Torture Never Works - Is that conventional wisdom correct ?

[John]

I've never believed that torture doesn't work. Maybe there are a few
psychopathic people who train themselves somehow to ignore the pain,
but on everyone else, torture works.

It's not clear to me why it's "moral" to kill a person in
self-defense, or to kill a terrorist with a drone, but it's "immoral"
to use torture to gain information, if doing so might save the lives
of Americans.

[Reality Check]

Torture does work in terms of getting people to talk, I beleive everybody believes that.

Torture also works in the sense it can get people to say whatever specific one thing the torturer wants them to say, true or false.

Which mean that if the interviewers want a person to tell a specific lie, they can get them to do that. Which means all answers have to be vetted as to veracity.

But if the goal is to obtain huge volumes of aswers to a plethoria of questions. And that every answer be true, then what pauses and resumes torture, is not tied to a specific question and answer, but instead tied to the immediate and free flow of information from the subject to the interview, and that every single answer be truthful.

What I have the problem with is the "Conventional Wisdom" being spread by the Media and some Politicians that information collected by torture can never be trusted as true, and thus can never be useful or relied on for military purposes, because the person being tortured can always just tell the interviewer a lie and the interviewer has no way of noing some ( or all ) the answers are lies.

The interviewer can always check all answers to questions against reality, some of the lies can be discovered. In that case "just talking, but telling lies when ever you want, will not make the torture stop".

That conventional wisdom is twisting logic beyond the point of breaking, as the torture case study in the "Zero Dark Thirty" movie demonstrates.