See Andrew Sullivan. A nugget:

The point of this can therefore never be to get truly reliable information. The purpose is to get answers the victim imagines the torturers want to hear. This might be the truth; or it might be a desperate untruth. The point is that the tortured is brought to the point when such distinctions are less meaningful than simply ending the ordeal.

(snip)

The torture of Winston Smith (in Orwell’s 1984–ed.) is designed specifically to force him to say that two and two equals five, just as the point of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” once used on John McCain was to get him to say things that were untrue. And it worked. If it really works, torture will force someone actually to believe that two and two equals five.

But torturing was never about the truth. Torturing is their pornography.

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