[Quote:]

It’s become the conventional wisdom that the tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that “anything” need not be truthful as long as it is what the torturers want to hear. But years worth of studies in neuroscience, as well as new research, suggest that there are, in addition, fundamental aspects of neurochemistry that increase the chance that information obtained under torture will not be truthful.

Torture is more about sadistic self-indulgence and dumb insistence on a pre-formed opinion than effective intelligence-gathering and strategy; as such, it fits in perfectly with American foreign policy.