Did Waterboarding Work?

A recently released report from 2004 by the CIA's then-inspector general offered no conclusion as to whether waterboarding and other torture methods were effective in securing valuable information from detainees, but intelligence officials are trying to anonymously inflate its findings. According to the report, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed "provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," but cooperated after being waterboarded some 183 times and subjected to over a week of sleep deprivation while being shackled and put in a diaper during his first few weeks in custody. "What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official told The Washington Post this week, after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. "Of course it began with that." But the report's author, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, told the Post that he was not in "a position to reach definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods" and that while waterboarding elicited information, the report did not include any systematic review of whether it worked in comparison to non-torture techniques or whether the information gleaned by the technique was accurate.