Breaking News: Torture is bad!

According to Bart Gellman's review of Ron Suskind's new book [1] the following things are true (hat tip to TPM [2]):

• Al-Qaedist Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002.
• Zubaydah's captors discovered he was mentally ill and charged with minor logistical matters, such as arranging travel for wives and children.
• The President was informed of that judgment by the CIA.
• Two weeks later, the President described Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."
• Later, Bush told George Tenet, "I said he was important. You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" and asked Tenet if "some of these harsh methods really work?"
• The methods -- torture -- were applied.
• Then, according to Gellman, "Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty."
• At which point, according to Suskind, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target."
  

This is the entire problem with a doctrine of torture (besides of course that it justifies others to dismiss torture conventions). The only scenario under which the Right claims justification is the so-called ticking-bomb – where there is an imminent attack somewhere and torture is the only way to garner information in a timely fashion.

I reject this argumentation on the grounds that any information produced under torture is unreliable and actually serves to waste time. Either the captured operative actually has pertinent knowledge, in which case they are likely zealous and will lie or die before giving it up. Or they have no direct knowledge in which case they will also lie in order to appease their captors. Either way, what we end up with is increasingly convuluded information making it far more difficult to suss out the accurate and functional intel.

[3]