I’m kind of curious how Scylla seemed (in the OP as I understood it) to be dubious of the effects of waterboarding but note that the Spanish Inquisition found it useful (as did a number of other governments since then). Did he suppose their torturers were inept (“Put her in the comfy chair!”) torturers or people back then were just pussies?
The experience was a learning curve. I didn’t know as much about it when I started researching or trying it as I did when I was finished and ready to write my post.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
If all you want out of someone is a “Yes, I consort with witches, now stop doing that!” I imagine it’s quite useful. There’s a difference between torture as a means to elicit confession and torture as a means to elicit specific information.
Always kind of wondered about this.
I think it is rather obvious that under torture you can get anyone to admit to anything. Movies aside the real world info I have read suggests that NO ONE can withstand torture…not even for very long.
So why the bother? Are the courts/government/torturers really convinced at the end of it all that they have a “real” confession? Surely they know they any confession is bullshit…if they were in the chair being tortured they admit to being a witch (or whatever) as well.
If they mean to burn someone at the stake do they really feel better that they got a “real” witch after forcing a “confession” out of them?
I’ll take a guess at this one, Whack-a-Mole.
Disclaimer: I’ve never been tortured nor tortured anyone, and I don’t believe in it.
Back in the days of the Inquisition, the objective of torture was a confession, and possibly a list of other people to go and torture. I imagine torture is an effective way to get someone to say, “YES, I DID IT.” As I understand it, truth was not overly important to the Grand Inquisitor.
These days, the objective is specific information. They’re not looking for an answer to “did you commit adultry.” They’re looking for an answer to “where did you plant the bomb, when is it set to go off, who financed your operation, and who’s your boss.” In this case, truth is critically important. If the torturee (is that a word?) simply says what he thinks the torturer wants to hear, that will not be useful.
I would say it’s because leaders are as imperfect as anyone, and the illusion of perfect knowledge is beguiling. We’d like to think there’s something we can do to force the truth to come out in time to save the day. Even though we know it’s unlikely.
Historian John Keegan has written that leaders have long been absorbed with the idea of a spy in the enemy’s innermost council who could tell you not only details of his plans, but shed light on his goals, what he values, and his decision-making process. Very rarely does such a thing come to pass, but vast amounts of effort have been expended on it.
Interrogation is similarly prone to being led astray by the hope that we can reliably produce innermost truth. The desire that it could be true is very powerful and can lead us to do things we otherwise wouldn’t.
That torture is evil is enough to discredit. I see no reason to argue that it isn’t efficacious in eliciting accurate information. Common sense seems dictates otherwise. A failure of torture seems to me to indicate an incompetent torturer.
For a thought experiment (for those of you who liked Saw:)
Information is locked in a padlocked box which will save the life only one of two men. Both men will do anything to live. One man knows the padlock’s combination but is securely bound. The other man does not know it, but has a wide array of torture paraphanelia at his diposal. If, in one hour the box has not been opened it belongs to the bound man.
My bet is that nine times out of ten the torturer gets the combination. I think I’m pretty tough, but I’ve suffered through some pain where I would have done anything to make it go.
People think their brain is a single entity in their control, but the fact is that their are many different subconscience instincts that take control. For example, if you accidentally put your hand on a hot burner you will snatch it back before you consciously decide to. It is not a decision of which you have control. If you are strong willed and thinking about it, it is possible that you might keep your hand on that hot plate, and overrule your instincts. However, the ability of the subconscience to insidiously overrule and even coopt your conscience self is well-known.
Heroin and crack addicts will do literally anything to get the next fix. They can’t help themselves. It overcomes the will. So, all that’s needed is a torture that is more unpleasant than drug withdrawal. Drug withdrawal by itself supposedly isn’t all that horrible. The comfort isn’t intolerably high. However, it simply never goes away. It grows and it builds, and wears you down.
I would guess that people maybe think that torture doesn’t work, because torturers typically try short intense painful experiences, while a longer, lasting one is probably what would do the trick.
Put somebody’s hand on the hotplate and let them know it stays there until the lock is open, and I bet it gets opened in minutes.
That would work on me. So would waterboarding. So would a bunch of other things. The only chance I have is a stupid torturer who’s simply going to punch me
What if both men were in a lifeboat? Maybe 100 kittens and puppies will be put through a meat grinder if the box is opened etc.
This kind of argument is totally fatuous. It does happen in the real world. It is a fantasy. If you want to base your belief system on something you dreamed about after watching a Hollywood movie, then so be it. I prefer to base my morality on things more grounded in reality.
This is such a basic logical fallacy that it doesn’t belong on this board. The source of an idea has no bearing on it’s validity. I don’t give a shit whether the idea is based on a movie, Howdy Doody or Dr. Fucking Seuss, and neither should any other intelligent critical thinker.
If you disagree with the line of reasoning than you should say something about that, but your argument as stated is as about as intelligent as saying the White Album by the Beatles has nothing to say because the cover is blank.
Anyway, the specifics don’t really matter. It’s the principles.
Your thinking has bigger holes than Lindsay Lohan.
Ostriches stick their head in the dirt, too.
There’s a few problems that are going to affect how helpful torture is.
With the Inquisition, there’s a single answer that stops the torture; Yes, I confess. Both the torturer and the tortured know that. So it’s going to be relatively easy to get that confession out. Just as importantly, the tortured person can’t use something else to get out of it - telling them his name or his job isn’t going to stop the torture. And the “test” for truth is the confession itself - the torturer doesn’t need to do anything more than get it to recieve the reward he seeks.
With Scylla’s lockbox, there are many answers that will stop the torture; the tortured man can give up any number he wants. This makes it slightly less effective, but the test for truth is shifted from the confession itself to a checking of the combination - the torturer will know immediately if the tortured man is lying, and this probably won’t improve the man’s mood. However, there’s also a timespan, which means that the tortured man can stall for time with fake answers, should he be bold enough.
With a suspect who isn’t accused of a specific crime, the problem becomes much greater. The tortured suspect has a huge range of lies he can make up, and because there can’t be any immediate test for truth, the ability to stall becomes greater still - it may well be the truth isn’t found out at all. If it’s (as with the usual example) a nuclear bomb ticking away somewhere in a city, time is still needed for someone to go and find that it isn’t actually there. If it’s details of an organisation, lies have an even greater possible range, an even larger time until truth can be found.
A smart torturer is still limited by what they go into the torture knowing, and by the means of actually checking the answer. To alter the thought experiment - imagine the lockbox is in a room 50 minutes away, giving the torturer not enough time for a return trip. Or if the torturer does not know about the lockbox in the same room at all, and the tortured person sends him on a wild goose chase. How likely now is it that the torture will be effective - and which seems the thought experiment closer to real life situations?
Hardly. To avoid this one simply keeps the torture going while they check the lockbox. The torture doesn’t stop until the box is open.
Again, your working with the “incompetent torturer” hypothesis. If the torture continues until the box is open than the one being tortured cannot lessen or end his torture with fake answers.
Yes. That is all valid. While my scenario is simplistic, it is simplistic on both sides of the equation. The problem is not knowing what you don’t know, and not being immediately able to test information. This is the same problem often faced by a police interrogator not employing torture. In either case, the best way around this is to have multiple people to interrogate.
That’s fair. As you’ve altered the scenario, I would think that 9 out of ten times it would not work. The torturer really only has 10 minutes, and only time to verify one answer. Yes, I would agree that it would be more realistic.
Let’s make it even more realistic:
As has been often said, the ticking time bomb scenario isn’t realistic, so why limit it to an hour? Why not 8 hours, or a week? For the sake of brevity let’s make it 8 hours.
I do however think that the part of the scenario you gave about only getting one chance to verify the information probably is accurate. I lie from a tortureee that is acted on it will probably blow cover or otherwise reveal that somebody has been compromised. So, that is a good alteration.
However, I would also say that it is rare that one might only have one person to work with. A competant torturer with multiple subjects could compare information while keeping his subjects separated to avoid collusion.
So, to alter the scenario again: The box is 8 hours away and the torturer only has sixteen hours total (only enough time to check the box once.) However, he has multiple subjects kept separately. With two, I would think the odds go back up to 7-8 times out of ten the box gets opened. With three, I think it’ more like 9 times out 10.
Scylla, I don’t think your locked safe analogy would turn out to be very close to how torture of captives usually works.
The problem is the ability of the torturer to immediately verify whether the given combination is correct. It takes him less than a minute to test whether the victim is lying.
What sort of questions do you imagine the CIA is going to put to a captured suspected terrorist? It’s not going to be “where is the bomb hidden?”. It’s going to be “Tell me about your associates. Who are they? What are they planning?” And then the prisoner gets tortured, and they eventually say a few names.
And then what happens? Well, these guys probably aren’t living in their mother’s basement in New Jersey. They are told a name, and that the guy lives in Pakistan. And then what? How do you verify the truth? It will take days or weeks to find anything about this guy, and in the meantime what then? Do you stop torturing the victim? Why would you, when he could be lying? So even while you’re checking out the story about the guy in Pakistan, you keep on torturing him in the meantime. And so the victim learns that it doesn’t matter what he says, whether he lies or tells the truth, because the truth, if there is any truth, doesn’t stop the torture. You torture him for information, then when he gives you information you torture him to get him to admit that he was lying.
Unless you decide there’s nothing the prisoner can do to make the torture stop. And so you torture the victim 183 times. And for what? Apparently the reasoning behind the real-life cases was to instill “learned helplessness”. In other words, they weren’t torturing these guys to get information, exactly. They were torturing them over and over and over again in order to destroy them as human beings to the point where they would agree to whatever the torturer asked. Like whether there was a connection between Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
In other words, it appears the government torture program turns out to be more akin to the medieval inquisitions or the Stalinist show trials where the goal is to get the victim to confess to whatever the inquisitor wants, than your example of a locked safe where the torture can stop simply by giving the torturer the combination.
I don’t think it is possible for an institutional program of torture to operate on a scientific basis. The torturers always torture, and their victims confess, and that proves that torture works, and therefore we need more torture. The main thing the torturers want to hear in this case is that the torture program is successful, and so miraculously the torture victims reassure the torturers that it was successful.
In your situation, there’s only one torturer - while i’d certainly agree we should consider a situation with smart torturers, I think that to ask him to carry on while also fiddling with a combination lock is one task too many. 
Plus, multiple people to test - i’d imagine in the most realistic scenario possible, we’d have to account for other people or even teams of people doing the checking portion, depending on the threat and the timescale, though they too would need time to get anywhere.
I’m not sure. By waiting for a consistent story, the problem of being only able to check a limited number of times can be accounted for, assuming the suspects haven’t agreed on a false plan in advance or by luck hit on the same story. But i’d say the problem with that approach is that it needs two confessors - one confessor won’t be checked, even if his story might otherwise be. It solves one problem while adding more to another - the torture now not only has to work once, but twice. A further problem is at what point does the torture stop - does it simply continue, for 8 hours, the torturer refuting everything the suspects say until there’s a match? Because if so, then the tortured person has no incentive to give in - the torture’s going to continue no matter if they tell the truth or not. If you instead go for a “round” of torture, check all the stories, then go in for another round, and so on until you get a match, then you end up slowing down the entire process to the speed of the strongest-willed suspect.
I think the problem with adding multiple suspects is that it’s only superior if torture works in the first place. It’s an added ability to check before the actual check, but it doesn’t improve the speed of results, or the likelihood of getting a truth. It just increases the likelihood that a truth, once confessed, will be recognised - so in my eyes, the chance the box will be opened is exactly the same, and the only difference will be that the torturer will be more likely to know they’ve failed.
The closest real life analogy that springs to my mind is Lawrence Oates. He could have easily stabbed Captain Scott and the others, eaten them and survived. In the real world he chose suicide.
If you’re happy that your fantasy scenario is more principle than reality, that’s your choice.
If you need any more real world scenarios where actual real life people chose a path other than murder, I’ll be happy to oblige.
I’m familiar with the story. Being weaker and more injured than the others, I doubt he could have stabbed them to death, and, since none of the others survived, I doubt it would have helped Oates.
Also, being alone in such a situation is certainly less advantageous than having company to split work and help support each other.
So, I don’t really see any metaphor for torture.
No. It’s not necessary. You are completely and totally missing the point. We are not talking about the moral component of torture, or whether or not one should or would choose it.
I agree that it is bad, and I am neither happy nor unhappy. It is simply a fact.
Whether or not something is a good idea is a separate argument from whether or not it will work. As I said before, the fact that torture is evil is enough to totally and completely discredit the practice, in my estimation.
There is no reason to have to argue that it doesn’t work. I don’t see why people need to discredit every single aspect of an invalid stance. I think it actually weakens the argument against torture to suggest it won’t work.
The moral argument against torture is unassailable. The utility argument against it is weak. Arguing fallaciously against the utility of it weakens the moral argument by association.
It’s like arguing against handguns by saying that they aren’t useful to shoot people with. While it is true that one can miss, or otherwise achieve an unfavorable result, clearly a handgun in competent hands is a useful tool of violence.
Why make such a bad argument when there is a perfectly good strong argument?
So, torture is morally bad but pragmatically it works. And therefore trumps morality.
That being the case, (in a purely hypothetical case) if your kid/wife/grandad was wrongly accused of being being a terrorist, you’d be first in line with the electrodes just to extract the confessions? I don’t want to live in that world.
Torture can be used to extract confessions, but you seem to live (and be happy with) a world where accusation equals guilt. If your hypothetical world is so great at
a) identifying with 100% accuracy who the terrorists are, and;
b) the exact time of when their terrorist outrages are going to occur, then :-
c) how come they can’t find out where the putative bomb is?
If you live in bizarro world, then I’m happy for you and your cattle prods In the real world, life is a little less Jack Bauer.
I honestly could not have written my previous post any clearer. I cannot understand how you get that from what I wrote.
???
It’s like you are arguing with somebody else. You haven’t listened to anything I said.
No. As I stated. The morality trumps utility.
No. Torture is evil. That is sufficient enough argument to invalidate it’s use. I said that, too.
Torture can be used to extract confessions, but you seem to live (and be happy with) a world where accusation equals guilt.
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I did not say that accusation equals. I don’t believe it does. I don’t know how you can actually read my posts and get that out of it.
Not that I’m Mr. Grammar or anything, but what kind of sentence is that? I can’t parse meaning or what the actual question is I should be responding to.
I don’t think I’m the one in bizzaro world here. For someone who claims to be reality based, your responses bare little resemblance to the words I wrote. I suspect your inebriated.
In the real world, it might take 45 minutes to get to the damned box to try the combination. In that case, the bound guy is going to be the one left standing.