Apparently, We Don't Yet Know if Torture "Worked"

We got famous all over the world as the big country that starts wars and tortures people. That's how well it worked.
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This was news to me. I thought we already knew how well it worked: we discovered, by torturing people, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and we had to invade right away!

Then, by torturing more people, many of whom we later discovered were not terrorists, we got them to give us the names of other people, who, it later turned out were also not terrorists, who we tortured into giving us other names, and a lot of them ended up in Guantanamo, and a lot in other prisons, and some, well, we don't know what the hell became of them. But we got famous all over the world as the big country that starts wars and tortures people. That's how well it worked.

But I now know that despite this solid record of success, the jury is still out on how well torture worked, because that's what I'm reading from sober, thoughtful journalists who write about the subject. Someone please tell me when we find out the answer, because I really, really want to know how well torture worked for us.

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