Torture Still Doesn't Work

By Robert Fisk, The Independent UK
Posted on February 4, 2008, Printed on February 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/75875/

"Torture works," an American special forces major -- now, needless to say, a colonel -- boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses -- and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees -- has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned -- the "waterboarding" technique -- before they could be seen by US investigators?