The CIA lied when it said torture worked in order to justify its continued use.
And, of course, 'Zero Dark Thirty' was bullshit - What We Know About Who the CIA Tortured, How, and What Good It Did - The Wire:
"...information collected through torture didn't help catch Osama bin Laden. Hassan Ghul [...] An al Qaeda member who is generally credited with having provided the key piece of information allowing the CIA to identify the location of Osama bin Laden. Ghul is understood to have provided the basis for the first torture scene in Zero Dark Thirty.
What the torture told us: The key detail about the identity of bin Laden's courier was given in response to a question from Kurdish authorities who questioned him prior to his being turned over to a secret CIA prison in Romania."
"...the report “concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.”
"...the Senate report contradicts the main defenses of the Bush-era torture program: That harsh methods were needed to produce actionable results, and that the program itself helped save American lives by foiling terror attacks. Instead, the CIA overstated the effectiveness of the program and concealed the harshness of the methods they used. Intelligence breakthroughs credited to the “enhanced interrogation” program by the CIA were instead gleaned through other means, and then used by the agency to bolster defenses of the program."
And they don't care about your 4th Amendment rights either. - U.S. confirms warrantless searches of Americans:
"The Obama administration has conducted warrantless searches of Americans' communications as part of the National Security Agency's surveillance operations... the administration's top intelligence official confirmed in a letter to Congress disclosed Tuesday...
"Senior officials have sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read Americans' emails, monitor their online activity or listen to their phone calls without a warrant," Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall said in a joint statement. "However, the facts show that those suggestions were misleading, and that intelligence agencies have indeed conducted warrantless searches for Americans' communications.""
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