When people say “torture doesn&#x27;t work” it&#x27;s usually meant to counter the way the U.S. used it in an attempt to get valuable secrets, almost always in a time sensitive context. It&#x27;s pretty widely agreed that, given time and monstrous creativity, torture works for things like getting false confessions because we have examples of the public false confessions the North Vietnamese, USSR, etc. forced people to make or the many false stories the CIA tortured out of people like bin Laden&#x27;s driver.<p>What&#x27;s contentious is the idea that you can get someone dedicated to reveal a secret before their friends notice their absence and change the secrets. The classic movie plot is something like a bomb disarm code but that&#x27;s a [fortunately] rare situation and likely futile when e.g. a dedicated extremist who knows they only have to hold out for a short period of time.