12,000 interrogations? What did he do, pass out a questionairre? The type of interrogation this guy is talking about is very time consuming, how the heck did he do 12,000 of them. Is he 300 years old?
If you want to appeal to people with direct experience, then what do you say to the French guy who Tortured Algerians to find terrorists?
Most? You couldn’t tell by the people they keep electing.
I do not know how that guy claims 12,000 interrogations. It is cited in the article. Send him an e-mail and ask. There are more than just him as an interrogator in that article anyway and they agree with him. You want to debunk his credentials then go for it.
As for the French guy who tortured I think he is the only torturer I have seen cited who says it works to gain information. Given that the French torture regime lost them that war and nearly collapsed the French government I am going to go out on a limb and say it was an overall colossal failure despite his testimony. Given the failed results he sounds like a guy trying to validate what he did.
Did he obtain info? Certainly. He also tortured a significant percentage of the population to get it and that caused the populace to resist the French to the point the French lost.
Dunno about you but that is a definition of “Fail” in my book.
That there really is reality, and even meaning, aside from what your “social location” in history and culture and class and so forth have socially determined you to perceive
That there is not is quite often posited, but not often in this place. The Straight Dope is a welcoming environment for folks who believe that there is a reality, which you can either know about or fail to know about, but that it’s definitely not merely “whatever you conceive it to be”. And that furthermore things have meaning (since, after all, it’s rather useless to speak of existent reality if deprived to speak of what any of it means) and that although you can have your opinions and perspectives and I can have mine, perhaps one and perhaps both or all of us are wrong but whether we know what the right answer is or not, a correct and proper meaning does exist.
It’s not well argued or well defended in here though. The entire topic is quite often treated the way you see it treated in this thread, as if reality is self-evidently there, and meaning likewise, and all insights and observations about subjectivity and intersubjectivity and socialization and how our minds work and so forth can be dismissed as “hippy dippy bullshit”.
Rather than being an effective rebuttal to radical assertions of “socialization” or “determinism” or “poststructuralism” etc, such arguments come across as infantile and thoughtlessly dismissive, like some villager confidently arguing that the world can’t possibly be round.
Not debunking in that sense, just did a little research on the two guys you quoted earlier in this thread. The common theme is they sell books.
Joe Navarro was an FBI interrogator for 25 years. Retired in 2003. Now selling books about How to win at Poker, Cold Reading, and recently Terrorists. He disagrees torture would be effective in the “ticking time bomb” scenario (ala “24”). It does not state whether he has actually partook in torture or seen it done and what the results are. I would guess not likely since the FBI has a history of not using torture as a means of interrogation. His assessment still carries weight though as he is a legit interrogation expert.
The other guy, Tony Lagouranis, was a low level Army interrogator during the current Iraq war (now a bar bouncer). Trained to follow the Army Field Manual techniques. Actually partook in interrogations that went beyond those techniques and he states they generally had a low success rate (ie, sleep deprivation, stress positions, dogs on leashes, cold). His overall assessment was it doesn’t work on people with no information, it might work on people who have information (echoing my earlier post about the Pinochet torture victim). The part about “sitting on exhaust pipes, broken bones, ect” was actually done by Marines on patrol (untrained in interrogation) who would go into suspects homes and rough them up/torture them and then bring them back to be questioned by the trained interrogator. He is also selling a book.
Nor sure why the jab that they are both writing a book. It is possible for someone to write a book about their experiences and beliefs without being dishonest about them merely to make a buck. If you think they are being disingenuous merely to make money then you need to show that.
Aside from that these two do have relevant experiences to share.
But they are not the sole support for the anti-torture argument. In fact the weight of evidence against using torture to gain information has been consistent and overwhelming. So far, as I said, I think the only cite from a person who tortured for information that said it worked was that French guy from Algiers. As noted the French experience there was a disaster of epic proportions and the lion’s share of the blame for that epic failure can be laid at the feet of the French using torture (matter of historical record now and not in doubt that I am aware of).
So add in the failures of the Gestapo that have been chronicled, the failures of the French in the 16-1700’s, the Japanese in WWII placing it in their manual that torture is a lousy means to get info. Add in cites from numerous other sources we have dropped in threads on this all over Great Debates.
One thing is consistently drawn from all of that. Torture is about the worst possible method you can use to gather useful intelligence. It is not reading between the lines. It is not wishy-washy. The conclusion leaps out at you as unavoidable.
Yet despite all this evidence we still have people here who just insist that torture could have a useful role to get intelligence. They narrow the circumstances to such an absurd level to do this and yet even then nothing in actual evidence suggests that torture would be the proper course of action even in such a remote case. They provide no evidence for it. They just think it must work like that.
It wasn’t intended as a jab. Just something I found interesting. It is motivation to constantly speak out, though.
That aside, I’m still under the impression that if a person knows something, and you want them to tell it to you, (and other methods have failed), torture is a way to extract that information/data (not intelligence, that comes later). It will also lead that person to tell you crap information and will always lead someone who knows nothing to make it up. The last one being a common situation. Common sense seems to dictate this. see my post #27. These aren’t stupid ticking time bomb scenarios; these are simple questions like who you associate with. Everyone is going to talk at some point. The fact that the whole premise for wanting this information is wrong, doesn’t mean torture didn’t make the victim give up his associates. ie, it doesn’t mean torture didn’t work. It did.
If someone grabs you personally, and asks you to tell them the name of your supervisor at work, I can assure you you’re going to give up that name. It’s illogical to think otherwise.
The above of course leaves out the big picture. That you’ve morally lowered yourself to below the enemy and you are now in fact the true bad guy. The people fighting against you, (whomever they are and whatever they’ve done; assuming they don’t torture) are now in fact fighting for a better cause.
I agree. (Example…Knowing the name of your supervisor may or may not be useful “intelligence.” And it certainly wasn’t worth torturing somebody to get it).
So which side of that argument do you consider poorly argued?
The pro-nurture extremists have a faith stronger than most born again Christians.
I was pretty sure the argument was whether or not torture works. Too many people try to short circuit that debate and simply say torture doesn’t work. If you ant to make the argument that torture is a net negative to achieving our current goals, I might even agree with you but I have heard too many people both on and off this board simply state “torture doesn’t work” and it makes it hard to ever take them seriously again.
I’d say that if someone’s just tied my nuts up in a sling to do whatever, they’ve already found my valuables. See, it wasn’t the torture that led them to find it, it was the process to find the valuables that, well, found the valuables.
Besides, I’d love to see a list of credible pirate stories of nut-roping which yielded useful treasure information from torture victims. I mean, I’ll even take a couple of good anecdotes since pirates weren’t known for much beyond treasure maps.*
*which is even dubious.
ETA: Any argument about a particular religion’s god being extant invariably falls far short of being an argument such that presenting it as one is quite intellectually dishonest.
Also, of course, any of the Pascal Type Wager arguments.
But torture being a net negative, especially to the degree it is MEANS that it doesn’t work. The people who are arguing poorly are the ones who want to point at torture supposedly getting accurate information in some contrived situation, and then insisting that everyone ignore the larger context. That definition of “works” is a contrived one, useful only as a method of diverting attention from the failures of torture. If the result of torture is net loss of information, how is that “working” even if one guy somewhere tells you the truth ? Especially when you probably don’t even realize it, since it’ll be buried in torture induced lies, and spoken to people who don’t care about truth.
Does setting your head on fire “work” as a method of removing lice ? If you use the same standards as the pro-torture people are using to defend torture, then yes it does.
I think what you are saying is that in the largely ideological fight against terrorism torture does more harm than good, not that it doesn’t work. Why prohibit the use of torture in those cases where it does make sense? I am happy to concede that torture is a bad idea in almost all circumstances because for the harm it does but the argument I frequently hear is that torture doesn’t work so there is no excuse for using it EVER.
Well, if something does more harm than good I have a hard time seeing how it can be said to “work”. To me that is like giving some soldiers an artillery piece that blows up when fired and kills the soldiers 9-times-out-of-10. Sure, on that 10th time it works and kills the enemy. Can you then say that the artillery piece “works” because once in awhile it does what you want it to? Nevermind the downsides?
I think the problem is, hypotheticals aside, it is near impossible to discern where/when torture would be the best choice to gather useful intelligence. You know that in the majority of cases it does not work and can actually be counter-productive. How do you then decide that on “that guy” it will be just the thing?
Without that knowledge, knowledge you cannot ever get, the only rational answer is to opt for the approach with the highest proven chance of success. That is not torture. As such torture is something you should never engage in to gather intelligence.
In post #8 of this thread I linked to someone doing exactly that.
Bear in mind here please that I AM AGAINST TORTURE, I don’t think the US should ever torture, I think we should punish anyone who does, etc., etc. BUT, someone else somewhere in this thread (I’ve forgotten who) made an excellent argument against your position, or at least against the version of your position which includes “never”. Namely, torture is one possible technique. Certainly I agree that if you have two interrogators one of whom always tortures and one of whom never tortures, then the one who never tortures is almost certain to end up getting more useful information. Enough cites have been linked to in this thread to convince me of tha. BUT, what if we have two interrogators, both of them masters of human psychology, both of whom having interrogated thousands of prisoners over decades; one of whom never tortures, and one of whom has torture available as a technique when, in his judgment, it is appropriate. It’s hard to see how the second one won’t, on the whole, produce better info.
Or are you claiming that of all the possible sets of variables for a given interrogatee; including their personality and training, the types of information they are believed to have, the level of certainty concerning that belief, etc, etc, etc, that a master interrogator with expertise in all possible forms of interrogation would – if motivated purely by a desire to extract useful information, ignoring moral issues – NEVER choose to use torture? That is a pretty extraordinary claim.
Considering that that seems to be the consensus of actual “master interrogators”, it’s not an extraordinary claim at all.
Cite that any are making precisely that specific and extreme claim?
I’ll add that the entire Global Warming debate is generally argued very poorly, by participants on both sides of the issue, both on the SDMB and in the larger public sphere.
Part of the breakdown is that partisans on one side of the issue hear a lot of wing-nuttery arguments by participants on the other side. So you have this target-rich environment full of poor arguments and easy shoot-downs. But then when someone comes along and tries to make a nuanced argument or talk about the hard-core science and economics, the debate just shuts down completely.
There are exceptions - people like jshore make a good effort to present reasonable arguments. But even then, their worst enemies are often people on their own side, who jump into the fray in ‘support’ of the original, nuanced argument with more craziness or extreme statements that the other side then pounces on, and the real argument is again lost in the dust cloud of partisan sniggery.
So, your argument is that AGW is poorly argued except for the cases in which it’s well-argued? How’s that answer the title question? If one person is arguing it well, then it doesn’t meet the criteria here I’d offer; since, after all it is being argued well.
I can’t be arsed to look it up again but there seems to be a distinct slippery slope once you put torture on the table. That is to say once you start as an option it gets easier and easier to opt for. Proper interrogation is a skilled task and entails some hard work on the part of the interrogator. If you get frustrated and can just fall back on, “Screw it, get the car battery” it could tempt people out of mastering their frustration and continue a proper interrogation. I want to say the French in Algiers went down this road. They did not start by torturing everyone but by the end they had tortured a shocking number of people as they really got on a roll (really off the charts…they arrested something like 30% or more of all males).
Further, once you torture you ruin the subject for any non-torture interrogation thereafter. The FBI mentioned this in Guantanamo because once the CIA started in with the rough stuff they knew those people were ruined as sources. The FBI left in disgust. Essentially you poison the well.
Third, there is just no way to determine how a person will respond to torture. I think I linked to that earlier. You just do not know, there is no test. As such I have seen nothing to suggest a skilled interrogator would be able to spot the people where torture would be the better option. Add that to poisoning the well bit above. If you get it wrong you cannot go back and opt for a more tame interrogation.
Fourth, people under torture are known to give a lot of bad information (something we have again cited in other threads). They’ll talk, you can be sure of that, but they will say whatever they think it is that will get you to stop. As the torturer you do not know what is the truth and what is the lie (if you did then why are you torturing him?). This can cause you to use resources chasing down bogus leads so become counterproductive. This was shown by the British woman in Argentina who they tortured, she told them the truth but they didn’t believe it and continued to torture her till they believed it but then she was so ruined could not give them any useful info after that.
Add it all together and it just never really makes sense.
Um, just about all of them ? It’s not extreme when it’s the consensus of the experts. The pro-torture people are the ones who AREN’T experts.