Torture Did Not Lead Us to Bin Laden

Torture was immoral when the United States first started looking for Osama bin Laden, and it remains immoral now. 

Torture also had little, if anything, to do with tracking down Bin Laden. Since the news broke on Sunday night of Bin Laden's capture and subsequent death, architects of the Bush torture program have been quick to point out that were it not for the "tough decisions" made by the Bush administration, Obama would not have succeeded in finally locating Bin Laden. They claim that Khalid Sheik Mohamed — who was waterboarded 183 times — gave up the name of the courier that eventually led U.S. forces to the compound where Bin Laden was hiding. They also argue that were it not for the authorization of these "enhanced interrogation" techniques, we would not have had the necessary information to locate Bin Laden.

There are serious discrepancies in this argument:

1. The courier's full identity was found by a phone call intercepted by the National Security Administration.
2. Khalid Sheik Mohamed claimed not to know the courier and gave conflicting testimony about him, including fake names.

Torture extracts unreliable and untrustworthy information. Careful and skilled interrogation that relies on other methods — persuasion, trust building, research, and critical analysis — leads to reliable, long-term results. According to former senior military interrogator Matthew Alexander, it is critical to understand the "social science behind interrogations, which tells us that torture has an extremely negative effect on memory. An interrogator needs timely and accurate intelligence information, not just made-up babble."

The capture and death of Bin Laden have brought all of these issues back into the national discourse. Not only is it important to make sure that we as a country never use torture again, but it's equally important to ensure that those who authorized and created the program responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers are held accountable for their decisions. A first step in that process is to call for a Commission of Inquiry. We need to know the full extent of our actions before we can take the appropriate steps for accountability.