

In the report's conclusion, it said, "The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees." Of the 119 men held in the secret sites, 21 remain at the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and only three have faced anything resembling a trial with evidence and a verdict.