Torture works to extract information like bleach works to disinfect an open wound. You may get the end result you wanted, but it’s going to damage you as much as or more than it accomplishes your goal.
Let’s say you have three Johns: A, B and C. John A knows where the guns are being hidden. John B and C are innocent schlubs hauled in a wider net. Each is asked to name what supplies the rebels have hidden in the village. John A says “Foodstuffs!”. John B says “Chemical weapons!”. John C says “Explosives!”. We know John A is lying, but how would the interrogator in this case actually know for sure? Especially if John A had been trained by the rebels to resist torture techniques. Should the interrogator demand again? What if John B accidentally stumbles on the “guns” answer first? What if John B knows what the rebels have hauled in, but doesn’t have a clue where the weapons have been stored? How will the interrogator know to believe John B’s statement?
I personally feel that direct, versus subtle, interrogation is no better or worse for effectiveness. Obviously, however, all we’re going to end up getting are anecdotes.
It seems like one of those issues where a lot of prople are going to believe what they want to believe. If you hate Bush you can easily find someone to say that torture doesn’t work. And vv of course.
My own sense of it is that the insiders are not going to let us in on all of their secrets, and there’s a real need for lots of disinformation. For instance if we pick up some terrorist because of a wiretap, we could say he was turned in by another terrorist. This protects the wiretap and confuses the bad guys. So there’s going to be some guesswork on this thread.
Having said that my own processing of the info I’ve read tells me that it’s usually going to give something useful, but of course, not always. It would amaze me if it turned out that everyone is capable of enduring days or weeks of torture so they can avoid betraying their friends.
Also you can fool some of the people… and all that. If it really never worked, or produced so much misinformation that it outweighed the good stuff, probably it would’ve been put out to pasture already. OTOH, torturers have to protect their jobs, just like everyone else.
I think the question itself is a strawman. Not all torture is the same as that used on the folks who confessed to be witches after all. To answer this question though…of course I don’t think that those who confessed to being witches under torture were in fact witches. I’ve already said that I think physical torture is pretty ineffective, especially the over the top abuse type. Not only is it evil but it doesn’t achieve the ends you are going for if you are trying to extract information. As I said though, not all things that are under the umbrella of ‘torture’ equal what was done at the Salem Witch trials, nor does the fact that this form of torture doesn’t work automatically discount all others.
Strawman. Sorry to use this trite phrase but it is. You are trying to coach the debate in a very narrow and self serving way by defining torture to be that used to extract confessions in the distant past.
-XT
-XT
The problem with that view is torture has been an integral part of government since government started. As I said, the US engaged in acts that would be considered 3rd world levels of torture up until the 1940s or so (beatings, electroshock, etc)
Carl Panzram wrote a book on his experiences in prison, I read it a few years ago and the descriptions of the sanctioned tortures in prison are no different than what we discovered in Iraq when we invaded. One instance he had was when he was placed in a bathtub by guards and shocked with a battery. Arguably acts which are considered the most human rights unfriendly activities of today’s world were common in all governments up until a few decades ago (on another note that reminds me of the fact that when Cuba was chastized for sending journalists to prison for 20 years for opposing the regime, that the US government send opposers to WW1 to prison for 20 years as well). It wasn’t until 1936 that the US supreme court ruled in Brown v. Mississippi that torture was not an acceptable method of extracting information from criminal suspects, and this was after the Mississippi supreme court ruled that it was acceptable.
Anyway, point is that torture is quite normal. That hopefully is changing and now that people can taste a life w/o torture I doubt they’d ever be willing to go back. However I don’t believe it automatically leads to instability as it has always been a part of government. The governments of Egypt and Rome lasted for centuries and milleniums while practicing hardcore torture.
I think you guys misunderstand how torture is used. It is used to force someone to start to give info which is then independently verified. If the communication turns out to be true then treatment improves, if it is untrue it gets worse. Its not like Salem or the USSR showtrials where all anyone cared about was a confession, irrelevant of the truth.
Care to reflect on the gross silliness you just typed here? One CAN despise torture even if one loves Bush.
As I already mentioned, it was profitable for the torturer then, like slavery (torture was an element for that peculiar institution too) it lasted for thousands of years until it was put out to pasture, torture should also.
IIRC the changes that allowed torture to be considered and allegations of torture appeared to get worse on the way to the Iraq war, I am going to go on a limb and say it: we have an administration that does not care if the torture info tainted the intelligence of WMD and Al-queda connections to Iraq, notice that someone (and I think it was Chalabi’s buddies with a helping of wishful thinking in the administration) was “independently” verifying the info, things don’t happen in vacuum folks.
I don’t think you got what I mean. If you, who (I assume) never tortured anybody can think about the possible shortcoming of torture, don’t you think that someone who’s accustomed to use it, and probably also trained before that, will be at least as able as you are to notice them and to use it in a thoughtful way? Except if you assume that any torturer will be a brainless fool.
Calling strawmans does not help; here is what you sweepingly deduced:
I just can not see why the proven ineffective torture of assumed witches can be dismissed as not relevant… Or it is only because you assume it does not happen today? You are not aware of people recently killed in Africa for witchcraft? Guess how did they get their confessions?
As for how effective torture is nowadays I can grant you something: it is effective for other dastardly reasons:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&s=klein
However xtisme, if you are really claiming here that torture is effective in some forms, it is you who is narrowing the debate. It is you who has to show the evidence.
Proof of ineffective torture is not proof that torture is ineffective. Just as showing that Bill O’Reilly is scumbag does not show that the republican party is wrong. Obviously, when torture is used incorrectly, it’s going to be worse than useless. Even some people back in the 1700’s realised what a farce the witch trials are. The American government today does not use torture to gain confessions.
It seems to me, torture is useful for at least 1 class of information, information in which:
a. The subjects knows the information
b. You know the subject knows the information
c. The subject knows that you know the subject knows the information.
If all 3 conditions are fulfulled, then all you need to do is randomly sprinkle questions of which you know the answer with questions of which you don’t know the answer. As the subject has no way of telling which is which, the safest policy is to just tell the truth in order to avoid being beaten.
In other cases, the use of torture becomes a bit more tricky. If you don’t know if the subject knows the information (ie: you round up 10 johns and one of them is probably a terrorist) then it becomes much harder to effectively apply torture which is what people have been focusing on more in this thread.
But assuming the above 3 conditions hold, then it seems torture would be a pretty effective way of getting information.
And what you post gave what evidence?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200412/s1257847.htm
**Assuming ** the intelligence was good before hand, however, it has already been certified that bad intelligence lead us to Iraq (evidence is appearing that it was just not an honest mistake) of course to be sure, to find the lapses one will have to independently investigate how the information was gathered. Are we not even curious?
Obviously torture in witchcraft cases would be a situation where none of the victims has the information the torturer is seeking. None of them could honestly say they really were granted magical powers by Satan. But the purpose of this torture was to gain confessions not information. A torturer isn’t concerned if a confession is true or false, but he is going to care if information is true or false.
Okay, lets work through a game theory example. You’ve captured a terrorist and your certain than all 3 pre-conditions hold. You have 10 questions that you want to ask him, 5 of which you know the answer, 5 of which you don’t. The answers to the questions can either be completely correct or incorrect and the terrorist doesn’t know which pieces of information you know and which you don’t. You tell him that you are going to ask him all 10 questions, if he gets them all right, he will be treated well and given medical aid. If he answers at least one wrong, then he will be beaten.
The terrorist has 3 strategies, he can either consistantly lie, he can randomly tell the truth or he can always tell the truth. If he consistantly lies, then obviously he is going to get a beating so he this is clearly not a viable strategy for him. If he randomly tells the truth, then he has a 1 in 32 chance of getting the answers right to the 5 known questions in which case, he has fooled the interregator which is his goal. Or he can answer all of them correctly and be guarenteed to be treated properly. Thus, in order to fool the guard, he has to, on average, be willing to endure 31 beatings. Assuming our terrorist does not have that resolve, he will spill the beans and we now know 10 verifiable facts. Using these 10 verifiable facts, we can then go on to terrorist 2 and use these to crack him. Terrorist 2’s chances of fooling the interregator are now 1 in 1024 and, with even more facts, we can make the chances of being fooled even lower. Granted, this is assuming we have perfect knowledge and we never make any mistakes. However, with a bit more sophisticated mathematics, we can accomodate a wide range of uncertainties. The basics boil down to essentially a terrorist can either choose to tell the complete truth or endure on average n beatings where n is a very large number.
I think Shalmanese’s analysis is entirely false. It flies in the face of basic psychology. The majority of people (torture victims) are impressionable and will soon figure out what the torturer wants to hear. They will start giving up the names of innocent people. Plus, the assumption that “we have perfect knowledge and we never make any mistakes” is grossly off the mark. Torturers more commonly know nothing of the culture of the victim, but they will soon start believing they do. Then, the torturers will start confirming and reinforcing their incorrect beliefs out of the torture victims.
Reminder: how’s the quality of the intel the Americans are getting on Iraq? How are they doing with the fight against the insurgents?
Let me add that I will stop short of stating that toture produces no information al all in any case, ever. Torture works better the more impressionable the victim and the better informed the torturer. I would go so far as to say that torture would work “relatively well” to catch amateur small-time crooks and cookie thiefs; it works worst of all to catch hardened terrorists of a foreign culture.
I find this believable:
I find the following unacceptable (what if the guys had been innocent?) and also factually doubtful, but you can make up your own mind:
What does culture and belief have to do with anything? I’m only concerned here with verifiable facts and hard data. A torture victim, assuming he is a terrorist, can only say 2 things, something which is true or something which is false. Theres no “what he wants to hear” stuff in here.
Your margin-of-error is showing…
Huh? I don’t even understand the question. Culture has everything to do with everything. If the torturers don’t understand the culture, they will ask the wrong questions, misinterpret the answers, and in general get the wrong idea entirely. As for “what he wants to hear”, I am arguing that that is an essential phenomenon which happens during interrogation under torture.
It did with my kids.