The Gestapo could and would simply arrest every person mentioned by the individual being tortured. These people would then be tortured in turn, and the Gestapo would round up every person mentioned by them. Lather, rinse, repeat. This was certainly effective in making the population fearful and rendering it easier to control. It also reduced the absolute number of people involved in activities adverse to the regime. The fact that the actual “subversives” removed, jailed and/or killed was a fraction of the total number of people thus treated was considered to be irrelevant. In this sense, the Gestapo was indeed “effective”.
To compare this scenario to the circumstances applying in regular police work such as the LAPD or the FBI, or even in the case of the IRA, is totally disingenuous.
This is patently ridiculous. You have not produced a cite that shows there is a consensus of professional interrogators that “torture” provides unreliable information. You have failed to support that claim.
What would you accept as evidence of that fact? Because I and others here have shown that every major intelligence agency in this country thinks it doesn’t provide reliable information. What exactly, other than a poll of ever interrogator on Earth would you accept to change your blindly ideological faith based ignorance?
It would help if you actually had any cites to refute what we claim. But I guess you don’t need to when you can dismiss uncomfortable facts.
Protip: When the facts say your ignorant opinion is wrong, change your opinion.
Nothing will work. he needs a vote by the interrogators. It is not enough to show the manuals says it does not work. It is insufficient to show those involved in interrogation say it does not work.
I am not aware that they ever had a vote among interrogators. Therefore you can not meet the ROVER thresh hold.
I am responding to you. I claimed that a consensus of professional interrogators feel that torture provides unreliable information.
I, and others provided cites to support that. You have consistently pretended those cites don’t exist. You are not willing to accept that it is even possible that you are wrong, and no information that could possibly exist could meet your standards.
We have provided a veritable landslide of cites that says torture is a lousy way of obtaining reliable intelligence.
You want a consensus? There is your consensus.
If you say we are cherry picking fine…provide cites of your own showing professional interrogators saying it is a great way of obtaining actionable intelligence.
So far you have utterly failed to provide a single counter and frankly you’d need more than one to undo the mountain of evidence provided to show you are wrong.
It is stunning how someone faced with the overwhelming evidence here would argue it is still an open question.
It is not an open question. Not close. If it were I am sure you would be swinging your own cites around here with glee.
You’ve got nothing and you know you have nothing. You have been called out by a Mod for this.
Perhaps your psyche requires that you be right no matter what but if so you are the only one who could think so after reading this thread.
I understand what you are getting at and this post is not meant in an adversarial way.
That said I wonder if those kinds of tactics, while certainly helping to control the population via fear, manage to actually decrease those actively opposed to the regime (e.g. terrorists/freedom fighters/resistance…depends where you stand on what you want to call them).
To be sure, if for no other reason than the law of averages, they will stumble upon resistance fighters and manage to take them out of action. On the flip side though I would think those kinds of tactics tend to generate resistance fighters.
I have no idea how it all plays out on balance but I think it needs to be considered that such tactics can create people opposed to you as well as get rid of them.
That certainly would explain why the various French maquis never had underground railroads to get Jews and downed British pilots out of France nor blew up a whole lot of infrastructure up to the lead-up to D-Day, why no maquisard was left to join the Free French forces en masse after it, why Netherlander resistance collapsed nigh-instantly and wasn’t there to capture entire towns once Market Garden was a go, why Russian and Polish partisans never got to turn the Russian front into a quagmire by disrupting supplies all over the place, why Stalingrad was a crushing German victory, why Warsaw was a beacon of pro-German sentiment and why no attempt was ever made on the Führer’s life.
Gestapo in, dissidents out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that !
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I’m being informed all of that was, in fact, the exact opposite of what happened. Carry on.
Because the GRU’s methods were extremely different, of course. Of course.
Maybe you never asked ?
Well, 4 million East Germans crossed over into West Germany over the period the emigration ban was in place, which represents 1/4th - 1/5th of the population. EFFICIENCY !
Which is why the ISI is presumably not considered a good source of data by Western agencies. I don’t honestly know, not being part of the intelligence community. Do you have any indication they are ?
Foolish ? Why ? You’re advocating torture on the grounds that “it’s immoral, but it works”. Implicit to such defense is the notion that “therefore we should keep on doing it”, i.e. taking behavioural cues from the Gestapo.
But all my torturer friends say it wasn’t !
Well, I don’t know how the Chicago PD is doing but since the Gestapo has a notably schlecht record at eliminating dissidents they can’t be doing much worse.
I do not disagree. I believe these tactics actually strengthened the resolve of the Resistance. I was only commenting on the fact that these were tactics of intimidation, not intelligence gathering.
NO. I am pointing out that your comparison is ludicrous by any standard.
Most members of the various gangs are very much known by the police departments. Unlike the Maquis, they are not really “secret” societies. However, to the extent that various gang members would like to shield their identities from the police, they are pretty dismal failures without anyone being tortured. The police know who they are, but they still face the task of actually identifying them in the act of committing a crime. No one may be imprisoned simply for being a member of a gang.
To the extent that the various torture-using police agencies were “successful” in attacking resistance movements, they differ from municipal police departments in that the police must have an actual crime for which to arrest a person and then must provide evidence for that crime in a court of law, while the person accused is permitted to employ defense counsel. The torture-using agencies were not bound by any such strictures, so they were allowed to round up large numbers of people on the flimsiest excuses and detain or kill them without compunction. This means that by casting a wide net, the odds were that those agencies would capture some resistance fighters by sheer luck, in addition to those handed over by betrayers and those identified through routine police interrogation, and they were then under no obligation to try them fairly, so that any capture tended to end in the removal of the person from the resistance. That, not some odd claims of the efficacy of torture, is why the Gestapo and related outfits have the appearance of being “more successful” than the LAPD.
Nope. You can’t make a cite say something just by insisting that that’s what it says.
I’m done with you. you’ve demonstrated your ability to think and process arguments in this thread. I’m not going to be able to improve that ability by continuing to argue with you, so I’m going to stop trying.
As I said, you will accept nothing but a poll of every interrogator on Earth. My cite demonstrates what I said. You show a consensus by showing what every major intelligence agency thinks. I, and others have shown this. You don’t accept it, yet you offer nothing to rebut.
There isn’t a national board of consensus where the consensuses are stored, ready to be linked to. And running away and pretending you win doesn’t make you the victor. It’s just pathetic.
So yeah, leave the thread, you aren’t engaging in any but the most vestigial way anyway.
It is not just for you that we reply, but it is clear that you are not touching the evidence presented, with nothing to support them your arguments are just silly.
IIRC in one case the Gestapo nearly depopulated a town in search of bad guys (maybe a 1-2 thousand people). Did they catch “bad guys” (as they would define it)? Probably. Was the whole town “bad guys”? Nope.
Is that successful? (rhetorical question) If you kill everyone you are sure to get the bad ones. :rolleyes: