Well, would you care to explain the difference? Because it’s obviously far too nuanced for me.
Or rather, would you care to explain how the distinction is relevant to our discussion?
Precisely correct. This is why the canard that “torture doesn’t work” is so popular. No, it doesn’t work as a holistic means of getting information. In your example, the criminals are relying on basically chance/hope/dumb luck to a large degree, hoping that their brutality will fill in the blanks.
It just shows that torture will only work if you have a lot of other information. It can provide information but only if you have other pieces of the puzzle. Again, torture is extremely effective as a method of societal control/punishment (ala the inquistion or other examples from the middle ages), as a form of intelligence gathering it is rarely suitable as a “stand alone” source.
My best counter to your example is, “that’s a good example of some criminals that should have done their research.” It takes no great feat to find out for sure if a house has a safe, and to then find out who knows the combination to said safe (in truth it’s not all that hard to find a way into a safe in which you don’t have to involve the owners at all–this is always preferable to having to torture it out of the owner, add in the human elements and things are always dicier.)
Exactly. “Torture doesn’t work, period” is such an absolute statement that it’s almost impossible that it is true. Torture can certainly work in certain situations. Then we see the debate reframed slightly to, “in the circumstances where torture WOULD work to gather information, you’d already have so much information that the torture would be pointless” well, that’s very different from the absolutist claim that torture doesn’t work. Torture can work and I’d bet my life it has worked at least once in human history as a means of gathering information.
Is torture a bad policy? Yep. I think it’s immoral to boot, and am no fan of it regardless of its efficacy. Start a thread saying “torture isn’t a very good way to get information” and I’d agree 100%, but say that “torture is never effective” or “torture never works, ever” and I’ll have to disagree. The only thing necessary to disprove that absolute statement is show ONE example in all of human history in which a person was tortured and as a result gave up information that was true. It doesn’t have to be relevant information, doesn’t even have to be important information.
How about “Torture is a very ineffective way of gathering accurate information.”?
Sure. I’m not sure why you seem to not realize how different an absolute statement is from a non-absolute statement. One side of the debate throughout this thread (until well, now) has basically been tied to the absolutist “torture doesn’t work, period” point.
Actually, that’s just the way people normally talk. If, for example, you say “Can, I kill a particular person by pointing a pistol in the air and the bullet hitting them on the way down ?”, people are quite likely to say, “No that’s a silly idea that won’t work.” Not “There’s a tiny chance it’ll work if you get extremely lucky, but there’s no point in trying because it’s virtually certain to fail.”
Also, one needs to consider what one means by “work”. Most of the time, a larger context is involved. If, say, as has been claimed in Iraq you torture people and all your other sources of information dry up because no one wants to talk to you, has torture ‘worked’ , or has it actually cost you net information ? Even assuming you actually got accurate information from your original victim, which seems unlikely ( because if they actually got some useful data the Bushies would trumpet it everywhere ). And how can you trust any information from someone you have tortured ? Torture poisons the well, among it’s other problems.
Probably not. You’ll say what they want to hear in order to stop them, which will only be the truth if they already knew or guessed the truth.
Note that the defenders of torture come up with one “ticking bomb” scenario after another to show how torture might work, but never actual examples of it working. If it ever works at getting the truth, it appears to be a very rare occurrence.
Subtle quibble - “Torture is a very effective way of gathering inaccurate information.”
Well, I certainly don’t want to defend the idea of torture. Moreover, I believe the harm that is done to a nation or group which indulges in it generally overwhelms any good accomplished regardless of how helpful the information is. I won’t say never for just the type of reason you describe above.
Nevertheless I suspect that torture, in expert and experienced hands, is reasonably effective. You need information from your prisoner. Surely there is a progression from volunteered information to information gathered by expert interrogation techniques and relationship building. As a last resort, or perhaps to glean any residual information, you use torture. Of course it is a dastardly and wicked and inappropriate approach with a larger negative consequence. But does it, with reasonable frequency (in expert hands) produce results? I think it does.
The OP asks for proof. I’m not sure how you’d get a good double-blind study (the word-choice seems appropriate, somehow). At the same time those who insist it is unproductive seem to apply standards for the information gathered that are unreasonable (it isn’t perfect information; it isn’t timely; it is incomplete). It feels to me that they want torture to be an inadequate method because it shortcuts the problem of criticizing “necessary-for-a-greater-good” argument.
OK. I personally would just rather say that torture is probably a reasonably effective tool but it shouldn’t be used.
Torture is useless to get a confession, as they will always confess. It is nigh useless in gathering Intel, as they will start out lying, then tell the truth, then start making shit up. You have no idea of what stage you are in.
*
But* if you want to know where the bomb/victim/body* is, torture works just fine. You start, they lie, you confirm the lie, you continue until they have told you where it is and you have confirm this. However, this will only work if you are sure they know where the item is. Note that sometimes dudes will brag and tell you they know where it is, with "you’ll never make me talk.
- or any other easily verifyable fact.
But again, if that’s true, why aren’t it’s defenders coming up with examples of it actually working ? I hear lots of people insisting that it should work, but unable to come up with examples of it actually doing so. Instead, we either hear nothing of what “information” was acquired, or find out that it was wrong.
And another flaw in your argument is the assumption that expert interrogators actually torture people. Given it’s apparent low utility and obvious evil, why would they ? As far as I can tell, it’s not the expert interrogators who are gung-ho on torture; it’s the amateurs who think the right way to solve any problem is to “get tough” and to hell with right and wrong.
So torture in ‘expert hands’ doesn’t get you good data, because if they use torture, they aren’t expert. At anything but torture at least.
Because it’s easy to envision that somebody who is tortured might confess to something he or she didn’t do, in order to make the torture stop.
Granted, somebody who is being tortured may invent information he or she doesn’t have in order to make the torture stop. But people have been saying all along that in order for torture to work as a means of gathering information, there has to be some way of checking or verifying the information.
And it’s not necessarily true that you need to know something already in order to check or verify it.
Let’s have some cites then.
Not that this will make any difference for any posters who continue to demand instances where torture has worked in a limited context… after those instances have already been described in this thread. But ah well, I’m a glutton for punishment. (And as I’m not a Christian, I’m bored tonight… and all the stores are closed.)
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](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E2DB1F38F933A25757C0A9659C8B63)
It’s interesting that in that case, actual torture wasn’t even required. The mere threat of physical pain was enough to break the kidnapper in a few minutes flat (there was never any actual order to torture him, just the order to pretend that they were going to torture him). Unfortunately, it was too late. That doesn’t change the fact that the police were able to obtain accurate information from a suspect who had, previously, been unwilling to divulge any worthwhile information.
We really don’t need any more repetitions of how “Torture never works” or “all you get is false information ever” or “torture is never, ever more effective than other methods, in any circumstances, ever.” Do we?
Ah well.
It’s interesting because it completely negates your point. Threats aren’t torture.
Piffle. Its a minor semantic infraction, exaggerated to counterfeit a weakness in argument. I quite firmly believe that it is always stupid to bet all your money and draw to an inside straight flush. I would say “Don’t do that, you’ll never catch it.”
And that would be a minor semantic error, unworthy of correction or argument. It only takes one exception to bugger an extreme superlative, but, really, is it worth it? Must the hamsters suffer so? It is a perfectly ordinary figure of speech, which your hyper-literal parsing neither clarifies nor refutes.
Exactly; people use absolutes in speech all the time without meaning it literally. In fact, we tend to make fun of people who don’t and hedge everything they say with “usually”, “mostly”, “probably”, etc.
What? I never do that!
At the risk of actually responding to der…
Sure someone giving up information to avoid pain totally negates the fact that some people will give up information to avoid pain.
And, of course, if actual pain was applied to the kidnapper, we all know that he then would have refused to give up the information or given false information, although he cracked at the mere threat of pain. Torture induces masochism. Or something.
I suppose that offering to pay someone to do a job, and then withholding the money after they did the job would also totally negate the claim that people will sometimes do things for money.
I’m glad you’re on the case here, and we can handwave freely.
Luckily, those who claim, as an absolute, that torture never works? Those whose political position just coincidently happens (what luck!) to be predicated on the utter and total lack of efficacy of torture? Pointing out that torture does indeed sometimes work has nothing to do with their position. It doesn’t show that they’re abusing language to make a point. And it certainly doesn’t show that any debate on torture should be something along the lines of “Torture sometimes works but I don’t support it and here’s why” instead of “torture never ever works, so there’s no reason to use it.”
Obviously it is pure coincidence (what luck!) that the distorted ‘vernacular’ just happens to make it seem like one position is the only possible one. And it is just a strange coincidence that those same people do not say “torture works, so there’s no reason to ever use it.” The fact that such a formulation would make their absolutist political argument look absurd, and that it isn’t used, it just a coincidence (what luck!).
If it works in some situations and doesn’t work in other situations, then you can just happen to ignore those situations which don’t support your political position, coincidentally (what luck!). If someone in GQ asked if it was possible to win money playing the lottery, the factual answer would be that it is possible but unlikely. But when your ox is gored, it’s just fine is you ignore the possibility and feign absolute certainty. Of course. Because, like, everybody is doing it. And it is such a slam dunk.
Of course, if a dreaded neocon said “torture works, so we should use it.” you’d support that argument, since it’s vernacular and lots of people do it and blah blah blah, right? And even without the boogieman neocon, you’ll retract your spurious objections to how the opportunity to avoid inflicted pain can, in the right circumstances, compel someone to divulge accurate information. Right?
On a side note, it is elucidative to see your *Mighty Morphin’ Power Standards. *
Lots of people use absolutes that aren’t justified by the facts. People even make fun of proper semantics, they want things in black and white. No tollerance for nuance or sounding like one of those geeks who says “probable” instead of “definite.” And that’s just fine, because lots of people do it, they have an entire bandwaggon to ride on, and that’s nifty. Other people need like, walk or jog or something. And I’m sure you want to discuss rather than obfuscate this issue and are using a standard of logic you support that you would feel comfortable applying to any other situation.
So I am sure that we can soon see you in many threads, posting in support of religion. Because, after all, most people believe in religion and many even mock the atheistic. In addition, most people use “theory” to mean “guess”, and they mock those pointy egg-head scientists who use terminology precisely. So I trust that we can see you in many threads in the future, doing your best to criticize the theory of evolution as “just a theory.”
I trust I won’t have to wait very long for you to post in support of religion and creationism being taught along side evolution in our schools, since they’re both “just theories”. I mean… right?
Glad that everybody posting in this thread is dedicated to fighting ignorance and answering xt’s factual question, rather than fudging the facts to support a political position.
(Why do I even bother?)
If there were never any torture, then the threat thereof would be useless.