“The senator and later presidential candidate John McCain [R-AZ] gave a blunt warning to the American people on the implications of continuing to torture prisoners [in a Newsweek article on November 21, 2005]: ‘The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps our war effort. In my experience the abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear–whether it is true or false. …This is a war of ideas. …Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas.’ ”
– Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, Page 313