The effectiveness of water boarding is hotly debated, and many think that any information collected through torture is questionable. That is not a liberal position, per se; plenty of conservative military guys consider torture ineffective.
We did glean important information from one of the Gitmo guys via waterboarding that was critical in getting bin Laden.
“Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.
‘Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.”
- NBC, msnbc.com and news services