Again, yes it does. Because torture ruins the victim as an information source, buries the “investigator” under bad information, shuts down alternate sources of information, makes it harder to catch people to interrogate in the first place, and requires an evil or incompetent ( and thus untrustworthy ) interrogator. Just off the top of my head.
Pardon me for the hijack back to the OP…
…I agree with the OP that, although I think torture is always immoral and should be illegal in all circumstances, the anti-torture arguments that I read on SDMB make me cringe. Present company not excepted.
Also, although I am a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I think many of the spittle-inflected stances on SDMB actively damage the chances that we might have of seeing progress in The Cause (to the extent that atheists have a cause).
Some of the pro-choice arguments just make me sad - but that’s not limited to this board. I think there is an easy compromise in the abortion debate that the vast majority of people would be happy to accept - but it is pushed out of reach by hyperbolic claims by pro-choice extremists (and anti-choice extremists too, obviously, but by the terms of the OP, I am supposed to be criticizing my own team).
But my nomination for The Least Likely Topic For Productive Debate is:
Nature vs Nurture (and related topics like Race, IQ, Affirmative Action)
In other topics, it’s easy to filter out the mouth-frothers but nature vs nurture seems to bring out the worst in everyone even though the scientific consensus seems to be Neither and Both.
The pro-nurture extremists (“there is no such thing as race”) easily win the award for the best use of the Argument of the Beard fallacy and the pro-nature extremists make me want to hide all the sharp objects.
Unreasonable Ally Syndrome is the reason I don’t post very often despite having lurked here for at least 10 years.
On a positive note, I have learned a lot about libertarian ideas, free-market economics, socialism, originalism, objectivism, states rights, gun control and other ideas that I don’t necessarily agree with but now know a lot more about. I am grateful for that. I might even have changed my mind on a few of those topics.
I wonder if it would be possible to create a board where people discuss matters of great import without the extreme polarization that always seems to happen in online debates. The excellent example of bloggingheads.tv suggests that it can be done.
Imagine a board where people argue with their opponents’ strongest points rather than their weakest points. Imagine people conceding that their opponent was right on something. Imagine thanking your opponent for pointing out that your argument was fallacious and promising - because you respect him - to do the argument more complete justice. Imagine coming to agreement:eek:
What would a board like that look like?
I don’t think this is necessarily true - the use or threat of violence may even hasten the identification of the subject with the interrogator (think of the “Stockholm Syndrome”, which describes exactly this process). Of course, different situations and persons may call for different techniques: some subjects may be better “worked” with kindness.
The difficulty with your argument is that it relies on the rather difficult to support proposition that the use of torture is never going to be a useful technique.
If the prisoners were the sorts of people who would identify with their persecuters in this way they wouldn’t be terrorists. Or has it not occurred to you that the last time your side demonstrated the use or threat of violence is likely to be the reason why they decided to kill you?
This isn’t about “terrorists” per se, but about whether torture can be an effective technique for interrogation by anyone; also, if you have been at all following the thread, I’ve already stated numerous times that using torture is a bad idea (effective or not) because its use tends to cost the side that uses it any moral high ground they might reasonably have otherwise.
Sheesh, you people are certainly proving the thesis of this thread correct. 
How many times do I have to say that I think torture is an extremely useful technique? It does what torturers intend it to do.
It’s just a singularly lousy technique for extracting intelligence that can be acted upon.
It is exactly that sense of “useful” that I’ve been arguing.
It strikes me that “torture is useless for extracting truthful information” falls into the category of things people wish were true.
People have repeatedly said torture must work in getting useful information because people torture. I’ve repeatedly said that is a bloody stupid argument. People torture because it works. The problem is what they do it for isn’t the gathering of information.
I’ve tried the logical argument against the ticking bomb scenario. No one has given me a single benefit to the bomber of telling the truth in that scenario.
When you commented on Stockholm Syndrome earlier, you seemed to think that torturing a prisoner would make the onset of said syndrome more likely. Is there evidence that suggest treating a detainee worse makes his or her identification with the captors more likely?
Uhh, what?
So you think that if we capture the bad guy in the infamous hypothetical ticking bomb scenario (in which we are 100% sure he planted a bomb in NYC, but we don’t know where, and we know it will go off in, say, 6 hours) we should proceed by looking deeply and earnestly into his eyes and telling him that people are going to die, and hey look, we aren’t torturing you, perhaps we’re not such bad sorts after all?
And you think that for ANY POSSIBLE TERRORIST that technique is more likely to result in useful intelligence than pliers and a blowtorch?
Uhh, what?
As I have said time and time again in this, the rational thing for the terrorist to do in face of torture is to lie about where the bomb is. In which case you are worse off than you were before, because you have reduced your chances of finding the bomb at random.
There is absolutely no benefit to the terrorist in this (ridiculous) situation of telling where the bomb actually is. None. Yet people seem willing to assume he will pony up that information as soon as the pliers come out. Is it because we think terrorists are automatically stupid people that cannot calculate the correct response to a situation?
No-one uses torture for gathering information?
One need no posit elaborate hypotheticals - torture (and indeed any interogation technique) clearly works best when the truth or otherwise of the information can be tested.
Depends. My point was that such identification was possible and may in some cases be more likely, as in the “Stockholm syndrome”. The “good cop/bad cop” routine relies on there being a “bad cop”, for example; it is easy to see how having a real monster of a “bad cop” would make the routine more effective. The “Stockholm Syndrome” appears to happen when the “good cop” and the “bad cop” are the same person, more or less (see also “battered wife syndrome”, which is believed to operate similarly).
Point being this: certainly a sophisticated interrogator is going to get more truth out of a subject than a crude torturer who jumps immediately to the hot irons. The real question though is whether a sophisticated interrogator with the ability at discretion to use torture is going to get more or less truth than a sophisticated interrogator who cannot use torture. All interrogation is more or less based on manipulation - by definition the interrogator wishes the subject to do or reveal something that is not in the subject’s best interests. Violence and terror are simply additional tools for such manipulation, and it is hard to understand how having fewer such tools is better for the purposes of obtaining results than having more, assuming equal skill and cleverness on the part of the interrogator.
I’ll go out on a limb here. No one uses torture primarily to extract usable information. Except possibly in a situation where there are no capable interrogators around. “Planned” torture (rather than smacking someone around when capturing them in the middle of a fire fight, for example) is designed for purposes other than information gathering.
Of course. But the stupid ass hypothetical at stake negates the possibility of testing the truth.
Actually I disagree. The interrogator wishes the subject to do or reveal something that is not in the subject’s perceived best interests. Showing them it is in their actual best interests is, I believe, a potentially very effective form of interrogation.
Re: the torture debate.
I am opposed to torture and occasionally I read someone making a the case against torture use an argument that I don’t think is a good one. However, I also see arguments on the pro-torture (or the “against torture, but it’s sometimes effective”) crowd that aren’t very good either. I don’t think either camp is alone in bad arguments or being dogmatic.
I don’t agree with xtisme’s statement (if I remember it correctly) that in the ticking time bomb scenario “torture is the only option that has any chance of success”. It strikes me as a very dogmatic and overstated assertion. It’s absolutely ridiculous to say that that’s the only possible means of obtaining the information you need. Is it the one with the most chance of obtaining the information? Maybe, I can’t say for sure, though I’m not optimistic that it is (but that’s pretty much nothing more than a gut feeling).
Look, I will agree that statements such as “torture never works for extracting information” are almost certainly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that it’s particularly effective at extracting information or that it’s better at it than other means. When I read people saying “torture never works for extracting information” here I tend to view that as a knee-jerk or dogmatic response, but I still think torture is wrong and probably generally ineffective at obtaining good information (almost certainly less generally useful than other techniques, especially taking the broader view).
Frankly I can’t say that I have any sort of practical knowledge of the subject, but then I doubt most, if not all, of the people engaged in the debate on these boards can say differently.
You avoided the key part of Malthus’s argument:
Two other points:
(1) Part of what bugs me about these arguments is that they’re really between the extreme-in-all-situations-ever anti-torture people and the in-all-practical-situations-and-certainly-in-the-US-today-but-purely-as-an-intellectual-exercise-we-might-propose-some-hypotheticals anti-torture people. We’re all basically on the same side. So there’s even less reason in this argument than most on the SDMB for tempers to flare, and yet they do (not pointing to you, specifically, or at all).
(2) But as long as we’re engaging in ridiculous hypotheticals, I don’t think “the rational thing for the terrorist to do in face of torture is to lie about where the bomb is. In which case you are worse off than you were before, because you have reduced your chances of finding the bomb at random” is really accurate, for two reasons. One is that there’s nothing inherent in the scenario that says that there’s no time to check the guy’s answer and come back. There could easily be time to make, say, 5 verification passes but still not even remotely have enough time to search all of NYC. Furthermore, assuming that we are evil and ruthless, we could always tell the guy “hey, did you enjoy that 5 minutes of torture? Well, tell us where the bomb is. If we find it, we kill you quickly and painlessly. If it goes off, we torture you FOR AS LONG AS WE CAN KEEP YOU ALIVE”. Are you saying that has zero chance of being effective?
Note, by the way, item #5 in this very interesting article that was linked by someone on your side of this argument in this very thread. That strongly implies that the efficacy of torture, purely as a means of gathering intelligence, varies wildly from person to person.
Tempers flare I think because the hypothetical is a bullshit argument.
Generally these discussion revolve around the US use of torture. Should we do it or not?
Now, presumably the US was using torture as a means to gain useful information. If they wanted false confessions or just to show the world how ruthless we can be I never heard it mentioned. If it was the latter then you have no argument from me. Torture is exactly the right tool for that job. If the former than it is absolutely the worst tool for the job.
So people trot out insanely narrow hypothetical situations where in that case torture would be indicated and it is worth doing because it will save lives. This obscures the issue of whether torture should be used as a policy of the US intelligence services to gather information.
Even in the narrow hypothetical it fails. Can torture work? Sure. However, as has been noted repeatedly from actual interrogators (people who even actively engaged in torture as cited earlier) they have never seen torture elicit useful information. Another cite upthread showed the failure of the Gestapo to get information from people as well as other instances of torture failing overall.
So, the point becomes you can choose a tactic with a 10% chance of success or a tactic with a 60% chance of success. Thing is you do not know which will be the successful approach on your captive. With nothing else to go on it only makes sense to opt for the higher percentage tactic. More, torture absolutely takes the interrogation method off the table and ruins the captive for any other tactic if the torture fails (this was pointed out by the FBI in Guantanamo).
To me the pro-torture crowd is looking for a wedge case which once in place can be used to justify torture. As someone noted earlier it would be like aliens demanding you rape a 6-year-old to avoid them demolishing the Earth so therefore raping 6-year-olds has some instances where it is an ok thing to do.
And again it goes back to using torture as a US government policy. Some random, narrow case completely glosses over the many other downsides torture brings with it. One FBI agent opined in Guantanamo that if the guy being tortured wasn’t a terrorist he was one now. Ask the French how well torture worked for them in Algiers. It arguably lost them the war there and more, almost collapsed the French government itself (there was an attempted military coup over it).
So, bottom line there is no time using torture is indicated to gather intelligence. Pointing to some narrow case where it works does not change that analysis. Its downsides far outstrip the occasional successes that it might produce.
But isn’t there a benefit in knowing where the bomb is not located within NYC? So as not to waste time searching there. If he’s 100% going to lie, then that’s somewhat useful information. If there’s a chance he won’t lie, then there’s a chance he won’t lie.
It would if there were only a handful of places to search.
There are a million places you could hide a bomb in NYC. Removing a handful in a ticking time bomb scenario is not really helpful.
I agree. Not really helpful in that scenario, but useful information all the same.
No. We shouldn’t do it. When we did it under Bush, we were wrong to do so. People who did so violated the Geneva Convention and should be punished. As far as I know every single person posting in this thread agrees with that.
So we agree, right?
Since we agree on the actual issue, why does the bullshitness or not of the hypothetical cause such anger? As far as I can tell, you seem to think that the discussion basically went like this:
A: We should not torture, because it is evil, cruel, and gives up the moral high ground; plus these following cites show that it is generally ineffectual at gathering intelligence
B: Hey, but what about the ticking bomb scenario? My hypothetical argues strongly that the US should torture
A: That’s a bullshit hypothetical
Rather, it went like this:
A: We should not torture, because it is evil, cruel and gives up the moral high ground.
B: I agree
A: Plus it is generally ineffectual at gathering intelligence, as these cites show
B: I agree
C: In fact, it’s NEVER effective at gathering intelligence. Never in the history of the entire human race has torture gathered useful information. Nor could it ever. Never never ever absolute never ever.
B: While I’m against torture, I think that statement is overbroad… for instance, what about the ticking bomb scenario?
A: Hey, that’s a BULLSHIT scenario, man!
I do not think anyone has said torture has never obtained useful information.
The answer to that is more nuanced and I think what anti-torture people are trying to get across.
The anti-torture people have provided scads of cites from actual interrogators, including people who have witnessed and/or engaged in torture, as well as historical cites from the likes of WWII Japanese manuals and Napoleon and assessments of the Gestapo who say unequivocally that torture as a means to gain information is pretty much the worst approach possible.
So, if you torture 1,000 people will you gain some information that is useful? Probably.
What that misses though is the effort you expend. Of all the information collected most of it will be crap. As the torturer you will need to expend a lot of resources chasing down bogus leads obtained from your torture. Sure sooner or later something will pan out. On balance though you have wasted more time and effort than the info is generally worth. Info you could have gained with less effort and more reliably via other, non-violent, means (refer to the Luftwaffe Master Interrogator).
I guess it comes down to your definition of effective. Is it effective if you spend loads of effort chasing down dead-end leads but eventually you find one bad guy?
I think “effective” needs to be weighed against other methods of gathering information and on that measure torture truly is the least effective method in your arsenal short of doing nothing whatsoever. We even have testimony from experienced interrogators who participated in/witnessed torture who said even in a ticking time bomb scenario torture is useless.
Actually, doing nothing may even trump using torture when you consider the other knock-on effects of using torture. Things such as losing the moral high ground and lowering morale on your side (witness the French experience in Algiers). Things such as stiffening resistance to your side. These have been witnessed, it happens, you are less safe because now the other side knows they really, really, really hate you and can now more easily recruit people to fight you and blow you up at any opportunity.
Again, all of the above has been cited and cited again. All the other side has is what they think, no cites, which I can only assume is from watching too many episodes of “24”.