By Neil the Ethical Werewolf Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman point out that oft-cited pieces of false information about Iraq training al-Qaeda operatives to use WMD were extracted under torture. Examples like this are important for the pragmatic case against torture. People being tortured don't try to say true things; they say whatever they think will make their suffering stop. Using torture will bring us lots of false information, and relying heavily on it may lead our foreign policy into catastrophic errors.
