What we are witnessing is an attempt to rewrite history to justify the unjustifiable. Defense of the Bush administration's decision to sanction torture as U.S. policy all boils down to a single argument: torture works. The ends justify the means. Former Vice President Cheney, with unequivocal support from Bush, made this exact argument in several interviews while he was in office.
The Bush administration's line of reasoning was then and is now deeply flawed for three critical reasons:
1) abundant evidence, which we will examine, suggests that torture is not an effective means of gathering actionable intelligence,
2) defining if something "works" is arbitrary and therefore subject to abuse and manipulation as a metric to measure viability, and
3) torture is immoral, even if the technique were proven to be effective.
Any one of the three points would undermine the argument supporting torture, but all three are true and, combined, provide overwhelming support for those opposed to the practice.
To claim that torture led to information that eventually led to bin Laden is not supported by the facts. Such a claim is nothing but a desperate attempt to cover up past criminality. The primary source from which we learned the name of bin Laden's most important courier (eventually leading to bin Laden himself) came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But not when he was waterboarded repeatedly in 2003, during which he claimed consistently he did not know the name of the courier. No, Khalid gave up the name sometime between 2004-2005 long after his enhanced interrogation sessions ended. Jose Rodriguez, who was in charge of the Counterterrorism Center, makes a contorted effort to claim torture led to useful information from Khalid. But listening to his tortured justification is itself torture, a cringe-worthy explanation that reeks of desperation.