wait, sheik mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and never broke

i cannot find the articles from memory but if you look at other instances like the (in the end false) ricin poison plot etc, the intelligence community are eager to reveal their successes to make the public feel safe, damage enemy morale, secure funding and approval of their methods etc. they have revealed info very quickly to do with osama's execution etc, stuff that tried to make links between iraq and terrorism etc. if theyd had a major success they would reveal at least some of it as soon as the intel was no longer actionable which would be a couple years at most as by then AQ are not going to use any location known to KSM as a precaution, its not like theyd keep risking it until the press confirms he talked. when they are silent but insinuate without evidence they had success, it nearly always in time turns out to be a lot of hot air, you can look at similar events from vietnam and the cold war, the company would let it seem they had almost omniescient capabilities but it later turned out they were often perplexed or down right mistaken. by labeling everything secret it makes it hard to prove they messed up, but if theyd had success stopping an actual attack, or heck even just to justify their use of those techniques and save the reputations of those involved, theyd have released it. the kind of writers on intelligence matters, who probably have reliable sources, whove been right about things in the past tend to think the cia got nothing, and the cia has not shown any evidence that it ever did. it means you can make an educated guess that they got bupkiss that was of any use, some idiots like the former cia chief in the interview from the link above claim they had great results but cant answer what they were. if you are willing to confirm you used waterboarding (a war crime according the US military) and any intel you got would no longer be active, why wouldnt you say what it was? if they said ok we cannot confirm anything, thats one thing, but to confirm committing crimes but not the evidence it was justified, 'just take my word for it', they got bupkiss, anything they could of gotten would be so untrustworthy it would be practically useless as in the past people under enhanced interogation confessed to things that couldnt possibly have happened and it takes so much time and checking to see whats impossible and what is even possible, theyve lost any time advantage of using torture. its why the fbi, mi6, french/canadian/australian/german etc intelligence wont use it, it takes more time and is less reliable. the point of torture/waterboarding, is to force someone to talk against their will, even against their country, their beliefs, their friends, their family. the point is to make anything preferable to the torture carrying on. so people who know nothing but keep getting tortured til they talk make stuff up, they construct sometimes very elaborate detailed accounts of things that never happened, sometimes using real names and locations because they are desperate for it to be believe so they stop being tortured. this is why people have confessed to crimes that happened when they werent in the same country, or name the all the members of their national football team from their childhood as coconspirators, they need names to make it sound good so list of the names from the poster on the bedroom wall growing up. so people with no intel give you tons on useless false intel you have to go check, and people with real intel do the same thing, theyl talk all day and night, just none of it is necersarily true as they want to cause you confusion and delay you in revenge for what you are doing to them. even people who actually want to help and to clear their name end up embelishing details to make it sound better to make it more likely the torture will just stop. its why dictatorships use torture, you can just grab anyone off the street and eventually theyl confess to anything to make it stop and you can make it look like every person you ever arrested was guilty because they all confessed, no mistakes were made, we always get our man etc. a greengrocer can end up 'confessing' to being a bomb maker due to torture, but it makes it more confusing and difficult to weed the real information from the bullsh*t generated by the torture process. KSM could have talked all day to the cia and confessed to everything under the sun without ever once giving them anything real, a single courier, a single weapons cache, a single commander. thats what torture is designed for, to just generate a deluge of 'information' with no distinction between truth and fiction. rapport building works because they are not desperate to embellish, you build trust, you learn their moods and behaviours so you can learn when they are lying and when they are genuinely opening up, as they arent being coerced or just desperate to spit out more words to delay the torture, plus if they get found lying, the trust is broken and they go back to the start. over time they build an almost stockholm syndrome need to please and repay kindness, mutual respect etc and dont want to betray or lose the trust of the interogator, they will even end up giving information they werent asked for to try prove they are now being honest to make up for their deceit earlier in the process, they end up wanting to give more details and will reveal things the interogator missed. they will deny and lie at first but over weeks etc they tend to actually want to be straight with their captor and either say nothing or the truth but they lie less, and less information but all of it true is far better than lots of information with no idea if its 10 or 90% true, not able to truly rely on any of it. playing ping pong with war criminals has gotten far more true information than torture ever has. its what israel used on the likes of eichman, its what the allies used on the nazis, its what the brits used on captive ira men etc and its what the fbi uses far more successfully than what the cia got up to. if they dont get anything reliable, they probably wouldnt have anyway with torture, they have just got lots of misinformation, people smart enough to resist one can resist the other by pretending to give in and telling you half truths.

sorry its not very well written but am in a rush so cant edit