torture has historically proven to be amazingly effective when it comes to obtaining information.

Not really.

Ali Soufan told a Senate judicial committee that al-Qaeda operatives were trained to resist the harsh methods, including waterboarding, and argued that conventional interrogations were much more reliable in extracting information.

'I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as enhanced interrogation techniques,' said Soufan, who was a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 'A major problem with it is it is ineffective. Al-Qaeda are trained to resist torture.'

Soufan was involved in the questioning of Abu Zubaydah, an alleged top al-Qaeda operative captured in 2002 and still held at the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The CIA has acknowledged waterboarding Zubaydah, and memos released last month by the White House said the technique was used on him dozens of times.

Soufan said that he and other agents were able to gain useful information of Zubaydah through conventional interrogations, but when the CIA began waterboarding, Zubaydah stopped talking.

Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was "not nice," he says. "But we did not physically abuse them." Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet -- as he remembers saying to the "desperate and honorable officers" who wanted him to move faster -- "if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy's genitals, he's going to tell you just about anything," which would be pointless. Rothrock, who is no squishy liberal, says that he doesn't know "any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea."

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."