Zero Dark Thirty: Why It’s So Important to Rebut Claims That Torture Works

Trained interrogators, in fact, argue that if some detainees did know about the courier who ultimately led the CIA to bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly — not eight years later.

The accomplished Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander told me in 2011 that, subjected to physical and psychological brutality, detainees “gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us.”