Since the seat of the free world - I'm joking of course - home of the scared and incompetent administration - here I'm not joking - Washington D.C., USA, has decided to continue to torture people that frighten them, I thought I'd provide a link to the often forgotten article by Merle L. Pribbenow, a former CIA official called: "The Man in the Snow White Cell".
It recounts the tale of Nguyen Tai's 5 year detention with the South Vietnamese and US. Tai was the most senior North Vietnamese officer ever captured during the Vietnam War. This was only discovered near the end of his stay.
The article makes a laughing stock of the fools that think you could ever find out anything from a determined individual that maybe useful in short order.
It concludes with this:
"While the South Vietnamese use of torture did result (eventually) in Tai's admission of his true identity, it did not provide any other usable information. The South Vietnamese played the key role in cracking Tai's cover story, but it was their investigation and analysis that put the pieces together to make a solid and incontrovertible identification of Tai, not their use of torture, that scored this success. .......
..... the South Vietnamese torture gave Tai the incentive for the limited cooperation he gave to his American interrogators, but it was the skillful questions and psychological ploys of the Americans, and not any physical infliction of pain, that produced the only useful (albeit limited) information that Tai ever provided."
I wonder if the greats at Guantánamo tried any psychological ploys on Haji Nasrat Khan or Afghan, Faiz Muhammad just a couple of the characters our great allies to the south are "real", "real" afraid of, eh.
I'll bet Barbara Bush would have a few comments for these scary guys:
"This worked very well for them. Being chained to the floor has help Mr. Faiz immensely with overcoming difficulties with his paralysed legs. Some of our own underprivileged should give it a try. It's just so real great (she chuckles slightly)."