Perhaps I should clarify:

I can tell you from personal experience...it is perhaps the most humane way; outside of long term phycological conditioning, of effectively breaking a prisoner in a short period of time.

Long term efforts of course lead to better results.

A trainned individual however can still give false information and or mislead his captors in a wide variety of ways.

We train certian critical assets (meaning important personel such as pilots etc) in our military to do this very thing.

It is called resistence trainning.

Those of us that have had the previlage to instruct such training don't mince words.

We call water boarding what it is: torture.