The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) apparently lied to the producers of Zero Dark Thirty by claiming torture was a valuable tool in gathering the whereabouts of Osama bin Lauden:
Lawmakers accused the CIA of misleading the makers of the Osama bin Laden raid film “Zero Dark Thirty” by allegedly telling them that harsh interrogation methods helped track down the terrorist mastermind.
The film shows waterboarding and similar techniques as important, if not key, to finding bin Laden in Pakistan, where he was killed by Navy SEALs in 2011.
A Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the CIA’s detainee program found that such methods produced no useful intelligence.
This shouldn’t surprise anybody. The CIA is one of the most frightening organizations that has ever existed. We’re talking about the same organization that experimented on unwitting United States and Canadian civilians by administrating mind altering drugs in the hope of developed a truth serum. The CIA likely wanted to make torture sound like a valuable tool in the hopes that it would convince a majority of Americans to support the heinous act. In true torture is unlikely to reap useful information because a victim will try to say whatever he believes his torturers want to hear in order to make the pain stop. Torture is a great tool to use when you want an innocent person to confess to a crime but it isn’t a reliable method of gathering reliable information.