The reality is that you are ignoring that in the original thread Politifact based that in facts and history, you are the ones that willfully ignores not only history, but that what the OP did say is not pulled out of thin air as you wishfully believe.
Yeah, it’s hard to avoid it with Tarantino, and I have a particular dislike for that word. 
This. But then again, I don’t have any information worth hiding. If you start in with the bamboo to the eyes or rending of limbs anyway, you’ll get some really creative statements from me.
When the French destroyed the Knights Templars, the Templar treasurer was quoted as saying, “Under such torture, I would have confessed to killing God.”
Given the limited options in the poll, torture will, at least sometimes, elicit truthful information from someone. I dispute the notion that it means torture “works;” since you can’t always tell what’s true and what’s not, or what else is being withheld. Not to mention torturing your enemies is a great way to earn more enemies, and ones who will be reluctant to be captured alive. It’s not worth it.
So can it reveal truthful information? Sometimes yes. Is it worth it? Almost always, no.
A broken clock tells the right time twice a day. But no one would say it thus “works”.
The few times torture produced results are so rare that to say it ‘works’ is false. And, even when it appeared to have worked, every time the intel coudl have been gotten by a less drastic way. Finally, even if it does 'work" one time in a hundred, the other 99 times you are:
- ruining your interrogators.
- Wasting time and effort chasing down false leads.
- NOT getting the intel you would have gotten, due to the victims clamming up.
- Hardening the hearts of your foes.
*So it’s incredibly counter-productive. * By that, it doesnt 'work".
A rather poorly worded poll, I am sorry to say.
Right. A honest person would have to answer “sometimes” but that’s due to how the poll is worded.
It’s never productive.
We have given you 30 or so cites showing that torture is “extremely inefficient and, in many ways, counterproductive”, so it’s not just opinion. It’s a fact.
I’m willing to say it sometimes works.
Also, the line as to what constitutes torture seems a very blurry one to me. Even a standard criminal plea bargain (something like revealing the names of co-conspirators for a shortened sentence) is torture in the sense that not revealing that information would lead to a longer prison sentence. You have still used a threat of physical confinement to coerce information.
So I think the question needs to be reframed so that we’re not talking about “torture” as if all methods are equivalent.
I ignored the conditions described in the body of the OP because they are nonsensical. By any sane interpretation of the question, torture does not work, and so that’s what I answered.
Yes, and this completely useless poll will now be used by the Pro-torture crowd to prove something.
There’s a pro-torture crowd?
For reals?
Read Damuri Ajashi posts.
Damuri, what say you? Are you pro-torture?
So, it does not work by definition. Very convenient.
No, so it does not work by any standard which would not state that a hundred monkeys bashing away on a hundred typewriters “works” to produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
It can work if the torturer correctly believes his victim has very specific knowledge.
But if the victim doesn’t know anything, or knows far less than the torturer believes, he’s going to tell the torturer anything he imagines the torturer wants to hear- true or not.
There are various things to consider on the issue.
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Because the vast majority of people are morally opposed to torture, they will want to believe it doesn’t work. This desire is going to cause people to selectively reason to support the argument against torture.
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What the US did as far as torture isn’t really that severe on a global or historical scale. Sending people’s children to concentration camps like North Korea does is far more severe than anything the US is willing to do. One person discussing the US’s torture process said ‘that barely counts as torture in the middle east’. Which is probably true. It is still torture but it isn’t as intense as what other nations do.
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A big advantage of torture isn’t gaining information, it is to deter people from opposing the government. Knowledge that a person or their loved ones would face severe torture helps to prevent rebellion against an unjust government. So in that regards, torture does work pretty well. If it didn’t, then tons of nations wouldn’t have all come to the same conclusion to use it for this purpose.
Some people may never be reliable sources of information. But if someone is cooperating willingly with you, then they are more likely to tell the truth. If there are any inconsistencies in their story they can be meaningfully investigated.
Torture assumes people are lying, so inconsistencies are expected and not meaningful. Victims have no incentive to tell the truth because it doesn’t gain them anything. They have no trust in their captors or long term goals beyond getting the torture to stop.
If the victim doesn’t know anything, then nothing works.