How would you respond to this high school student's question re torture?

[Whack-a-Mole]

@aldiboronti

I didn 't say the French use of tiorture worked, I know full well it didn’t. My point was that the French used the German techniques because they had worked for the Germans in WWII. If they hadn’t worked then the French wouldn’t have bothered trying.

Cite for torture being effective for the Germans in WWII please.

And then explain away Hanns Scharff, the Luftwaffe’s “Master Interrogator” in WWII.

He is highly praised for the success of his techniques, especially considering he never used physical means to obtain the required information. No evidence exists he even raised his voice in the presence of a prisoner of war (POW). Scharff’s interrogation techniques were so effective that he was often called upon to assist other German interrogators in their questioning of bomber pilots and aircrews, including those crews and fighter pilots from countries other than the United States. Additionally, Scharff was charged with questioning V.I.P.s (Very Important Prisoners) that funneled through the interrogation center, namely senior officers and world-famous fighter aces.

After the end of WWII, Scharff was invited by the United States Air Force to give lectures on his interrogation techniques and first-hand experiences. The U.S. military later incorporated Scharff’s methods into its curriculum at its interrogation schools. Scharff’s methods are still taught in US Army interrogation schools.

As for watching too many movies, that’s just a cheap shot unworthy of GD. Unsurprising though from a poster who insists on capitalizing and underlining a word as if that somehow makes it unanswerable. And repeating it. You seem to be of the Bellman’s mind, “What I tell you three times is true.”

It is providing emphasis. This medium precludes the cues we pickup from verbal communication so we use various means to provide the equivalent emphasis. Sorry you are unaware of that.

And of course in time honored debate fashion when you’ve got nothing attack the person instead of the argument.

If you’ve got cites galore to debunk the mountain I and others have provided in the threads I have linked for you (in a previous post) then have at it. If all this reading I am supposedly unaware of supports your claim then it should be no trouble for you to back your assertions with proof.

[aldiboronti]

You completely ignored my citation of Jean Moulin in reply to your assertion that everybody breaks under torture so I rather think the effort of gathering cites would be time wasted.

There seems to be a real fear that if we admit that torture can prove effective sometimes then it opens the door to its use. Hence the reams of literature arguing that it’s never effective. (Heavens forfend that the Americans just aren’t very good at it.)

Torture is wrong. It’s always wrong. But it sometimes works. (Are you really denying that?)

[Miller]

@aldiboronti

I didn 't say the French use of tiorture worked, I know full well it didn’t. My point was that the French used the German techniques because they had worked for the Germans in WWII. If they hadn’t worked then the French wouldn’t have bothered trying.

What standard are you using for “worked,” here? Because the Germans never did quash the resistance or completely pacify France. The resistance was a perpetual problem for the occupying Germans right up until the Allied advance pushed them out of the country. It’s possible that, given more time to work over the native population, the Nazi’s tactics might have eventually succeeded, but I don’t think that you can call what actually happened a “success.”

[ShibbOleth]

Have him read this article, “Acts of Conscience”

The harshest frequent technique used at Nama was the use of cold water, Jeff says. Cold can be a serious torment to a naked man on a winter night; in Afghanistan, one prisoner died from hypothermia. Sometimes, to maximize the humiliation of the Iraqi men, American women would be brought in to watch them undress. Sleep deprivation was also used to an extreme extent, especially in Jeff’s early days at Nama. They could keep a prisoner on his feet for twenty hours, and although the rules required them to allow each prisoner four hours of sleep every twenty-four hours, nowhere did it say those four hours had to be consecutive — so sometimes they’d wake the prisoners up every half hour. Eventually they’d just collapse. “This was a very demanding method for the interrogators as well, because it required a lot of staff to monitor the prisoner, and we’d have to stay awake, too,” Jeff says. “And it’s just impossible to interrogate someone when he’s in that state, collapsed on the ground. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Since these techniques violate both the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual, the all-important rule book that carries the force of military law, the Bush administration has attempted to finesse the issue by creating the distinction between “prisoners of war” and “enemy combatants,” promising to reserve the harsh techniques only for hardcore Al Qaeda members and not for the Iraqis or even the Taliban.

Jeff saw the effects of beatings “all the time” in the captives as they arrived, usually after they were arrested by Delta Force members working for Task Force 121. “They’d fall on their knees and beg you not to kill them,” he said, “completely terrified because of the way they were treated the previous forty-eight hours.”

And it wasn’t easy to clear suspects, either. One time Jeff told the senior interrogator that the guy he was interrogating was a chump, just a nobody picked up by accident, and the colonel dressed him down in an open meeting: “You don’t know that! You just couldn’t break him!”

Then for Jeff the doubting began.

“Even if these people did do these things, I don’t want to do these things to them,” he says. “I want to be humane about it. I want to keep my dignity.”

Experimenting with more-traditional “soft” techniques like the appeal to a man’s pride or to the futility of resistance, he found them both more successful and more reliable. At least you knew it was more likely to be genuine when a person decided to cooperate. “From what I’ve seen of harsh physical tactics,” Jeff says, "[it’s] harder to tell if they’re just saying something to stop the discomfort. But if a prisoner breaks by the more-traditional means, you instantly know it.

“I’d done harsh interrogations, with little or no results at all. And I saw a lot of other people do harsh interrogations, too, and just never saw any type of results to speak of at all.” But most of the interrogators in the camp were totally gung ho and wanted to go harsh on everybody. It was that kind of unit. “They thought that was their job and that’s what they needed to do, and do it every time.”

He began to feel more and more repelled, he says. I don’t want to hang out with these people. I don’t want to see them do these things.

By then it was spring and the Army was starting to hum with tales of Abu Ghraib, although it had not yet broken in the media — the first story would hit TV on April 28. But Jeff and some of the other interrogators started talking about the things they were doing at Nama. They weren’t as sexually abusive as the things that went on at Abu Ghraib, but they were making a daily mockery of the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions. “Nobody was stupid enough to take pictures, but you know, it’s the same stuff,” says Jeff. “You kind of got the sense that some people thought it was fun. And I think kind of an underlying thing was it was fun for people, but they had this guise of like it was always, you know, for the information.”

[Whack-a-Mole]

@aldiboronti

You completely ignored my citation of Jean Moulin in reply to your assertion that everybody breaks under torture so I rather think the effort of gathering cites would be time wasted.

There seems to be a real fear that if we admit that torture can prove effective sometimes then it opens the door to its use. Hence the reams of literature arguing that it’s never effective. (Heavens forfend that the Americans just aren’t very good at it.)

Torture is wrong. It’s always wrong. But it sometimes works. (Are you really denying that?)

Yes I am really denying that torture works. Perhaps it is more apt to say it can work but then picking people out of a phone book randomly and hoping they are an enemy can work too. The point is there are much better alternatives to torture. Proven alternatives. As noted even that liberal squishy-hearted Napoleon recognized that torture was a waste of time (unless you want false confessions in which case it is the best tool for that task).

I did not ignore Jean Moulin. I noted that torture actually tends to make prisoners more resistant. That is part of the reason it is terrible as a means to gather information.

“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”

SOURCE:The Politics of “24” | The New Yorker

I have responded to your questions. I have provided you cites. I have pointed you to threads where we have been over this ground and provided a great deal more cited information.

So far your response as been to dance around and accuse me of not reading or not responding which is certainly not the case. I have directly addressed your posts.

Unfortunately you seem to be one of those who would rather hold on to their biases than educate themselves (or, if you really are right, educate us…fighting ignorance and all that).

[Whack-a-Mole]

@aldiboronti

I didn 't say the French use of tiorture worked, I know full well it didn’t. My point was that the French used the German techniques because they had worked for the Germans in WWII. If they hadn’t worked then the French wouldn’t have bothered trying.

@Miller

What standard are you using for “worked,” here? Because the Germans never did quash the resistance or completely pacify France. The resistance was a perpetual problem for the occupying Germans right up until the Allied advance pushed them out of the country. It’s possible that, given more time to work over the native population, the Nazi’s tactics might have eventually succeeded, but I don’t think that you can call what actually happened a “success.”

No kidding.

Finally found the post where gaffa cited Professor Darius Rejali with the following bit (link to gaffa’s post):

So you tell me, does torture work? I’ll give you the opinion of the professional Gestapo.

In 1942 the Czech resistance assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotector of Czechoslovakia, Hitler wanted results, he didn’t care how, he said these guys don’t listen to anything, and the Gestapo got the three bad guys but to do that they tortured and killed 7,545 individuals, annihilating two villages. They also got 100 resistance members on the side they weren’t looking for but that’s pretty typical results, Battle of Algiers, Vietnam, we can go through them.

In Algiers we have:

Out of the casbah’s total population of 80,000 citizens, Massu arrested 30 to 40 percent of all males.

<snip>

Police records show that Teitgin issued 800 detention orders (arrêtes d’assignation) for eight months before the battle, 700 for the first three months of the battle and then 4,000 a month for the remaining months. By the end of the battle, he had issued orders to detain 24,000, most of whom (80 percent of the men and 66 percent of the women) were routinely tortured.

SOURCE: http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2004/06/21/torture_algiers/index.html

So I guess the lesson is if you torture pretty much freaking everyone you can have some small success via that method.

[aldiboronti]

@Whack-a-Mole

I did not ignore Jean Moulin. I noted that torture actually tends to make prisoners more resistant. That is part of the reason it is terrible as a means to gather information.

I’m trying to reconcile your two statements, that everybody (underlined for emphasis) breaks, and that torture makes prisoners more resistant.

The task is proving positively Herculean.

[Captain_Carrot]

Breaking isn’t the same as yielding useful information, or knowing anything when interrogated again in a month.

[Der_Trihs]

@aldiboronti

I’m trying to reconcile your two statements, that everybody (underlined for emphasis) breaks, and that torture makes prisoners more resistant.

The task is proving positively Herculean.

Because they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear, not the truth. Especially after they tell the truth and get tortured for it. And then there’s the ones who go insane.

And once you torture them you are unlikely to ever good good information out of them, even without torture. Because they’ll always be operating under the principle that you might at any time torture them again. They know what you are.

[begbert2]

@Der_Trihs

And once you torture them you are unlikely to ever good good information out of them, even without torture. Because they’ll always be operating under the principle that you might at any time torture them again. They know what you are.

I’d imagine you could call somebody else to “good cop” them, though. Although it wouldn’t be the actual torture that yeilded any info - and you could do that without going as far as torture just as well.

[Peter_Morris]

posted in error - deleted

[Der_Trihs]

@begbert2

I’d imagine you could call somebody else to “good cop” them, though. Although it wouldn’t be the actual torture that yeilded any info - and you could do that without going as far as torture just as well.

I wouldn’t expect that to work under most circumstances, since they’d have no reason to think that someone who works with a monster is not also a monster; you can’t play “good cop” with someone who won’t believe that you are “good”. And I do recall that one of the complaints of the serious interrogators was how their sources were ruined after the torturers got their hands on them.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Der_Trihs

And I do recall that one of the complaints of the serious interrogators was how their sources were ruined after the torturers got their hands on them.

Been so many of these threads and many are so long I cannot be arsed to look it up now but yes, I recall the FBI being more than a little cheesed off that their sources were ruined by this. There is a quote from some FBI guy somewhere exactly on this point…I think. (Like I said…so many cites I am losing track)

[Peter_Morris]

@Chris Moise

My fiancee and I recieved the below email from a high school junior … How would you guys respond to the below?

… Whether it is officially torture or not, the CIA protects this country and keeps all of us safe from evils we never even knew about. In return for this, these men and women are embarrased by their own government and people, who claim they needlessly tortured people. … These prisoners are not deserving of the same rights as Americans. First of all they are prisoners of war, secondly they are PRISONERS and deserve punishment. How can an American think this?

Find and give him a good history of the Salem witch trials. Have him read it, then ask him a few questions on it. Use his own words against him, as far as possible.

Was it worthwhile? The trials kept all of us safe from Satan’s evil that we never even knew about. The accused were all witches, and minions of Satan, not deserving of the same rights as Christians. They were prisoners, and deserved punishment. And many of them confessed under torture to witchcraft, which is conclusive proof of their guilt.

If he doesn’t get the point from that, there’s no hope.

[aldiboronti]

The same mantra keeps being repeated, “They’ll tell you what you want to hear.” None of you seem to allow for the fact that some torturers will want to hear nothing but the truth and will take all possible steps to ensure that they get it. If the information extracted proves false it is, after all, to the discredit of the torturer.

It all comes down to this. The extraction of information by torture is a skill. Used clumsily, it will provide nothing. Used by those who wish to hear only that which will please their superiors, it will yield only that.

But used by a determined and clever torturer in search of hard facts it is a fearful engine which can and has been used successfully time and time again throughout history.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@aldiboronti

The same mantra keeps being repeated, “They’ll tell you what you want to hear.” None of you seem to allow for the fact that some torturers will want to hear nothing but the truth and will take all possible steps to ensure that they get it. If the information extracted proves false it is, after all, to the discredit of the torturer.

It all comes down to this. The extraction of information by torture is a skill. Used clumsily, it will provide nothing. Used by those who wish to hear only that which will please their superiors, it will yield only that.

But used by a determined and clever torturer in search of hard facts it is a fearful engine which can and has been used successfully time and time again throughout history.

You really are informed on this by watching Rambo movies aren’t you?

I’ve asked repeatedly for cites to your assertions. Yet all you make are assertions.

Time and again throughout history? Great! You should have a metric crapload of material to shut me up. The collected knowledge of centuries of torturers.

Lay it on me.

Bottom line is you’ve got nothing but too many episodes of “24” informing you.

We have done this here…at length. I pointed you to some of it. Willing to bet you didn’t even look. If you did you’d know you’d need more than these “feelings” of yours that torture magically is useful. Hell, I pointed out pieces up thread. Did you respond to a single point? Nope.

Face it, you are dishonest on this subject. You want torture to be “ok” for some reason or another. I won’t begin to guess why but realize your notions are utterly without merit.

May as well start telling us the sun rises in the west. You’ll have about the same luck with that.

[aldiboronti]

You really want me to dig up cites for the successful use of torture? Are you serious? Is it your position then that no useful information has ever been extracted under torture? Is that really what you’re asking me to bring up cites against?

I ask because I can’t quite believe that this is the position you’re taking. Confirm for me that it is and I’ll take the trouble to bring up an instance to explode such a ridiculous assertion, a cite.

Oh, I’ll take the trouble anyway, as it needs very little thought. When Guy Fawkes was captured by the authorities in Jacobean England he was put to the torture and eventually gave up the names of his fellow plotters, including Sir William Stanley. This was genuine information, not just “what they wanted to hear.” What they wanted to hear was the identities of the others, and with the use of torture that is precisely what they got.

Wikipedia lists authoritative sources but I’m sure I can dig better up if you’re really going to argue the point.

OK, that’s one. Think that’s the only time in the whole of history it’s been used successfully? Really?

By the way I’ve never watched 24, haven’t got a clue what it’s about, other than Kiefer Sutherland saving Western civilization each week. And I wouldn’t trust Hollywood to get one single thing right anyway. My information comes from reading books, and I don’t trust those unless they’re well-sourced.

[aldiboronti]

Another cite for the successful use of torture.

Israeli intelligence in 1994 discovered the whereabouts of Cpl Nachson Waxman, a soldier kidnapped by Hamas, by means of torturing the driver of the kidnap car. (And the fact that the resultant rescue mission was botched has no relevance at all to the argument. The torture still successfully revealed his location.)

I’m sure you don’t need a link for that as Krauthammer wrote about it recently in a column and it received a lot of publicity.

Gotta go. Rambo II’s about to start.

[aldiboronti]

Oh the more the merrier.

I should have remembered Walsingham, he came up recently in an excellent biography of Christopher Marlowe that I bought.

In the realm of counter-espionage, Walsingham was behind the discovery of the Throckmorton and Babington plots to overthrow Elizabeth I, return England to Catholicism and place Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne.

In November 1583, after months of surveillance, Walsingham had Throckmorton arrested. He extracted, under torture, Throckmorton’s confession — an admission that he had plotted against Elizabeth with the Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, and others. The plot, which may not have been known to Mary, called for a two-pronged invasion of England and Scotland along with a domestic uprising. Throckmorton was executed in 1584, and Mendoza was expelled from England.

Sir Francis Walsingham is the perfect example of a ruthless and clever torturer.

Need more examples?

[Kalhoun]

@aldiboronti

Oh the more the merrier.

I should have remembered Walsingham, he came up recently in an excellent biography of Christopher Marlowe that I bought.

Sir Francis Walsingham is the perfect example of a ruthless and clever torturer.

Need more examples?

A stopped clock is right twice a day, too. I don’t doubt that torture sometimes results in useful information. But if we concentrate only on the occasional effectiveness, the fact that it is illegal, inhumane and barbaric tends to get lost in the shuffle.

We don’t want to be “that guy.” That’s why we signed the Geneva Conventions. As a government and a world power that wants to be known for setting the tone, we don’t torture because it’s wrong. The fact that it sometimes works should have no bearing on our decision to decry torture.