Is there any proof torture works?

Great Debates
121

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
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.

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.)[/QUOTE

tomndebb Yes I agree that a dash of scepticism for a posters alleged background is always healthy so I dont blame you there.

But the training I received from the British Army as do all Special Forces and Prone to Capture troops was not merely a case of being put through the interrogation process but studies of individual techniques,histories psychological profiles of both the I’s and the captured and even the more successful enemy interrogators of the recent past.

Now that was what us blokes received in training to RESIST Interrogation,so you can imagine how much more comprehensively interrogators are trained

Though to undermine my own case U.S. I’s were incredibly ineffectual when the allies first went into Afghan,partly because they were so hamstrung by what they could and could not do and because they were very badly trained and often quite naive.

The Afghan prisoners didn’t even bother with cover stories they held their questioners in such contempt.
It was only when they were threatened with being sent home to their own countries to be questioned(Algeria etc.)that they became more compliant to escape that fate.

This is probably why the U.S have been reduced to what they’re doing now.

It irritates me though that there was no similar outcry from western liberals when Brit soldiers were tortured to death by the provisional I.R.A. or G.Is were tortured by the N.Vietnamese.

Its not just wrong for us to do it but for anyone to do it.

But as to the subject of Interrogation science generally you can imagine my frustration when everyone considers themselves to be experts on the subject without any justification whatsoever.

To relieve my frustration I’m going to find the nearest Electrician and start advising him about the best way to rewire a house (because Iread an article on it once)and then stand weeeeeeell back!

122

Ooops I meant to include that the Gestapo using torture managed to break open the entire Dutch resistance network.

They got names,radio frequencies,codes and cyphers,safe houses,arms caches,agent landing fields,recognition signals,the lot,everything using torture.

So no merely confirming what they’d like to believe there I fancy.

123

Any cites for something so implausible ? No, not for the Gestapo torturing people, but for the torture actually accomplishing much.

No, it’s because they wanted to hear lies, and they got lies.

Why would there be ? Our tax money doesn’t go to support them, nor were we constantly told about how they were a shining beacon of justice and freedom in the world, and so on. One expects the bad guys to do bad things. Most Americans are in denial that America is one of the bad guys. And most of those that aren’t, don’t want America to be one of the bad guys.

False comparison. First, it’s a lot easier to recognise things that obviously are bad ideas, than it is to know all the little details of actually accomplishing a professional task. And second, it wasn’t the professional interrogators that wanted torture in the first place. This is more like watching Bob from upper management shove aside the electrician and set the house on fire and kill himself when he pees on the wires. I don’t know how to wire up a house, but I do know that peeing on live wires is a bad idea.

124

I did check, and a spy that survived reported in the book “A time to Speak” By Jeanne Manning (Published 2000, Turner Publishing Company World War, 1939-1945 / Personal narratives) that torture did work for Hitler alright… After much torture they told the Nazis that they knew that the allies were going to land in Holland and Belgium. Not in Normandy.

"So the Germans, because they got this through torture, believed this more than anything else. They said, “they wouldn’t have fought for so long to hide this, so it must be true.”

So here I do see even more evidence of why torture is used by the estate, it is a tool for the powerful to get what it wants (even if false).

Once again, one powerful point appears: Ideology that is fed by torture leads rulers to catastrophic decisions. Like the citizens of Lybia, and the right wing in England and the USA, you have been lied by the current rulers and torture Lust4Life

125

I’d take this book with a bushel of salt if I were you,the Germans never at any time seriously believed that the allied invasion was going to take place in Holland and Belgium.

Read your history books rather then some self promoting fantasist
My "Rulers"are not actually right wing but liberal democrats and they didn’t instruct me in R to I as they were probably too busy governing the country but i was trained by the Joint Services Interrogation Wing.
dertrihs

The mere fact that not only are you unaware of the Dutch resistance being totally broken by the Gestapo but believe it to be some sort of far fetched fantasy displays the depth of your ignorance on this subject.

No I am not going to give you any cites for this,just as I would refuse to give a cite to prove that the Battle of Britain actually happened .

126

Actually, while torture was involved, your claim that torture was the sole, or even primary, method of garnering that information overstates the situation, completely. The various resistance groups among trhe Dutch suffered from the problem that they were (initially) too easily infiltrated by pro-Nazi sympathizers along with a fairly amateurish approach to security. Torture did play a role in gathering information, but much of that was based on information already taken.

127

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Actually, while torture was involved, your claim that torture was the sole, or even primary, method of garnering that information overstates the situation, completely. The various resistance groups among trhe Dutch suffered from the problem that they were (initially) too easily infiltrated by pro-Nazi sympathizers along with a fairly amateurish approach to security. Torture did play a role in gathering information, but much of that was based on information already taken.[/QUOTE

I’ll totally grant you that but one hell of a lot of info was obtained by torture.
I find myself being put into the position of defending the efficacy of torture which may well give the impression that somehow i approve of it .I dont.

Me and my mates didn’t ever really talk about it but we all dreaded the consequences of being captured,even more then being killed.

We were taught that the R to I technique if you were a prisoner of the Provos in a back room in W.Belfast was to seriously try to make them very,very angry with you so that they would kill you quick in a moment of spite before they got to work on you.
We knew an incredible amount about their families,communities etc.

I memorised the names of the mothers,wives ,girlfriends and sisters of the "Players "in the areas I was working with so that if I got caught i would taunt them with saying that I’d had sex with the women most close to them.

Its a funny old world isn’t it?

128

Even Operation Mincemeat showed that the idea then was to show Hitler as many other invasion points as possible, like Patton and the Calais deception they managed to throw a lot of smoke that in the end clouded German intelligence.

So a historian is a fantasist? Is a direct witness then supposed to be mistrusted?

http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/1563115603

So the only good point you made against me was that I made a mistake of calling Blair a right winger, No problem, like many in england I have to fall back on the British idea that he was Bush’s poodle. And I’m not DerTrihs.

As it was demonstrated, you attach labels without investigating first where the information comes from, so I have to doubt what you claim to be.

And I produced so far 3 cites that show the powerful using torture for the most likely reason: to get the information they like to hear, torture is done to find justification for stupid decisions. (Invading Holland was not given any credence elsewhere, we are dealing here with what the Gestapo in Holland got from the spies)

“Invading Holland” was only one of the items torture got to Germany and I already know it was not given too much value, I know history and it seems to me then that even the Nazis realized how that information obtained with torture was unreliable.

129

IGObuster]Even Operation Mincemeat showed that the idea then was to show Hitler as many other invasion points as possible, like Patton and the Calais eception they managed to throw a lot of smoke that in the end clouded German intelligence.
So a historian is a fantasist? Is a direct witness then supposed to be mistrusted?

As it was demonstrated, you attach labels without investigating first where the information comes from, so I have to doubt what you claim to be.

.
[/QUOTE]

Sorry me old mucker but its pretty obvious you haven’t got a clue about the argument you’re trying to put forward.

It looks like that so many others you’ve done a quick google to try and cherrypick anything that might support your ideological views without really understanding the subject that you’re on about .

I cant really be bothered to take apart your misconceptions piece by piece but i’ll just say that you know as much about WW2 as you do interrogation science

Operation Mincemeat was absaloutley nothing whatsoever to do with Overlord(Look it up)it was the deception plan for the Sicily landings(look it up)an entirely different operation in an
entirely different geographical area well before the Normandy landings.
I’m sorry,i dont mean to be rude but I haven’t the time to educate you about the entire course of the latter part of WW2.

Ask your teacher monday morning.
I’m sorry but I just haven’t got time for this.

130

I brought evidence of what torture brings, sorry if it does not fit your ideology.

Look up your rude deceptions, I brought it up to show how the British were trying everything to deceive Hitler into putting troops elsewhere from they were really going to land. I’m not making a point it was directly related to Overlord, you did.

I see, no problem, just be sure to learn something new.

131

Yet you have time to keep coming back, waving your imaginary credentials, and proclaiming your view (which is a bit unclear other than an unshakeable faith in the efficacy of torture) to be established beyond doubt.

I would never claim that torture has never been successfully employed (for various outcomes). The problem with torture is that it is simply not reliable. You may have missed (or ignored) the evidence presented scattered among the various concurrent threads, but decisions have been made, based on tortured evidence, that were clearly wrong.

Taking cheap shots at U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan (a point indicating your ignorance, since they were mostly pulled out in preparation for the Iraq debacle), and making sweeping claims regarding how “good” interrogators are capable of determining the truth in nearly all cases simply sets you on one side of the emotional discussion without actually informing the debate.

132

Not in this Forum.

Knock it off.

[ /Moderating ]

133

Sorry, I did correct it because I then just realized that was uncalled, however I just see your reproach needs an explanation of why the quote does not fit now.

134

My credentials aren.t imaginary but I don’t blame you one jot for viewing them with cynacism,there have been several phonys apearing on theses boards,some of them “old hands”.

My comments aabout U.S. interrogators weren’t cheap shots at all and weren’t meant to denigrate them.

My info on this subject came from THEM and they will be the first to tell you that that were inadequately trained for the task set them and it was THEM who stated that the people they were supposed to be queationing held them in contempt and did’nt even bother trying to sell them cover stories.

This was not their fault at all,it was down to the huge number of constraints that they were trying to do their job under.

I felt the greatset of sympathy with them fir trying to do a very difficult and very vital task under impossible conditions and as for their poor training,that was 'nt their fault either.

That was down to the chair polishers responsible for their training who had a completely unreal idea of the cultural situation that they were going into.

My only emotional involvement within this debate is with those people who are stating as fact those things that they WISH to believe with only a pitiful if any knowledge of the subject.

I do not include you within this category but you ARE guilty of taking unwarranted umbrage at what you perceive to be “digs” at U,S. personell,when in fact I was only reitterating what they themselves said.

I’ve flashed up unnecessarily myself in the past so I’m not taking the moral high ground here.

135

Sorry for the many typos there but was trying to post whilst doing something else at the same time.

Just a couple more points to answer tomndebb Yes I do keep coming back as I will not allow misinformed posters to win the day just by their sheer persistance.

Secondly you say that the only opinion that I keep reiterating is an unshakeable belief in the efficacy of torture.

I express a belief in the efficacy of torture in broader circumstances then many of the posters would like to believe because THAT IS WHAT THIS THREAD IS ABOUT.

The O.P. specifically said that this was not a debate about the morals of torture,which is a subject for a different thread but if it works or not.

Also I dont believe that torture works in quite a few situations so my belief cannot be construed as unshakeable .

I would like to believe that I am the best looking bloke on Earth,but unpleasant though the truth is that I’m not (No seriously,stop arguing with me) the truth is the truth and I am compelled to make the statement that I am not incredibly handsome though I wish it were otherwise.

Likewise even though you may hate and despise the use of torture it works pretty often.

(Judged of course from the viewpoint of my imaginary training and my imaginary credentials tee hee hee)

136

Let me put it more simply, then. There’s only one venue where torture might be considered as even a tiny bit moral, and that’s where soldiers or intelligence agents are trying to extract information from an enemy who has information that might keep a lot of soldiers or civilians from being killed.

Torture may work for tyrants who wish to terrify citizens and extract confessions from prisoners, innocent or not. Torture may work for common criminals who want to get the combination of the safe from a bank manager. Torture may work for slavers who want to break the will of their slaves. But it seems to me that the fundamental evil of these purposes makes torture’s efficacy a moot point. Murder, extortion and kidnapping may well work for tyrants and criminals as well, but who the fuck cares? The evil purposes to which torture is routinely put so thoroughly taints it that it makes discussions of its means somewhat evil, too. Monks in the Spanish Inquisition may well have had learned discussions of the best means of breaking a witch, but what sane person cares whether the boot, the plum or the the rack work best? They’re all fucking evil.

That being the case, you can’t have an argument about the efficacy of torture unless you are either willing to aid and abet evil, or to confine it to that one venue I mentioned earlier. The idea that the purposes to which torture may be put is not relevant is profoundly wrong.

Considering the ineffectivenss of torture as a technique, I find the notion that it works for its stated purposes even in that one venue to be dubious.

137

You keep repeating this like it matters. Even assuming that you are relating something real, of course they held the interrogators in contempt; they are foreign invaders. And of course they didn’t bother with cover stories; attacking invading enemies is perfectly right; it’s the expected thing to do, pretty much everywhere. Do you think Americans or anyone else would act differently ?

Of course it’s their fault. Nothing gets you off the hook for torture. And what was the worst consequence they faced if they refused ? Rather less than what they did to their victims, I expect.

138

You seem a little confused here so,I’ll do a little clarification.

I’ll just clear up one point straight away that many of the prisoners were’nt fighting off the invaders of their homeland because they were the nationals of other countries,Britain.Jordan,Saudi,Algeria to name a few.

The Taliban oppressed their own people,I read of one report where children jeering at Taliban members were shot dead by those Taliban.
The foreigners captured had joined the Taliban and were involved in behaviour like this so I think that your pity for them is just a trifle misplaced.

Secondly I’ll clear up another misconception that you appear to be labouring under as you dont seem to be aware that people from different cultures operate under a different mind set from that of Western Liberals.

The prisoners did not hold their captors in contempt because they were invaders,quite the opposite.
In the M/E martial qualties are held in the highest esteem,many Palestinians hate the Israelis guts,putting it mildly .
But they dont hold them in contempt of that I can assure you.

(Usual disclaimer here,I’m not Jewish myself and as far as I know do not know any Jewish people)
To M/Eastners treating a vanquished foe humanely is held as a sign of weakness,it is contemptible,it is behaving like a frightened woman(Their views not mine)

At first prisoners DID come out with cover stories but when they realised that no harm would come to them,not even reduced rations or uncomfortable quarters if they refused to be amenable,let alone physical abuse,THEN they held their captors in contempt .
As to nothing gets you off the hook for torture so that its “Their” fault ,"They " didn’t torture anybody,"They"meaning the U.S. Is weren’t even allowed to speak nastily to their prisoners.

My final point is,spare me the pitiful tripe that I might be making this up to win the argument,I’d look a right cunt if I was making it up because I would bound to be found out sooner or later and as a consequence would mever ever again be able to make any point,however serious ,in this forum again .

139

Yeah, sure it is. Those evil savage monsters, we should torture them to make them respect us ! :rolleyes:

No, you are just repeating what we are supposed to believe so we can tell ourselves we are torturing subhuman demons, and not victimizing people. So we manufacture lies like Jessica Lynch’s “ordeal” and “rescue” - after all, we can’t admit that Iraqis might treat their prisoners better than we do ours.

We DID torture people ! Have you been paying attention at all ?

140

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Yeah, sure it is. Those evil savage monsters, we should torture them to make them respect us ! :rolleyes:

No, you are just repeating what we are supposed to believe so we can tell ourselves we are torturing subhuman demons, and not victimizing people. So we manufacture lies like Jessica Lynch’s “ordeal” and “rescue” - after all, we can’t admit that Iraqis might treat their prisoners better than we do ours.

We DID torture people ! Have you been paying attention at all ?[/QUOTE

Cheerio,!
fNo you didn’t torture anyone in Afghan when the allies first went in,(Though the S.A.S. went in on combat several weeks before you guys did ,but I digress)

Quite honestly I cant be bothered,I suspect that your viewpoint is more motivated by some sort of hatred to the U.S. as a U.S. citizen who was bullied or something Cheerio,have a jolly nice day.