Torture Does Not Work, as History Shows

"Torture works," an American special forces major - now, needless to say, a colonel - boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses - and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees - has ended.