Digby has a great post up about the conflict between the actual scientific evidence about torture’s efficacy and the folk beliefs about it. In sum, being under a lot of stress is a surefire way to stop remembering things correctly, and to produce misleading information. And that’s just on top of the fact that a lot of people being rounded up and tortured don’t know anything, and the well-established fact that people who are being tortured will quickly and rationally cough up false confessions in hopes that the torture will cease. (Indeed, Searching for Whitopia, and the one thing that comes up again and again is how allergic the residents of what he deems Whitopia are to reality. He describes their existence as much like those Russian nesting dolls. They escape not just the cities but the suburbs to live in a community that’s main value is that you don’t face much in the way of challenges from reality. And then you move into a gated community, and inside your gated community is your giant house that isolates you from the neighbors and likely has a super high tech security system to protect your from the imaginary criminals. Indeed, their commitment to living in a fantasy world is such that Benjamin goes house-hunting, and discovers that a charming house with an official historical landmark designation languishes on the market while ugly monstrosities that reference certain architectural traditions in a way that’s almost deliberately cheesy and fake get snatched up. The tacky wins hands down every time. Too much reality is unsettling.