Those who criticize the Bush administration for sanctioning torture often point out that information obtained through torture is generally faulty. Prisoners will say whatever they think the torturer wants to hear in order to end the pain, accurate or not.
One problem with this criticism is that it implies that if torture were effective it would be justified. That sets a dangerous precedent, of course, and greatly misses the point: we should abstain from torture because it’s a human right violation, not because it fails to achieve our aims.
But these critics also mistakenly assume that those in the Bush administration want accurate information from their detainees to begin with, and there is no indication that they do. In fact, torture has the advantage of coercing detainees into saying what the interrogators want to hear, thus allowing them to justify doing what they had already planned to do anyway. Want to move against Iran or Syria? No problem: just waterboard some poor schmuck at Guantanamo into “confessing” that he was encouraged in his lust for Western blood by one of those states.
The problem isn’t that torture makes its sufferers give bad intelligence; the problem is it works all too well for an administration hell-bent on making its delusions real.