The utilitarian argument against torture made the case that, whether or not it is moral or legal, it suffers from an essential problem: It doesn’t work. A captive will say anything and confess to anything to make the torturers quit torturing. This wasn’t just the view of pacifists and bunny-lovers. The FBI viewed torture as unproductive, too, producing dead-end leads and outright lies, but rarely actionable information.

Now Rupert Stone at Newsweek reports that an expanding number of scientific studies backs up this assessment:

...compelling scientific evidence is emerging that torture and coercion are, at best, ineffective means of gathering intelligence. Worse, as Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, wrote in a recent book, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation, torture can produce false information by harming those areas of the brain associated with memory. O’Mara marshals a large amount of scientific literature to make his point. In one important experiment from 2006, psychiatrist Charles Morgan and colleagues subjected a group of special operations soldiers to prisoner-of-war conditions (including food and sleep deprivation and temperature extremes). These soldiers were highly trained and physically fit, and, unlike most detainees, they were motivated to cooperate. But even they exhibited a remarkable deterioration in memory as a result of these stressful conditions. According to Carle, enhanced interrogation techniques have similar effects. “It is obvious that sleep deprivation and temperature extremes disorient the detainee—they are designed to do so,” he says.

Stone goes on to summarize studies O’Mara includes in his book of the “diving reflex”—the reaction that occurs in mammals submerged in water. These show that brain activity moves away from those areas related to memory and toward those “principally concerned with survival.” O’Mara cites numerous studies but focuses on one in particular that found being starved of oxygen (hypoxia) “severely impairs” a person’s cognitive abilities. Waterboarding, the torture technique that simulates drowning, not only causes hypoxia, but also causes carbon dioxide to collect in the body (hypercapnia), generating fear and panic. Thinking ability and recalling information will be “markedly reduced” in such circumstances, according to O’Mara.

In addition to O’Mara’s work, Stone writes that a study on test subjects found that after sleep deprivation the rate of false confessions soars. Sleep deprivation can also induce the formation of false memories, hallucinations, and psychosis. As noted by one of the study’s authors, professor of cognitive science and law Elizabeth Lofton, in the U.S. criminal justice system it’s not rare for sleep deprivation to be used and false confessions elicited in this way. This has resulted in plenty of wrongful convictions.

Stone concludes by noting that studies are showing that rapport building is a more effective means of obtaining information than torture is. That’s not news. The FBI took that view decades ago and repeated it as criticism when the post-9/11 torture was revealed.

But, as Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist with longtime experience on torture and U.S. involvement in the practice wrote in December 2014:

Torture methods employed by the CIA under the guise of its “enhanced interrogation techniques” program can be traced back — through personnel and decades of research — to human experiments designed to induce the subjugation of prisoners through use of isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, psychoactive drugs and other means, according to details contained in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, a summary of which was released last week. While many have focused on the brutal physical distress inflicted on detainees — beatings, extreme cold and heat, painful rectal force-feedings, waterboarding, and more — a close reading of the 500-page summary also suggests other disturbing aspects of the CIA’s means of breaking down prisoners. The CIA chief of interrogations under the Bush administration, whose name was redacted in the Senate report, previously used a discredited training manual, Human Resource Exploitation (HRE), which was identified as using torture on political opponents of 1980s Latin America regimes — he was even admonished by the agency over the matter. That handbook, according to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, drew “significant portions” from an even earlier 1960s CIA interrogation handbook that advocated rapport-style interrogations and, when CIA found it was needed, the torture of suspects.

While it’s true that torture was not “legalized” and officially publicly defended before the Bush administration came along, it’s a mistake to think the practice was only initiated 15 years ago.

In Vietnam, POWs like Sen. John McCain and scores of other captured Americans suffered vicious torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, reprehensible behavior under Hanoi’s orders.

But no more reprehensible than the tiger cages in which intelligence agents of the U.S.-backed Saigon government tortured suspected Vietnamese communists while Americans in plainclothes watched and gave advice on what to do next. Some of these captives were said to have been tortured by the Americans before being turned over to Saigon authorities. The tiger cage torture went way beyond waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and days in forced positions, but it emerged from the same barbaric mindset that approved, designed, and implemented torture after 9/11.

President Obama denounced torture in the earliest days of his first term and barred its use. John Brennan said at his confirmation hearing after being nominated for a second time to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency that he called into question his original views that torture had produced actionable intelligence. Just last month, after Donald Trump did some chest-pounding about doing more than waterboarding in carrying out the global war on terror, Brennan said he would not use torture, including waterboarding, even if a future president ordered him to do so.

That sounds good. But Brennan is a serial liar and shouldn’t be trusted for one second in this matter.

President Obama will leave the White House in eight months. Ten or 20 years down the road, a future president could secretly choose to order torture. While now backed by recent scientific studies, knowing that torture doesn’t produce useful results isn’t a new revelation. Knowing this hasn’t kept high muckety-mucks from ordering or condoning torture in the past. It would be a mistake to believe that this will never happen again—especially since those who ordered it last time were not punished even slightly. It can only be wondered: If it does happen again, will the secret even get out, the way it did last time?