Does Torture Work ???

According to the Democratic version of the Senate torture report, CIA torture following 9/11 was ineffective:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/09/cia-torture-report-senate-intelligence-feinstein/20134093/

In other words, torture does not make people tell the truth.

But does it make people tell lies?

In my April 10, 2013 essay "Lies from the Korean War, and Why They Still Matter", I argued that torture is not necessary to get people to tell the truth and that torture does not necessarily make people tell lies. The example I gave was the US POWs who confessed to conducting biological warfare on the people of North Korea and China during the Korean conflict:

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/lies-from-the-korean-war-and-why-they-still-matter/

An interesting thing happened recently which is quite pertinent to the arguments in the Senate report and in my essay. An article published in October 2013 by a Chinese magazine alleges that evidence the US conducted biological warfare in Korea was false:

A recent article, titled "The Germ War of '52 Was A False Alarm", published in a Chinese magazine (Yanhuang Historical Review, Oct 2013), revealed the truth of the allegation. The article was written by Wu, Zhi-Li, the ex-Surgeon General of Chinese People's Volunteer Army (the Chinese troops sent to Korean War). In the article, he clearly stated that the allegation started as a false alarm from the CPV's front-line troops. While he and his medical team (and later the medical experts from Beijing) were still struggling to investigate and confirm the reports, the highest leaders (i.e., Mao, Ze-Dong & etc) had decided to start a large scale propaganda campaign against the U. S. He said that during the whole year of the campaign (1952-1953), his team did not find even a single victim of the biological warfare. Furthermore, he talked about the tremendous political pressure on him and his colleagues to show the "evidences" of the germ war. At the end, he could do nothing but fabricating the evidences and gave those to the so-called "World Peace Council." Even the evidences submitted by the North Korean were also fabricated by one of his colleagues, Professor Chen, who had previously investigated Japanese biological warfare in China during WW2.

http://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/cia-document-suggests-us-lied-about.html#.VIdetzHF91Y [refer to the comments made by "Light"]

One has to ask: why are these allegations being made now? Are they accurate, or do they reflect a disinformation campaign by someone in the US with Chinese assistance?

If these latest Chinese "revelations" are accurate, they support the contention that torture encourages people to lie. Should that be the case, then the Democratic version of the Senate torture report should be considered as valid.

If Senate Republicans should now argue that torture is useful in getting people to tell the truth, they in fact may be the party that got it all wrong.

There's only one way to settle this: locate any remaining POWs who made the alleged confessions, give them immunity from prosecution, and ask them to tell the truth about what they did.

I'll bet the chances of that happening are near zero.