Let’s suppose you want to gather informations about a secret military building on foreign soil. You’re going to use various methods. For instance, you coud pay a local official to tell you where it is situated. A spy could follow someone who could lead him to said building. You could send someone to take pictures of various suspicious buildings and anlyze the pictures. You could torture someone. None of this method is foolproof. The official could take the money and lie, the guy you’re spying upon may be actually going to a meeting of former college students, the suspicious building could be an ordinary factory, the tortured man could know nothing about it.
None of the methods used is 100% foolproof. Actually, none is particularily more efficient than the others in itself. It depends on the circumstances. However any of them could work. If you’re only bothered about getting results, using all of them including torture and recouping the infos you’re gathering is the way to go.
Because you’re looking to correlate their answers. One guy breaks early and tells all, but the other is feeding you bullshit. So you keep on torturing the both of them, until the guy that has broken changes his story out of desperation. Eventually the guy that held out breaks, so now you have a correlation. Except maybe they had a pre-planned false story, since the second guy has switched stories since then…
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that it can work. But against a prepared, organised enemy, the countermeasures (work in isolated cells, use “need to know” information restrictions, have pre-prepared cover stories so that torture victims can appear to break when they haven’t making real breaks suspect, assume any captives are going to break eventually and move/alter anything pertaining to what they know etc.) make it ineffective and perhaps overall counterproductive.
Torture can work to gain information, but mainly if you use torture light. Heavy torture is usually used more to intimidate and control people. I think heavy torture only works to gain information when you use proper psychology with it, such as offering painkillers as a reward for telling the truth and offering worse torture for misleading answers, and/or threatening to use it on friends and family. In fact I remember reading in a modern police interrogation manual that most of the psychology tricks used by the police were invented by the inquisition interrogators of the 1300s, so they combined advanced psychology with heavy torture.
So yeah it works if you ask me. Doesn’t mean anyone should ever use heavy torture, and even if people do use torture light it should be a last resort. Torture has endless ramifications aside from the obvious human rights issues. It can promote hatred and distrust for the regime that practices it thereby cutting off just as much human intelligence as it gathers because people don’t want to help an evil regime. Eventually it’ll lead to even more instability, terrorism and rebellion against the regime and it can demoralize everyone who finds out about it and politically isolate the nation that practices it.
Theoretically at least. Torture was widespread in the US until about the 1940s. And probably just as widespread in other developed nations.
Some think they know when the victim breaks, but as some have said here- some agents are trained to resist torture, and they’ll break at a different time, and others are pathological liars, and others are great actors, and others… well you get the idea. The problem is- you don’t REALLY know when they are in which of the 3 stages.
Waiting for a correlation will work IF- both victims really know the fact you’re after, and (by pre-arranged or by accident) both don’t feed you the same false info at the same time.
There are only a very few cases where physical torture can be effective in getting information. And, even then, it’s dicey.
Google “does torture work?” and you’ll find accounts by former torturers who testify that torture doesn’t work. The information you get out of people by torturing them is rarely usable.
If you’re interrogating someone, you’d expect to find information you already know and information you don’t know, wouldn’t you? So let’s say your hypothetical torturer asks about “what kind of supplies are there?” and keeps getting answers he doesn’t like. After applying more pain, he finally gets an answer he likes (“guns”), so he moves on to other questions.
Was the answer given because the victim actually knew about the guns? We’ll never know because the torturer isn’t going to continue asking the question once he got the answer he “wanted.” Once he does answer that way, the torturer is going to be able to claim this guy is guilty because he was able to answer “guns.”
Torture strikes me as a very effective way to indoctrinate victims in the story to which you already know some of the details. The remaining details can be filled in by the torturee, so knowing part of the story doesn’t really help you.
Your hypothetical torturer is a very nice guy: he only asks the question once.
They’re not stupid; they’re willing to torture people because it can reduce the risk of domestic unrest. (In fact, I think that is a more important use of torture in dictatorships than as information gathering: think of all the examples of dictatorships torturing people who couldn’t give any useful information). It reminds me of a line in Nightwatch:
“They torture people? Why doesn’t anyone stop them?”
“'Cause they torture people.”
In a democracy, having people cowed and intimidated by the government is a good way to make sure it doesn’t stay a democracy for very long…
Just reading through The Torture Myth, posted by Frankenstein Monster from the Washington Post. I’m not sure this is saying what folks think its saying.
Seems to me Col. Rothrock is saying that physical torture is not very reliable…not that all torture does not work.
And I’m not sure exactly what Col. Herrington is saying here. The implicatoin Im’ getting again though is he’s talking about physical abusive torture. Surely simply asking folks questions isn’t going to get answers, so I’m guessing there is something else in his process…something like drugs, sleep depravation, some kind of psychological stress…something. Its unclear exactly what he’s saying…and knowing how the interview process goes I’m guessing that much is left unsaid here.
I’m not sure how this shows torture works or doesn’t work…its kind of just saying that if we do torture people we can expect the insurgents to reciprocate. However, I’m unsure how valid that is…or to put it differently, if we didn’t torture anyone would some of the insurgents still cut off civilians heads or torture Iraqi’s to death as we saw in Fallujah. My guess…it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in most cases. Afaik the insurgents don’t seem to be all that interested in capturing American troops anyway…just in killing or maiming them.
I’m not seeing the ‘overwhelimingly negative evidence’ that torture doesn’t work…least not here. I’ll check out the other sites if I get a chance later.
My final thought is…if torture really doesn’t work, why is its use so wide spread throughout the world? If it really doesn’t work, why do intelligence groups throughout the world train their people to resist it? Is it all just thousands of years of bullshit? I find that incredibly hard to believe, that its all sadism and bullshit without any effect at all.
Why do you assume that the torturer would be stupid and would go on insisting until he would get an answer that would only mislead him? In the hypothetical you were presented with, the point of this question was precisely to know whether the suspect actually knew something.
Besides, wouldn’t this equally apply to a regular interrogation? If the interrogator has already decided that the suspect is guilty and keep on interrogating him until he gets the answer he wants, and the suspect is actually not guilty, the interrogator is wasting his time.
It seems to me that in this case, you’re precisely doing what I mentioned above : assuming that the interogator is going to use torture stupidely. While actually, not only he probably doesn’t, but he has much more knowledge about torture, its results, its limits, the possible behaviors of the victim, etc…that you could ever imagine.
As already mentionned if it was so inneficient a method, why was it, why is it still so widely used? Even in a number of democracies…
I’m trying to dig up a cite for an article I read recently about one of the most effective American interrogators of Japanese POWS during WWII. Having served as a missionary in Japan, he spoke Japanese and was familiar with the culture. His interrogation method essentially was asking them questions. He assured prisoners they were safe, made sure they got medical care if they were injured, and built relationships by talking about home with them.
The article brought up the classic example of a prisoner who knows where a ticking bomb is located. In that situation, even if a prisoner is tortured, all the prisoner has to do is withhold the secret long enough for the bomb to go off.
I think part of the reason people support the use of torture its purpose in extracting information gets confused with punishment. My parents are a small sample, but they’re about as representative a pair of Americans as any. When Khalid Sheik Mohammed was captured, they insisted he should be tortured, without regard to any information he had.
I call it “the lottery effect”, even with so many losing or ineffective bets, some SOB’s do get lucky, and so the lotteries thrive and so does torture.
Maybe. Of course, the converse could be true too…maybe sometimes people resist and so folks say it doesn’t work at all. Personally I find the practice distasteful, especially when we are talking about the over the top physical abuse type torture. No self respecting libertarian type is going to be too comfortable with that kind of power in the hands of the state…reguardless of who the state happens to be.
To me though the claim that torture in any form at all does not work is extraordinary…and for me to be convinced I’m going to need some extraordinary kind of proof that this is so.
I think you’re asking smart questions; I think part of the answer is that there are various ways it can “work.”
You are a Cruel Despot wanting to supress a rebellion. You capture a rebel and torture him enough so that he tells you that they are based in village A. So you burn it down and slaughter the inhabitants.
Of course, they were actually based in village B. But seeing A burned to the ground, and seeing the shattered shell of an informer you release from your jail, they may well decide to stop supporting the rebellion.
I agree torture is sometimes used as an intimidation factor - an extreme form of punishment to deter activities that state opposes. But I remain unconvinced that torture is also a generally ineffective means for getting information.
I think some of the people who are arguing this position are trying to make the moral question go away by making it moot. The moral decision is easy when the question is “would you be willing to make somebody else suffer for no useful reason?” But if the question becomes “would you be willing to make somebody else suffer if it promotes a greater good?” and the moral issue becomes much harder to address. Some people want to avoid difficult moral questions by simplifying them and changing the terms of the question.
I was replying to xtisme’s “the claim that torture in any form at all does not work is extraordinary” Are you saying then that because the torturers did succeed in getting a confession, regardless if it was false, that then torture works? Sure it did in the sense that the church got a hold of the possessions of the executed, by golly it did work.
Well, I’m not a torturer, so perhaps you can tell me: when do you decide that someone under torture has no useful information to give? Do you just stop without finding out anything? I thought the purpose of torture was to break people’s will to resist and get them to answer questions…
At least in the U.S. I expect interrogations to sometime give way to trials where a jury can decide on guilt and the defendant has a right not to incriminate him/herself. In a military situation, I’d expect regular interrogation, but no torture that presses someone to give answers he/she might not have. I’m not going to go out on a limb and say torture never works, but I think it’s widespread use is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
Does anyone know what regular use of torture will do psychologically to the soldiers asked to perform it? Will they be able to integrate into civilian life when they leave the military? Will they become sadists?
I dunno… I’ve got a pretty good imagination and I’d be surprised if you could divine its contents from the few comments I’ve posted on the SDMB.
Perhaps you can tell us how the torturer works his way around this dilemma?
I’m sure not going to accept the fallacy of arguement from authority in this case. How much do you expect me to trust people who make their living causing pain to other human beings?
Torture is very effective… just not as a method of obtaining reliable information. It’s great to indoctrinate people, instill fear, discourage dissent, etc…
I would assume everyone here is probably familiar with the moral issues, and if they favor using torture, they won’t be swayed by it. Then if I’m going to try to convince them to go against the use of torture, the moral question is already moot because it didn’t convince them, so that’s why this thread is about the other issues involved.
