In case you missed it, the US Senate released it’s report on the use of torture to gather intelligence from the prisoners at Guantanamo (and other places, presumably).

I can sum it all up for you very quickly.  Yes, they used torture.  Yes, it was despicable what they did, and threatened to do.  No, they did not get any good information from it.  The use of torture did not help catch Osama bin-Laden.

AND – the use of torture should still be left in the toolbox.  Quite simply put, when you are conducting an interrogation and the person answering questions KNOWS ahead of time that there are certain things you can not do, he’s already won.  I’m not saying that we should use those things every time, or even ever, but we should never prohibit interrogators from using them.