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A friend saw Zero Dark Thirty, the Katherine Bigelow thriller, the other day and was mightily impressed. He was also surprised when I mentioned the controversy about the film's implication that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden. There is every indication that this never happened.

Another friend and colleague, Jeff Stein, writes this:

Moviegoers would be well advised to remember what one of the CIA’s most ardent defenders of torture, former clandestine services head José Rodriquez, admitted last April: That agency interrogators couldn’t get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to give up Osama Bin Laden’s courier despite days of water-boarding and sleep deprivation.

Starting with the Bush administration, some have tried to sell us on the notion that torture produces real-time intelligence. A great number of intelligence officers say the premise is not true. Virtually all of the time, a tortured prisoner will spill whatever beans necessary to stop the torture. Most, if not all of the time, the beans are so old as not to be useful at all.

My concern is that disseminating an idea of the false value of torture softens people up to thinking: "We don't like it, but it's necessary." The necessity is extremely rare.