Channeling Dick Cheney, UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo staunchly defended waterboarding at a Southern California debate, telling an audience that torturing terrorism suspects yielded valuable intelligence that helped keep America safe after 9/11. “Fifty percent of the information that we have on al Qaeda and its workings came from interrogation,” he said, according to the Orange County Register. Cheney spouted the same canard Monday night on Fox News. Conveniently, for Yoo and Cheney, there is no evidence in the public domain to back up their claims. In fact, multiple investigative reporters, most recently the Washington Post, have found the exact opposite. That is, torture didn’t work. Instead of producing valuable intelligence, it prompted prisoners to lie to their interrogators, thereby sending the US government on wild goose chases, trying to stop terrorism plots that never existed.
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