Since it’s not possible to post a thread in GD, and since the opinions in the “Torture Doesn’t Work” thread in GD were all over the place, I decided to start a thread here that is just for polling, not really for debating.
In this thread, “Work” is defined as “Getting truthful information from someone.” Whether other, non-violent methods of interrogation get information or not is irrelevant; since the GD thread was about torture specifically, this thread will only ask whether torture works in and of itself, not in comparison to other methods.
Whether a torture subject gives out other false information is irrelevant as well - this thread is about whether the total sum of information given out by a subject contains truthful information - be it sandwiched by false information or not.
Again, that someone can win the lotto is a given, that a good number of people gets the illusion that we should use it as an investment tool is silly as the evidence shows.
IMHO your poll needed another entry:
[ul]
[li]No, it rarely does. [/li][/ul]
As that is missing I had to vote for the most negative choice, as in “No, never” as it is the closest to what was pointed at by the evidence that tell us that “It doesn’t work because it is extremely inefficient and, in many ways, counterproductive.”
This qualification pretty much makes your poll a non-starter. Torture doesn’t “work” if you can’t tell which part of the information is true, and which is false.
Any choice I might make among the ones you provide would be misleading as to my actual opinion, so there’s no point in voting.
I would suggest you ask this one be closed and put some more thought into the choices offered.
I don’t see an option for “I don’t know—I don’t think there’s been any kind of proper, thorough, scientifically rigorous study on the matter.”
I mean, define “torture.” The rack? Sleep deprivation? Drugs? Electrocution? Finding out what the subject is most afraid of, and sticking them in a bucket of it? Zapping their brain with EM fields until they start seeing the shadow demons from “Ghost” clawing at them?
What’s the OBJECT of the torture—information? Detailed information? A confession? A “confession”? Is a “partial” success considered better than nothing?
What kind of subject is being tortured? A brainwashed religious fanatic? An out-and-out psychopath? Just some regular person, but who happens to be on “the other side”?
What kind of combinations of those factors are you working with? Will torture method “A” work on subject types “E” and “F,” under circumstance “Y,” but not under circumstance “Z,” or subject type “D” under any circumstance—but for the latter, method “B” will?
Would you be able to quantify torture effectiveness/failure rates into numbers that could be relied on, when trying to decide on if it would be worth attempting? Or, more importantly, if the torture meets a simple cost/benefit analysis? Time and money, if nothing else, have a concrete value.
“The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
Never say never, but the results are far too inconsistent to place any reliance on them. Or, as the director of MI5 in WWII put it, “Apart from the moral aspects of the thing, I am convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run.”
If a person lies 99.99% of the time, but tells the truth 0.01% of the time, and you cannot distinguish between the truth and false information, your poll would still require one to answer “Yes, part of the time” which is ludicrous.
I’ll be straight up honest about it. If torture is on the table, I’ll tell you whatever it is you want to know. Now put away those slivers of bamboo and let’s talk.
Poorly designed poll with way too few options, IMHO.
Given what we had, I took the “occasional” middle ground, since in certain specific circumstances it probably would be effective.
Those circumstances would be:
You KNOW without a shadow of a doubt that the prisoner has the information that you want AND you can immediately test to see if the answer is correct (i.e., a password to unlock a computer right in front of you).
You couldn’t give a damn if what the person says is true or not, as long as they eventually will say what you want them to say…see the 16-17th century witch trials and more modern ‘brainwashing’.
But as a general method of extracting information from a populace when you don’t know who knows what…not effective at all.
Are you saying that torture only works by random chance? Are you saying that a torture victim might just say some random shit about a terrorist plot that he knows nothing about but just happens to turn out to be correct? Because if not, then its not like astrology.
BTW, that statement “It doesn’t work because it is extremely inefficient and, in many ways, counterproductive” is opinion, not facts and barely even evidence.
Torture is more effective in some situations than others. And it would be immoral to use torture before asking nicely.
But the notion that torture is ineffective because we can’t really rely on the information is a bad argument. We can’t ever really rely on information given to us by terrorists.
Torture is not particularly effective for fishing expeditions but if you are going to use it for a fishing expedition, your job isn’t to figure out what is true and untrue. If you are doing it right, the victim should be trying to convince YOU that what they are telling you is the truth. Then you can check some of it out but its not like they just say some shit and you send a dozen squad cars to go check it out.
Torture leads to more false positives. The lack of torture can in some cases lead to false negatives.
