Former Navy Judge Advocate General Admiral John Hutson speaking about the last time from 2000 to 2003 that a Republican administration tortured people said,
Fundamentally, those kinds of techniques are ineffective. If the goal is to gain actionable intelligence, and it is, and if that’s important, and it is, then we have to use the techniques that are most effective. Torture is the technique of choice of the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough.
Bush, shortly after 9/11 went the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo tough route by signing a directive giving the CIA the power to secretly imprison and interrogate detainees. This led to rendition of prisoners to countries where they were sure to be tortured and the establishment of “black sites” worldwide.
As far as to the torture techniques used, although no knowledgeable individual would advise using torture since it is ineffective as well as illegal the lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough Vice President found lazy, stupid and pseudo-tough people at the CIA to talk to who sent him to the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program (SERE) where he found 2 lazy, stupid pseudo-tough people to run his torture program. These were Mitchell and Jenson trainers in the torture experience program used to harden soldiers to the possibility of torture and how to resist.
Of course they had to make this decision quickly in a lazy stupid and pseudo-tough manner, James Risen and Matt Apuzzo described this process.
The C.I.A. has said it hired Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen because their experience with “nonstandard” interrogation was “unparalleled.” But the government’s own experts favored the traditional approach to questioning prisoners. And the Senate report makes clear that the speed with which Mr. Mitchell was brought into the program — less than 24 hours elapsed between the time his name was floated and that first cable — meant there was no time to analyze whether his approach was best.
After a year of lazy stupid and pseudo tough planning these 2 went to Guantanamo with a chart copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The NYT even suggested that they may not have even known the source of this chart. The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. Of course torture is only good for conformity at best and does not work at securing accurate information. The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
Torture hurt the gathering of information that it was intended to elicit. Ali Soufan was the FBI professional interrogator who first questioned Zubaydah until he was turned over to the CIA for torture and Soufan was withdrawn by the FBI Director due to his concerns over the legality of CIA methods developed by Mitchell and Jessen. He also points out that the FBI agent who knew KSM best never had a chance to question him, instead of a professional interrogation the CIA amateurs waterboarded KSM 183 times in the month of March after his capture on March 1, that is an average of once every 4 hours for a month.
Soufan after looking at the results of the CIA program said.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
Likewise Stephen M. Colecchi in American Magazine wrote:
The use of torture must be rejected as fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person and ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism.” It is counterproductive not only because experts tell us that it does not work, but also because it undermines the very good it hopes to achieve: the common good of all.
So not only does torture not work, and not only does it create more terrorists, it is for the "psuedo-tough". In other words, real men don't torture.
Bush himself described the proper procedure for accusations of torture as required by international law:
It's important for people to understand that in a democracy, there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth. In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse ... there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered. ... It's very important for people and your listeners to understand that in our country, when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act. And we act in a way in which leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. ... In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation.
By not prosecuting Bush/Cheney for their torture the USA is a rogue nation. Anyone participating in torture or complicit to torture is defined by international law as a war criminal. You do not see Bush/Cheney traveling internationally because they are high profile war criminals. However any US vet is also exposed to arrest and prosecution by international law since the US has not done the job. War crimes are crimes without a statute of limitation, after all they are still arresting 90 yo Nazis in Europe for prosecution.
Now Trump is promoting this form of GOP lawlessness in an effort to increase the long list of international war criminals living in the USA. Torture certainly will not help the security of the country or gain useful information. What he is proposing is illegal, immoral and useless. For a full look at international law regarding torture see here