Thats some not most
Plus history is written by the victors … Guy Fawkes was found on top of gunpowder … is a fact given to us by the people who arrested and tortured him
(please note I have no in depth knowledge of Guy Fawkes just picked him as the first on the list)
It does not matter if they were guilty, or not. AK48 is right - the purpose was to educate others on why it was bad to oppose the state. The ones they were not sure about but might be a problem, simply disappeared - maybe to Gulag or into the sea off Argentina.
Regimes over the centuries seemed to be big into self-justification. Torture provided a confession for all the world to see that the torturer was justified in arresting and condemning this person.
Plenty of scientific studies that show torture is ineffective as a method of extracting information. The wikipedia article on torture links to several of them, including a 300+ page report from thje National Defense Intelligence College which links to dozens more studies. The Cardozo study notes that the ratio of false confessions to truthful confessions is too high to make torture an effective tool for interrogation, particularly when there are other methods which the data shows are more effective.
Historically, torture was used not to extract information but to get people to conform to an ideology. And also to punish those who refused. The NDIC study I mentioned above has a detailed analysis of the historical use of torture.
On TV cop shows (surely accurate reflections of the world) a lot of emphasis is on obtaining confessions. If not torture still a great deal of pressure the get someone they “know” is guilty to admit it. I suppose, to undermine later claims of innocence. But I get the feeling that the innocent is as likely as the guilty to fold. (Ignoring the problem of people volunteering false confessions.)
Dershowitz is just flat out wrong on the torture issue. The ticking time bomb situation never occurs in real life. And if it did occur, getting a warrant to torture would then be a ridiculous waste of time. It’s possible that he was trying to justify the use of torture by Israel, something they have backed off on after realizing it didn’t work.
I agree that torture is completely unreliable when it comes to obtaining confessions. I also agree that it is completely abhorrent and should not be used (if you’re convinced you have a ticking time bomb scenario, invoke the necessity defense at your trial). There are a lot of organizations (not necessarily states) who torture prisoners to obtain information. Are they merely unsophisticated? I don’t mean to make light of what they are doing, but rather to point out that they seem to be happy with the results they are getting.
Rob
Well if they made a movie about it, then I guess it could happen.
Thing is, when you have a professional torturer, or just an ad hoc guy who handles the prisoners, such a person will invariably be someone who enjoys torture for its own sake. Why else are they always volunteering to be the guy who tortures the prisoners? The people in charge who don’t enjoy torture are happy to let the sadist handle the job, because they don’t want to do it themselves, and when you order normal people to do the job they end up all PTSD.
But the trouble with letting the sadists handle the torture is that the sadists aren’t torturing for what the bosses say they want. The sadists torture because they enjoy it. Getting confessions and/or intelligence is something they do only because they want the bosses to keep providing them with new victims. Professional torturers are always sadists, which means that the professional torture apparatus is devoted to torture for its own sake. They are always–always–crazy fuckers who enjoy causing pain, and notions like whether their victims are guilty or innocent have no meaning.
As to whether torture can work, obviously it depends. If you’ve got the money in your safe, and the gang wants you to give them the combination, you’re going to give them the combination unless they accidentally kill you before you crack. This is because the intelligence you give them–the combination of the safe–can be checked in a few seconds. And if you lie, you get more torture.
But most torture isn’t like this. Suppose you’re an intellectual. The police arrest you for one reason or another, because you’re a troublemaker. They want you to name your troublemaking accomplices. Eventually, you name whoever they want you to name. And they might even let you go after that. So what was the point of the torture? To get the names of troublemakers? Of course not, they gave you the names of the troublemakers. The point was to justify your arrest in the first place to their bosses, to justify the arrest of future troublemakers, to show how much treason there is, and how essential the police are. And to destroy your relationships with your fellow troublemakers, you implicated them and so now they don’t trust you. And to break you, now you know you’re the kind of scumbag who’d betray your friends and associates just to save yourself a little torture.
Or torture could be used like the narcotrafficantes. Someone is a problem, so grab them and/or their family members and torture them to death. The purpose is not to get something from the torture victims, the purpose is to stop others from being troublemakers in the future, or they’ll end up like the victims. States use torture this way too. “This is what happens to people who cause problems, so you better not cause problems.”
Turns out a lot of torturers are regular guys who do it because they don’t want to be tortured themselves if they refuse. However I thing what you said applies to anyone in this country who at worst would have only lost their job if they refused to do it. They should be prosecuted, and if they have a legal loophole, they should be committed as a danger to others.
I don’t think this is backed up by modern research, including Stanley Milgram’s experiments and the Stanford prison experiment. Everyone is capable of being a torturer and we’re deluding ourselves if we think otherwise.
Okay, this scenario…the police pull over a man frantically driving home. Blood is in his back seat and all over his person. A shovel and fresh dirt are in the trunk. A six shot revolver is found concealed on his person with one empty casing in the cylinder. He confesses that he did something bad but will say nothing further.
Later that night, a woman is reported missing. Police obtain a DNA sample from her hairbrush. It matches the blood in the first guy’s car. His fingerprints are found in her apartment. A bullet, with her blood on it, is pulled from her apartment wall along with a giant splatter of her blood on the wall. The bullet is a conclusive match to the revolver guy #1 was carrying.
The police want to know where she or her body is and are willing to torture*. Tell me how this guy would not cave and give up valuable information.
*Not that I approve of this tactic. I’m just saying that in very limited circumstances, it will work.
He might. Then he will be released because torture is illegal, and likely go out kill again. The cops who tortured him will be convicted of crimes. What a great idea!
Or it turns out that he is a cop, and the missing woman is one of the people they tortured and killed. Because that’s the kind of thing torturers do.
They seem to be torturing for he fun of it here. From my own experience in the criminal justice system, the guy will probably break when they advise him politely of the evidence against him. Most people are far too willing to spill the details IME. Secondly, they have done all that they have done, obtained , fingerprints,DNA and ballistics results, results that usually take weeks. They cannot however piece together her last location or where his car was, (from CCTV, mobile and credit card records) which takes a much shorter time? The police in your example are utter idiots. Not exactly realistic.
You seem to accept that that the goal of the torture is really to get information. Most of the replies here – and I agree with them – think that that getting information is just the excuse to torture, and the real goals are to threaten others and/or satisfy the torturer’s (individual and organizational) emotional desires for revenge/inflicting pain.
Since the torture really does threaten others and satisfy emotional desires, it does in fact work for these organizations, so they keep doing it. Whether or not it actually gets reliable information is beside the point.
Hmm… I don’t think this is the generally accepted view for, for instance, the generals’ trial in Soviet Union or the Prague trials (*)
(*)Regarding the latter there’s an excellent movie “the confession” based on the memoirs of a rather high ranking and originally totally dedicated, if somewhat naive, communist with an impeccable record. It depicts the “soft tortures” like sleep deprivation, used until he admits to all sorts of implausible treasonous actions during his whole life, like all the other people arrested.
Luckily for him he was only a low-ranking minister and wasn’t sent to the firing squad, and later managed to flee to the west.
It’s interesting also because despite being very knowledgeable about the party, he and his wife are shown to be in complete denial. He can’t believe at first that the party or Stalin could be condoning what’s happening to him, and once his admission of guilt is announced, his wife, who fought along him in Spain and France, immediately assumes that he has to be guilty and hide his treasonous ways from her during all those years because the party couldn’t possibly lie about that.
Exactly - why? Based on the amount of blood and time gone by, the woman is likely dead. Plus, it seems she’s buried - so likely suffocated if not already dead. They have enough evidence to convict if they never find the body.
If they find the body from torture, they that is excluded from the body of evidence; not sure if the case is automatically dropped, but a lot of the evidence including anything he said and any testimony from the torturers is probably inadmissible. If they found the car and blood, then if they can’t testify how they found the evidence, then there’s not a lot of evidence.
Plus, they’ll go to jail for torturing.
Better to do it the way the Mounties took care of Clifford Olson a few decades ago - they paid hm hundreds of thousands for information where each of the bodies were. His wife moved the money offshore before they public outcry could cause the government to claw it back.
Actually, once they have the guy, eventually he will talk. Once he’s in jail, it affects things like chances of parole if any, type of accomodations, etc. Plus, like the Batman guy, he’s probably bursting to tell the cops how smart he is and prove it - “see, you’d never find him without me telling you!”
Well, one way is that this guy could not give up valuable information is by lying. After all, being the kind of guy who’s happy to murder someone, he might also be the kind of guy who thinks its fun leading the police on wild-goose chases, and who thinks it’s macho to resist pain.
So he lets himself get beat up for a little bit, pretends to crack and gives the police some inconveniently out-of-the-way and hard-to-narrow-down location. Two days later, when the cops have finished digging up every inch of the large field several hours away and come back to him, he giggles and says "Oh, sorry. I guess I was just having fun then. But this time, I really have been broken. Just stop torturing me, and I I’ll tell you where she really is buried ".
If you were the cops, how many times would you go through this before giving up?
[Of course, this is a pretty bad hypothetical, since it’s pretty clear the woman is dead anyway, so there’s no real rush to find the body. But then, if there is a rush to find her, lying is even more effective, right?]