I’m not sure if I’m reading this right… are you saying that if torture is considered totally ineffective, we wouldn’t prosecute members of the Bush administration, but if it is at least somewhat effective, we would prosecute them? This seems to be the opposite of what I would think - the one possible reason to excuse people for performing torture would be if it was effective.
I am suggesting that we should condemn torture EVEN IF IT IS EFFECTIVE. I see no reason to argue for the rather speculative position that torture is never effective in any circumstance; just because it might be effective in certain scenarios hardly means that it need be supported in general.
EVERYONE cracks under torture. It’s just that you are unlikely to get the truth from them, since they are telling you what you want to hear. The first time you make a wrong guess about whether they are telling the truth, you will immediately head into fantasy land, because you’ll be torturing them into recanting their “lies”. The “criminals” - if they are criminals - are going to lie because you’ll at some point be torturing them into it.
And it poisons the well for any further interrogations as well, even if torture isn’t being used anymore.
That’s not the question; the question is, is doing so more efficient than getting the right information the first time with more effective and moral methods ? There’s also an excellent chance that NONE of the answers you got were true, because you tortured them into telling you the lies you wanted to hear. You are also going to be under the handicap that your other sources of information will dry up; people don’t willingly talk to torturers.
AND, as was pointed out in another thread, you aren’t going to get such cold, professional, logical tactics out of a torturer in the first place. It’s only monsters and incompetents who torture in the first place, so you are going to get the results of monstrous and incompetent behavior. As we have.
I condemn it regardless of effectiveness. The effectiveness of torture for interrogation is a side issue anyway; the primary reasons for torture in the real world are cruelty, terror, and the production of convenient lies. The reasons we have indulged in it.
Quite simple really. You ask for evidence of success then attribute any success to luck making it all but impossible for torture to succeed on it’s own.
And again, you can’t take their word for anything because they are all liars. Not really much point in engaging you on this issue, is there.
No, I’m pointing out that anything will “succeed” if you do it often enough. That’s a standard trick frauds use, after all; make enough guesses, and you’ll be right sooner or later.
Don’t be silly. Liars or not, they could always come up with hard evidence. Too bad they destroyed all those interrogation tapes; no doubt those had gobs of evidence for the effectiveness of torture.
It certainly would be helpful if the terrorist was running around setting his bombs with his kids in tow. If there were two, you could start by shooting one in the head, which should be pretty impressive. Open with a bang, I always say.
The time constraint in the OP is absurdly narrow. Consider it will take some time to setup the torture, ask some questions then get people to the designated location and defuse a nuke all in under one hour. Even if the captive told you the real location after the first jolt of electricity and you had police spread around the city to respond you have maybe one shot at this. If the captive lies to you just once it’s almost certainly game over. Bye-bye New York.
Anyone willing to knowingly set off a nuke in New York City is, by definition I’d say, a fanatic. Such a person is exceptionally unlikely to tell the torturer the actual location in this scenario. Worse, the bomber knows that he can lead his captors astray. It behooves him to lie and waste what precious little time there is available. He need not hold out long, just a few tens of minutes will do.
That said we do have evidence that in a “ticking time bomb” scenario trained interrogators do not use torture. Granted their time constraints are not a mere hour but more likely a day or two (at a guess).
In WWII we know that the British eschewed torture of captured German spies in favor of other methods. I think it likely there were times when the information they wanted was time sensitive yet they didn’t torture.
Then we have the guy below who I cited in another thread on torture:
If it were you or me, people who are not trained interrogators we are probably totally fucked having no skill in this area. A trained interrogator however does know how to glean information without torture. Likely it will not be anything direct such as, “The bomb is in the train station!” What they are more likely to get is indirect evidence. Maybe ask him how his last meal was. What did he have? Yummy burrito? Wow…where did you find a yummy burrito in New York? Pedro’s? The one by the train station?
Ok…overly simplified but I think you get the idea. And there is some evidence that even in time critical situations interrogators do not use torture.
I’m not a professional interrogator, either, but I know of at least two.
1: Please tell us. If you don’t, you’ll have the deaths of millions of people on your conscience. Yeah, you think your cause is right, but how certain are you? Are you certain enough to risk millions of lives on it?
2: Listen, if you don’t tell us, you’ll end up in jail or worse. But we’re willing to make a deal. If you tell us where it is in time for us to defuse it, we’ll grant you prosecutorial immunity, and let you start a new life in the Witness Protection Program. None of the people above you in your organization will ever find out where you are, and you and your family will be safe from them.
OK, neither of these techniques is guaranteed to work, but they’re both more likely to work than torture. Best of all, you can combine them with each other or with other methods, while torture pretty much removes all other options (no prisoner is going to believe “we’ll let you go free”, if you’ve spent the last fifteen minutes clamping his nuts with jumper cables).
I disagree that either would be as effective in the time allotted. Just one of those MMV type things I guess. Myself, I don’t think either of the techniques you describe (even combined) would work even if you had a lot more time. The guilt angle would only work if the guy was already feeling guilty about blowing away millions…after all, he set the bomb to do just that. Hearing some unbeliever tell him that his motives are really wrong and repugnant to god, etc etc, would have no effect at all…at least not in the hour granted. AFTER the bomb blows up the guy might start to have second thoughts or remorse, when the reality of millions of men, women and children dying starts to sink in…but by then it would be a bit late.
As for immunity…I doubt you COULD (in good faith) offer such a guy such a deal, or that he would believe you even if you could (what would stop you from canceling it once you have the bomb safely in hand? What would convince such a guy that you wouldn’t cancel it once you had the bomb in hand?). This MIGHT work if you had several weeks to wear the guy down, the play good cop bad cop with him, to play on his fears and perhaps his latent guilt…but the OP doesn’t give us weeks. Nor days. Nor even hours. Just one hour.
Contrast that to the direct method. Since a lot of the uncertainty has been conveniently taken out of the equation (like whether the guy actually has the knowledge be sought), it’s pretty straightforward. He will either not talk, will talk and give deliberately invalid information, or will be made to talk and give the correct data. This will probably be done by applying a significant amount of pain to the guy and threatening him with even more pain for long periods of time if the information turns out to be false (i.e. ‘If this lead turns out to be false and that bomb goes off we promise this…you will live for years. And the pain you have suffered thus far is only a taste of what you will suffer in those years’).
Would it be effective? Maybe…probably not though. But instead of a certainty of the bomb going off with nothing done at all you would have the chance that it might be prevented. When gambling with millions of peoples lives a small chance is better than none at all.
Anyway, I don’t want to go around and around with this. I think it’s really a silly argument that brings nothing to the actual debate about the use of torture.
In Post #67 I provided you with cites (that you repeatedly asked for) to actual interrogators who were under time pressure that opined that torture is worthless.
If you torture our nuke guy do you think there is any chance he will reform his opinion in favor of saving his torturers and the city? I think once you start shocking his nuts he’ll erect a big old, “Fuck you all” flag in his head and gleefully wait for the bomb to go off. With that in mind and the knowledge that he can actively hinder your search by giving false information I think the notion that torture might, just possibly, work here goes right out the window.
Working on latent guilt probably has a better, albeit small, chance of working. Not to mention, as I noted in my previous post, a good interrogator will be unlikely to just ask for the location of the bomb but will come at the individual with seemingly inconsequential questions that may yield useful information.
You handwave away alternate options because of the limited time and the stalwarness of the interrogatee and ignore the fact that if you have such a limited time and so stalwart an interrogatee who needs only to stick it out one hour - and knows it. I think this is in the dictionary under “special pleading.”
Here’s a similar argument: When roll a hundred-sided dice, you can be quite sure it’ll land on 13. You know this because the odds of another number coming up is really low, almost zero really (give or take) - but 13, now, you can bet on that. Sure, it’s probably not going to happen. But that reads PROBABLY not…which is better than NOT. So, 13 it is!
Waterboarding can break someone in just a few minutes. Thing is, he doesn’t need to “hold out” at all - he just needs to lie, which will set the torturers wasting time on a false trail. Torture makes people talk, not tell the truth. A lie will stop the torture as fast or faster than the truth; and no, the solution isn’t to keep torturing because then they have even less reason to tell the truth - you won’t stop when you hear it. You’ll be unlikely to even recognize it.
That’s a major flaw with the whole “ticking time bomb” excuse for torture; you don’t need to make them talk fast; you need accurate information fast. And torture is bad for getting accurate information at all, much less fast.
What makes you think torture is “direct” ? You torture someone, you’ll get a huge amount of garbage you have to sort though using methods that are actually effective.
That won’t work because he’ll know that you’ll do that even if he tells the truth. By torturing him, you’ve proven that you are monster, and he’ll expect monstrous behavior from you.
Depends - is the treadmill velocity constantly increasing sufficiently to cause enough reverse drag on the bomb’s wheels to constantly counteract it’s forward propulsion?
Both of these work (I think) better than torture. But I would go one step further for (1) - if the guy is a Islamic terrorist, have him visit with a local Imam or similair to talk about Islam in America. This is working under the assumption that he has probably been mis-informed about just what America is really like, and may be able to be educated. Sure, one hour is a short time frame but (IMHO) not impossible
For (2) - you just need to be trusted to deliver on your word. Something that reguires that you behave impeccably in other avenues of public life. Somehting that America (or an AMerica that tortures) has not been doing.
Wait, so “the direct method” for getting information is to torture people? I’ll keep that in mind the next time I want to know what time it is, or need directions to a professor’s office. Here, all this time I thought that “the direct method” for gaining information was just to ask someone.
Couldn’t the CIA just hire Derren Brown? I’m sure that crafty bastard could get information out of anyone, or at least more reliable info than a bunch of ham-handed torturers.
There was a line in the movie Reservoir Dogs (paraphrasing) “If you beat this guy long enough, he will tell you who started the great Chicago fire, but that don’t necessarily make it so!”
But, I think that in a situation where you have a verifiable goal you are looking for, torture would be very effective. And while I might have qualms about it in a general sense, in a doomsday scenario like the OP, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.
But, it is a strawman to use that outrageous scenario to justify waterboarding in a normal interrogation.