Actually I think that the line between torture and threats is a little blurry. For example, one of the classic ploys is the “mock execution.” While it’s done in different ways, the point is to make the victim think that he or she is or may be about to be killed.
You can laugh about it when you watch it in The Untouchables, but still.
Obedience to the torturers. Who will get what they asked for, which is quite likely not what is real.
And who would they be ? Not I. You are conflating three separate issues; does torture “work”, what do you mean by “work”, and should torture be allowed.
My political position is that torture should be absolutely forbidden, and those who perform it imprisoned for life without parole or executed. Whether torture “works” sometimes, all the time or never is irrelevant, and only of intellectual interest to me.
Because you are a right wing apologist.
From… you.
:rolleyes:
Ah well, don’t know why I wasted electrons.
Still looking forward to you supporting creationists who say that evolution is “just a theory”.
Well, they work on the same dynamic, the victim is given a choice between giving up information or suffering pain/injury/death. From what I understand, it is the psychological/physiological reaction that makes waterboarding torture. Which seems to be a similar reaction in a ‘mock execution’ scenario.
It’s not the pain itself that makes someone talk, but the promise that there won’t be inflicting pain in the future if the victim complies. Smashing someone’s hand with a hammer is much less likely to produce any results than smashing someone’s hand with a hammer and then telling them (or letting them believe) you’ll hit 'em again unless they divulge information. Torture is predicated on what people will do to avoid pain/suffering/injury/death.
I’d imagine that even the folks who’re dead set on denying that torture ever works couldn’t explain how the same person could crumble under the threat of torture but wouldn’t then give the same valid information under torture. Somehow I am fairly confident that any future answers will have the same pattern of avoidance that we just saw used.
I will be highly surprised if any of those whose positions are based on ideological purity and not facts will be able to support a claim that a person who’ll give up a specific bit of information under the threat of torture, wouldn’t give it up under actual torture.
Yes, “from me”. My political position DOES NOT require that torture never works. So, who are the people who you claim that do hold that position, who will say “OK, start the torture !”, if it’s shown to ever work ? All the people I know who oppose torture do so because it’s wrong.
And when they do, I and others point out that they obviously don’t know what they are talking about. Because they don’t.
Garbage. It’s the belief that if they say what the torturer wants to hear that the torture will stop. “Complying” has nothing to do with it.
Easy enough. They are not yet as panicked and irrational and desperate as they would be if they were actually tortured. And, the interrogators were lucky enough that the person in question actually knew what they wanted.
Oh, he’ll give it up all right. So would you, even if you didn’t have it.
And so what ? You keep acting like it matters if it works. If someone gets “information” from torture, true or not, burn it and kill the torturer.
I’m not going to spend any more time in this thread responding to or elaborating on any of your nonsequitors, absurdities, contradictions and double standards.
I’m bored, but I’m not that bored.
However, for the sake of the thread, I will be happy to fight your ignorance on another matter.
First, you might want to check the title of the thread
Then, you might want to read the thread.
Then you might want to go back and read the OP for content.
Then you might want to pay attention to how the OP said that this thread was only to focus on the factual question and that hopping up on a soapbox to talk about whether or not torture should be used was outside the thread’s scope.
The fact that you haven’t read the thread, noticed its title or refrained from engaging in discussion that the OP specifically said was off topic… might explain why you are baffled that I am discussing the topic of the thread. And why you have, twice now, flung puerile slanders at people who were merely attempting to discuss the topic of the thread. If you’re confused as to why someone would discuss the topic of the thread, maybe it explains why you assume that some of those talking about the topic of the thread are really supporters of torture or right wing apologists.
Now would probably be a good time to start your own thread if you have no intention of focusing on the topic of this one.
Ah well, back to a factual discussion: we’ve had a few examples where torture has been shown to work in limited circumstances. We also have (from such scum as those right wing apologists, Human Rights Watch) a statement, even within a piece claiming that torture does not work, that “Clearly, torture may sometimes persuade people to reveal information they would not otherwise have divulged.”
We have other individual examples, like the Battle of Algiers. The basic facts were that a messenger known as “Djamal” was captured and tortured by the French and revealed the location of a hidden FLN leader. This is simple historical fact, and of course (along with any other individual example) demolishes the absolutist claim that torture never works.
Now… getting back to the OP. On the question of whether torture “works at all.” The answer has to be that yes, in certain circumstances it absolutely gains valid information. On the question of whether or not “torture actually works in any kind of systematic way for extracting information?” The answer is probably not. Unless you have specific questions that you are asking of people who you know have the answers, and you have a fairly foolproof method of verifying their answers, you’ve got a fairly useless strategy. Torture as a means of gathering broad-based intel, or a systemic means of gathering any and all forms of information, is pretty much worthless.
As for the question of “What kind of success rate are we actually talking about here?” That’s tricky. I’m not aware of any valid statistical study on torture with rigidly controlled variables. It would probably be totally impossible to design such a study, in any case.
We do know that, tortured past their breaking point, many people will simply begin babbling. We also know that, despite obfuscatory rhetoric, there are some topics about which you really can’t babble much. Torture a bank robber and ask him where he buried his loot or you’ll torture him for twice as long next time, and there’s no possible reason for him to make anything up. The truth will not only be verifiable, it’ll end the torture.
(Standard disclaimer to avoid further obfuscation: the guy was caught on camera robbing the bank, and doesn’t have a twin, and admitted he robbed the bank, and his fingerprints and DNA were all over the bank, and he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, and he remembers where he buried the loot, and Jesus, Moses, Buddha and Mohammed all confirmed that he robbed the bank.
Whatever you need.
Just no more vapid and blindingly obvious bits of obfuscation like “But if the guy you torture didn’t actually know where the loot is, then he can’t tell you the real location!” )
We can even carry out a fairly rudimentary thought experiment to look at some circumstances in which torture might work. Every reader of this thread should be more than able to conceive of a situation in which they’ve just withdrawn money from an ATM, and someone comes up to them, say, with a knife, and demands their card and PIN number. Let’s say the threat is that they’ll cut out one of your eyes each time you give them the wrong number, and the time between you giving them a number and them checking it with your card at the machine right next to you is somewhere in the vicinity of five seconds. To avoid the standard bits of obfuscation, we can assume that the criminal has seen you just use the ATM, so they know for a fact that you have to have a card and the PIN. How many people here would, honestly, not simply give up their PIN number? That should give everybody reading the thread a pretty good idea of whether or not, in the right situation, torture would work.
Things get much less certain if we’re talking about, say, asking a spy who his contact is. If all he knows is that he got a phone call every third Thursday, and he was told to refer to the man on the line as “Bob”, there’s not much else he can tell you. And there’s no real way to check the accuracy of his information.
Did he really speak with some guy, codename “Bob”, or did he meet with Boris Badinoff and he knows Boris’ apartment number, too? If the interrogator assumes that the original answer is false (even if all the spy really does know is that his contact was some thin guy codenamed “Bob”), then we can get all sorts of absurd accusations.
We also have the fact that even after you break someone, they can still give you misinformation if they think that’s what you want to hear and/or they think you can’t check it for accuracy (see Abu Zubadyah and John McCain).
So, yes. Torture works. In limited circumstances. That is, when it is used to ask specific questions whose answers can quickly and consistently be verified. Torture may work for other, broader questions, but just like when an innocent (and often poor) person is offered a plea bargain for a crime they didn’t commit, and their state appointed lawyer advises them to take the deal rather than go to jail… people will admit to all sorts of things to avoid punishment.
But by the same token, I don’t see much more reason to be suspicious of a confession offered under torture than a confession via plea bargain that’s given to avoid the death penalty. Or any massive prison term, for that matter.
So, there’s really no simple answer. Sometimes torture works flawlessly. Sometimes all it yields is misinformation. Sometimes it gives you a mix of valid information and bullshit. Absent any methodologically sound statistical study, I doubt we’ll even know the relative efficacy of various types of torture in various circumstances with various people and various bits of information.
As always, reality is a bit more nuanced than an absurd black/white dichotomy.
The world is analog, not digital.
And despite the worldview of some, we’re not living in a comic book.
Ah, but ironically they weren’t.
The OP asks if there is any proof torture works, but I haven’t seen anything yet I’d classify as proof that it “works.” “Works” is not defined in the OP and that is a rather bad mistake, IMHO. Torture probably can under certain very limited circumstances, get limited amounts of useful information out of people. But does that meet the definition of “works”? Does “work” mean “effective enough to justify its use as a regular instrument of policy by a national government”? Then the anwer is probably “no.” Does “work” mean “can get useful information out of people under some fairly rare circumstances”? Then the answer is probably “yes.”
I think it’s pretty clear that it does work and we are wired that way. We put our hand on a hot stove once and we feel pain right away, and then we have lingering pain for some time after. We learn not to do that for fear of pain that is a direct result of our action. Torture has modified our behavior.
Now if that biological response can be transfered to things like extracting information that would depend on the person being tortured and the ones preforming it. If they can make that link or not.
That being said I think using such techniques is a very great evil and should not be employed.
Yes it is. I’m sure when xtisme gets back he can clarify, but this sure as sunshine looks like a definition:
Well, yes but no. I was under the impression that the OP was viewing the matter from a perspective of the War on Terra: will torture prove effective at eliciting operational information from terrorists, real or imagined. Hence, your input regarding a rape-murder case may, or may not, be actually relevent, depending on whether or not you regard difference in motive as relevent.
And, of course, how you define “works”. I, for one, am not willing to concede that because something “works” once or twice out of any number of applications, that can be taken as proof that it “works”. For my two bits, something must be consistently worthwhile and effective to qualify as something that “works”.
Pretty much as I meant it. I was looking for whether torture ‘works’, defined as ‘you actually get useful information’ in a systematic way. We often hear that ‘torture works’ or ‘torture doesn’t work’…but I’ve never seen anything that talks to what kind of success rate we are really getting at here. It ‘works’ 10% of the time? 50%? 70% Never? Sometimes? Often?
Not really, though of course the War on Terra would be a subset of when torture is and has been used. My question was really more general…does it EVER work, and if so, what kind of success rate are we really talking about here? My own impression is that it ‘works’ based on how motivated the individual is to keep the information back…and of course on whether the person being tortured actually knows anything at all anyway. If you torture (or threaten to torture) someone who you KNOW has done something…well, even then my guess is it is a hit or miss proposition with the tortured giving mis-information as often as not, depending on how motivated they are to withhold the information you seek and whether they are so afraid or in such pain that they end up telling you whatever you want to hear. But that is my GUESS…I was really hoping in this thread to get something a bit more definitive.
-XT
Well, as I see it, nobody else but the CIA has even the remotest hope of being able to justify torture. I’m sure torture might be useful in home invasions and such, but is anyone seriously arguing its usefulness outside fighting the War on Terra? Anybody want their local cops having torture as an option? Their school board? The post office?
I think this is the basic confusion here, and the basic concern.
Of course torture is not justifiable. That has nothing to do with whether or not it works. Killing scholastic underperformers would help diminish that gene pool but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
Advancing the notion that torture is effective in extracting information has no bearing on whether or not it is justifiable.
There seems to be a misconception amongst many posters,probably from watching too many movies,that interrogators are dumb,sadistic brutes.
Yes there probably some like that but most are intelligent,cunning and very,very highly trained.
Amongst others torture,or the threat of was used very successfully by the Gestapo and the Japanese in WW2 and Chinese/N.Korean interrogators in the K.W.
An I. will not ask his victim about things that he is unlikely to know about or things that CANT be verified.
Interrogation is a very exact science and an I will work from where the prisoner was captured,his dress,equipment accent,body language and many,many other things that would fill a thick book let alone a post.
When inevitably the victim cracks they will tell the I. everything and I do mean everything that can be of the slightest use to his captors including his life story to stop being hurt again.
It will have been made V. clear to him that all his info will be cross checked with other sources(some of them fictional),that he will be asked again and again the info in different ways while he is tired,frightened and in acute discomfort,which will make lying V difficult.
The questioning will go down into the most insignificant detail that the memory of the most accomplished liar will not be able to to replicate.
The victim knows this and knows that any inconsistencies over hours and days will result in the pain starting again or execution.
The aim of the I.is not reams and reams of verbiage but accurate and factual info.
An I who keeps getting incorrect data will be much more heavily disciplined then the I. who fails to get any info.
There seems to be a lot of wishfull thinking amongst people who because they dont want torture to work make the confident assertation that it either doesn’t work or if it does then only in incredibly limited circumstances.
In the past I have had a much more personal reason not to approve of torture then most here but I have to say that it has a proven track record in recent times,love it or hate it.
People seem to think that interrogation/torture is within the realm of opinion and googling.
It isn’t,anymore then then I am qualified to express an opinion on computer programming,no matter how much googling,book reading or what a friend of mine told me that eveyone knows.
And as a rule, those are the ones that DON’T torture. It’s not the professional interrogators who are gung-ho for torture, because they know that it’s simply bad technique.
Not the ones who torture. They are looking for confirmations of what they already believe, or are motivated by pure sadism.
That depends on who’s in charge. Someone like Bush and friends will punish subordinates who tell them the truth, if it’s opposed to what they want to hear.
It’s not wishful thinking; it’s the truth. Something we’ve just seen confirmed yet again by the failure of American torture to accomplish much if anything beyond further tarnishing our reputation and manufacturing enemies.
I am sorry. I did not realize I had butted into a discussion by a bunch of thugs debating whether or not torture will work to get information out of bank manager, rival thugs and whatnot. I thought I was dealing with civilized human beings. I will butt out now.
I mean, civiilzed people would find the debate meaningless, outside the issue of how to save lives, right?
Snide, while too common, is not a good approach to GD.
Snide while unintelligible is a really bad approach to GD.
I agree that a skilled interrogator will prefer not to use torture but the fact is that many nations in the world still use it.
It is complete nonsense that they use it merely to confirm their beliefs,if they didn’t want their beliefs contradicted then they wouldn’t question the prisoner in the first place.
Torturers are not usually sadists because that would affect their questioning.
i.e. Tell me what I want to know
and I’m still going to keep hurting you anyway because I enjoy it,will completely negate the purpose of information extraction the first place.
Torturers have psycopathic personalities,they dont see their victim as being really human and are indifferent to his suffering,his emotional state or even wether he lives or dies.
I dont somehow think that the P.O.T.U.S. will come down on individual interrogators and punish them for disappointing his expectations.
My knowledge of this subject comes from receiving some of the finest,indepth resistance to interrogation training in the world,with regular refreshers and being on the receiving end of the topic.
Not from reading books or watching T.V. documentaries.
I am curious to know where those posters who so assertively tell me that torture is so ineffective and the reasons why have learned their expertise?
I will not take the Wiki as a sensible answer.
Sorry.
That’s not how the powerful or fanatic think. People like confirmation, even if they have to torture it out of people. From torturing “information” from people in American torture chambers, to the Inquisition torturing confessions of witchcraft and heresy from it’s victims, to Communists putting people through show trials with predetermined outcomes, we see the same pattern. It’s stupid and pointless, besides being cruel, but it gets done anyway.
But information extraction isn’t the purpose of torture anyway; it’s just the excuse.
His subordinates will.
Because it’s failed miserably, as has been pointed out again and again in this thread. It’s stopped the flow of information, not helped it. It’s the pro-torture people who keep claiming it’s effective, but can’t come up with evidence of it working as well as techniques that don’t involve torture, much less better. All they do is come up with convoluted hypothetical situations involving nukes and thirty minute timers.
That’s not how it works. Since torture will, ultimately, always confirm the preconceived notions of the person inflicting the torture, that person has a 100% confirmation bias to believe that torture does work. (In this they are much like polygraph operators.) It is always possible that the results of torture happen to coincide with reality, but that has little to do with the efficacy of torture.
They do not inflict torture with the intention of confirming their beliefs; they are simply led into a mindframe in which their confirmation bias supports their preconceived ideas.
I do not blame you for not accepting Wilipedia.
Of course, you need to understand that I have no reason to place any trust in your claims of having been trained to be tortured. (Not that you have not, but your experience sheds no light on the efficacy of torture to produce true statements.)