To anyone who still says hard interrogation is good (or torture works):

"How do you separate the sheep from the wool? There’s no fingerprints, no DNA," said a former senior intelligence official who helped set up the CIA’s interrogation program, and who would not speak for attribution. "You don’t know if you have Osama bin Laden or Joe Shit the rag-man."

Yeah, we got all kinds of good intelligence, we didn't know who we were even talking to.

Bush has said those interrogations provided "vital information necessary to … protect the American people and our allies." But FBI agents familiar with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah have claimed that the waterboarding was worthless—and that the only valuable information from Abu Zubaydah came from documents captured from him. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him," FBI agent Dan Coleman told The Washington Post. "The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much."

They didn't give us information, the stuff they had did.

Similarly, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stated at a Guantanamo Bay hearing that he murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002, though Pakistan has already convicted a terrorist named Omar Saeed Sheikh for the slaying, casting doubt on the information Mohammed gave his interrogators under torture. Perhaps most infamously, al-Libi told interrogators that al-Qaeda received training in weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, which never happened. al-Libi recanted his claim in 2004, about a year after Colin L. Powell cited al-Libi’s false, torture-derived information to the United Nations as he made the case for invading Iraq.

And the information that we did get proved to be worse than useless, people said what they thought we wanted to hear.

It was worse than useless.

Six years of breaking our laws, violating the Geneva conventions, and an echo of the Spanish Inquisition later, and what we have to show for it is a broken world image, a broken military, a broken government, two wars in the middle east where the only people who think we're doing better than break even in either are the White House and the viewers of Fox News, saber rattling to start a third war with Iran, 3900+ dead US soldiers, nearly 30,000 wounded, and 250,000 soldiers with brain damage. This is not a legacy, it's an indictment.