Summary: There is no evidence to support the widespread belief that the torture techniques used by the American intelligence community are effective.

Popular culture and ad hoc experimentation have fueled the use of aggressive and sometimes physical interrogation techniques to get those captured on the battlefields to talk, even if there is no evidence to support the tactics' effectiveness. ...

“The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information,” wrote Col. Steven M. Kleinman, who has served as the Pentagon's senior intelligence officer for special survival training.

Kleinman wrote that intelligence gathered with coercion is sometimes inaccurate or false, noting that isolation, a tactic U.S. officials have used regularly, causes “profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort” and can “significantly and negatively impact the ability of the source to recall information accurately.”