Lonni absolutely couldn’t be trusted not to fold under pressure, that doesn’t make him any less of a hero. His first concern even before telling Luthen about this massive weapon was his own safety, that was the problem.
Not to mention the entirety of blue squadron and almost everyone in red and gold squadrons.
In universe*, nobody can withstand torture, trust’s got nothing to do with it. This has been true since we saw the little floating interrogation drone in ANH with it’s syringe of (presumably) truth serum, but Andor raised the stakes with Dr Gorst’s novel methods.
The rebels must assume that the empire will shortly learn everything that a captured agent knows, and act accordingly.
*this is true in our universe too, of course, but rarely is represented correctly accurately in movies/shows.
Returning to a previous part of this thread - Leia did. And in this show we have seen Bix getting the treatment which does demonstrate some that Leia was something special in universe.
Did Bix get the floaty robot truth serum that Leia got as well as Dr cupcakes new screaming methods?
If they tried the truth serum on Bix first then had to bring in Dr Gorst that would suggest Bix also resisted truth serum. If she didn’t get truth serum and it was straight to the headphones, then Bix and Leia were subject to different methods. I am assuming Leia did not get tortured with Dr Gorsts methods as he was long dead, although the empire are a creative bunch.
( sirens for chewie and an amped up chest hair electrolysis removal machine for Han)
I am likely wrong in everything here, as demonstrated by all my prior posts.
Well we never actually see on screen what was done to Leia, but the premise was that no one stands up to torture in universe, with Leia being the obvious exception. Personally I highly doubt Ghorst had the only one of the machines and no plans on file to make more.
Of course this is informing events in the original trilogy with stuff added to the universe later. In the original movie it was the typical hero standing up to torture just like heroes always do in a kid’s fantasy movie.
Leia did - for a while. How long was she held before Luke et al. showed up to rescue her? SW has always been a bit vague on timelines.
But in the real world, lots of people can resist torture for a few hours, days, maybe even weeks, but in the end, almost everyone cracks at some point. With something like the Death Star plans, getting the information is very time-critical. Everyone knows killing that thing is Priority #1, and Vader needs answers fast. And Leia is one of the people who knows that. She knows that holding out for even a few days might make the difference between victory and defeat, so she gives it everything.
Had Vader had the luxury of time, he’d have broken her eventually.
I thought Luthen found out the Gorst method was going to be replicated, which led to the team taking him out.
Aren’t there multiple studies now that “enhanced” torture methods don’t actually work?
Well, people tend to start saying whatever it is they think the torturer wants to hear, so you can’t really know if the information is accurate or useful. The problem is torturing one person you’re pretty sure has the information (like Leia) vs. torturing a lot of random people who may or may not know anything. The latter group is probably far more likely to just start spewing nonsense to get the torture to stop.
I remember at least one EU novel suggested that Leia was able to withstand the torture because of her inmate power of the Force (being a Skywalker).
Lonni wouldn’t even try to withstand any torture, he made it very clear to Luthen that his safety was his primary concern. He would have talked without any need for it. They obviously would have tortured him any ways of course.
In high school they had a guy come talk to us once. He had been a pilot, and his plane was shot down over the Suez Canal sometime in the late 60’s-early 70’s. The Egyptians captured him, and for the first few months, they interrogated him for daily, often using torture. He told us that he would resist, and lie, and try to fight back, but every day they would get something from him. On a good day they would get a little; on a bad day they would get a lot.
Lonni dies unknown and forgotten but some farm kid who joined the day before and a pirate who was paid to be there get medals. Nice.
I feel like I have to say this is tongue in cheek.
Let’s qualify that. Torture in our universe is really good at getting people to read from the script (sometimes literally, but also figuratively, as when the desired narrative is implied by how questions are framed and posed). It’s less good at getting people to admit truthful information. It’s abysmal at extracting useful intelligence. Like, even if you get Johnny Terror to admit everything he knows, you don’t think that by the time he makes that admission Jack Handler and Hans Brains haven’t already tweaked their plans so that the intel is stale?
That’s where the Bush-era torture apologists went (way, way) wrong. They looked at how effective torture was at getting flyboys downed over Vietnam to admit to being dirty air-pirates, and then assumed those results could be extrapolated to eliciting useful intelligence. It can’t.
That’s actually one of the great shortcomings of Rogue One and the NT, IMHO. They actually drastically shorten what I had imagined to be the timelines for things like hyperspace travel. I was imagining something like Star Trek’s warp travel. It can take days, weeks, months, or years to travel by warp to other parts of the galaxy, with the time increasing with distance at a given speed.
But the NT and Rogue One? It’s closer to teleportation (at least within an order of magnitude) than to warp travel.