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Elephantman: "You doubt the veracity of what you are being told. You seek confirmation."
According to this by Jeff Stein,
The CIA's reliance on repeated, and brutal, "enhanced" interrogation techniques shows how few spies the spy agency had before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks....
When interrogation subjects coughed up some seemingly vital new information about new plots or al Qaeda personalities, the CIA had few means to check it against reports supplied by spies under its control, either in the terrorist group or elsewhere.
Everything they were hearing was new. By many accounts interrogators slapping suspects like hamburger patties didn't have a clue whether they were telling the truth. They didn't have independent sources of information to know what was up....
[When word got out about torture,] "it hurt CIA recruitment...It's, well, a vicious circle. Faced with a spy gap, the CIA has put greater and greater pressure on interrogators to wring confessions from suspects."
Elephantman: This is why the idea of waterboarding one of these guys a hundred or two hundred times, under the terms set forth by the OLC memos (only short exposures) makes sense to me.
