re: #10 Killgore Trout

It sounds like a little bit of plausible deniability. They were happy to have the useful information but they can’t legally accept intelligence gathered through waterboarding. Of course there’s no way to be sure that the plots would have been successful so it’s really a debate over hypothetical situations. The truth is probably somewhere in between but I tend to lean a little more towards our President than British politicians in this case.

I don’t think you’re getting the totality of what they’re saying.

The simplest way of putting it is:

More information will be extracted using method other than torture, than using torture, and the information will be of better quality.

So torture ‘doesn’t work’ in the same way that satiating your hunger in the wild by eating every wild mushroom and berry you come across doesn’t work. Sure, maybe you’ll be lucky and they’ll only be good tasty ones. But probably not.

You have to figure out how much time was wasted, how many intelligence assets burned, how many lives were lost because we followed up stories told to us during torture because the torturers wanted more information, and the person being tortured wanted the torture to stop.