Recently, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, former advisor to George W. Bush, called on President Obama to declassify documents that prove the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques, more commonly known as torture. These techniques include: beating, slapping, isolation, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, which simulates drowning. 

 President Obama released several CIA Memos that document the use of such methods, as well as the legal rationale created to justify them.           

Much to my dismay, the documents do not seem to support the proposition that torture is an effective method for extracting information—they in fact indicate quite the opposite. In March 2003, the CIA used waterboarding 183 times on the self-ascribed mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Another high-profile detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002.    

The Bush administration pressured interrogators to apply increasingly harsher methods to extract information. Torture was utilized partially as a means to confirming a link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Maj. Charles Burney, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist, reported in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were under increasing pressure to produce a link between al Qaida and Saddam, but none could be established. Consequently, there were further demands to produce results through the use of harsher interrogation techniques. A recent report by the Senate Armed Services Committee found that former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abuses that led to the deaths of atleast 6 detainees and the false imprisonment of hundreds of innocent civilians.

With the release of the CIA memos, many Americans are now demanding that the suits in Washington who signed-off on these methods be prosecuted.