Cruelty is a Slavic pastime.
There’s a surprisingly little known item.
Scopolamine and sodium pentathol were the first truth serum drugs. People would babble and the content of what they said was generally not reliable.
But they showed up about 80 years ago. It would be absurd to think that the world’s intelligence agencies have not been working on improving those drugs. At least those agencies from countries that have actual pharmacological science to be funded.
The point being, torture is almost certainly less effective at getting information. Now you can’t use that in criminal or even civil Justice because of impediments to self incrimination. But the intelligence folks have no such restrictions. So for this among many other reasons the articles are pretty much absurd