--There are psychological methods of working information out of people that have been successful. Experts in Islamic law have sometimes been able to talk terrorist fanatics into a different point of view, since when it comes down to it, real Islam does not condone the kind of things they do. If this can be improved upon, and shown to be successful in more cases, it would be better than hostile interrogation techniques. Converting an enemy into a willing ally is the ultimate success.

Alfred McCoy from Madison-Wisconsin says the FBI used psychological methods to extract information from Al-Qaida

(hope the article being from Amnesty USA doesn't make you twitch)

Since 9/11, the White House and its media allies have shaped the debate over detainees as a false choice between tortured intelligence and no intelligence at all. Yet there are, in fact, alternatives to torture such as an approach we might call empathetic interrogation—first used by the U.S. Marine Corps to extract accurate intelligence from Japanese prisoners during World War II and practiced by the FBI with great success in the decades since. After the East Africa bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998, for example, the FBI employed this method to gain some of our best intelligence on Al Qaeda and won convictions of all the accused in U.S. courts.