Again while doing VSNP research, I've been looking through the declassified articles from the CIA's Studies In Intelligence. One article (which doesn't have anything to do with the VSNP, but which nonetheless caught my eye) is "The Interrogation of Suspects Under Arrest" written by Don Compos in 1968. (PDF version here.) Supporting my earlier argument regarding the ineffectiveness of torture, Compos writes:
The question of torture should be disposed of at once. Quite apart from moral and legal considerations, physical torture or extreme mental torture is not an expedient device. Maltreating the subject is from a strictly practical point of view as short-sighted as whipping a horse to his knees before a thirty-mile ride. It is true that almost anyone will eventually talk when subjected to enough physical pressures, but the information obtained in this way is likely to be of little intelligence value and the subject himself rendered unfit for further exploitation. Physical pressure will often yield a confession, true or false, but what an intelligence interrogation seeks is a continuing flow of information.
Emphasis added.
Related article: Clinton's Guantanamo: How the Democratic president set the stage for a land without law.
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