Extortion

"The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy."

Extract from a (fantastic) article in The Atlantic, Oct. 25, 2007.

Andrew Sullivan, writer (1963-)

Here is the link to the article.