From the authorities’ point of view, sometimes it’s more important to be seen to be doing something about the problem of crime, heresy, or what have you, than it is to actually catch the guilty party. Torturing somebody, especially in public, is going to be seen as doing something, even if they’ve got the wrong person. There might be an additional bonus, from the authorities’ point of view, of making life difficult for an “undesirable” in the bargain. That punishes someone who is not popular, and intimidates other unpopular people and people who are opposed to the authorities.
Bah. In one case it’s “psychological torture” in another it’s mild pain, and in all case,* both sides know that the “victim” can say “Enough of this shit” at any time*. Just like if Bob the masochist hire Mistress Vicky to paddle his ass- he’s not being “tortured” at all.
This is the problem with allowing just about anything to be defined as 'torture"- playing your old classic rock in the cars, making your kids listen to it is 'torture".
Both those cases prove nothing about whether or not your average dude would torture another for real.
Many years ago I had a GF with bad back acne. She’d ask me to clean her back and pop her back zits. This hurt like a MoFo. She even screamed a few times. Was I torturing her? No- because at any time she could say “Stop” and I would, she wanted to have me do it.
Those dudes in the study were being recompensed, and both sides knew the other could say “enough” at any time.
Right he starts by lying. Then after a while, he tells the truth, sure. But- what happens if by then he;s so delirious or stressed he gets details wrong or forgets things? Next step is he starts making shit up- saying ANYTHING to please the torturer. “Aliens!” “J. Edgar Hoover!” “I killed Kennedy!”
And you dont know exactly when he has gone from lying to babbling to making shit up- well, until he starts saying total fantasies.
So no, torture doesnt work for getting reliable info- ever. Well, I suppose if the safe is right there, but when do you finally give up and decide he really doesnt know the combo or the stress has driven it from his mind?
Sure, and see this line "According to experts, the preconditions that can lead someone to become a torturer include a fervently held ideology that attributes great evil to some other group and defines the believer as a guardian of the social good, an attitude of unquestioning obedience to authority, and the open or tacit support of the torturer by his peers. More immediately the torturer seems to cope with his cruelty by means of a psychological split in his personality."
This doesnt mean sicko sadist that gets sexual pleasure from pain, true. But it’s also not “Joe Average” either.
I have seen a german film about a prison experiment not long ago… interesting how the characters are adapting to the one or the other role http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Experiment
I think people are easily accepting power given to them, next step is abuse of that same power. the extreme is torture. Depending on the school system , the educational frame a person has grown up in it’s more or less easy for him/her to step over the line.
His claim to fame prior to advocating torture was getting Claus von Bülow’s attempted murder conviction for putting his wife in a coma overturned (and made into a film, which he even did a cameo in) and as part of OJ Simpson’s dream teamof lawyers that got him a not guilty verdict for double homicide and writing a book about it.
In China’s case, I read once – no cite – that there was an emperor far back in Chinese history who, for humanitarian reasons, decreed that no suspect ever should be convicted of a crime save on his own confession. The punishments for crimes were so harsh, after all – they must not be visited on the wrong man, and how else to make absolutely certain the suspect is guilty, unless he confesses? Of course, the punishments being so harsh, a guilty man is not always eager to confess, so . . .
“Claim to fame” implies that he was famous for it, which as far as I can tell he wasn’t. And even if he was at the time, I see that was in 1976; plenty of time for fame to fade. He was famous for the much more recent Simpson case; I’d heard of his name in connection with that.
Dershowitz was famous for his civil rights work. And defending freedom of speech is the pinnacle of success in that field. Later he gained infamy by defending murderers, probably to make some money.
That doesn’t change the fact that his views on torture are absurd, and don’t even make sense. His concept of obtaining a warrant in the non-existent ticking time bomb case makes no sense, if you can wait to get a warrant, you could use a reliable method of obtaining information. He also has made the mistake of justifying torture by saying it could be used where people might have information that could be used to save lives. Since he might have information that could be used to save lives, I hope he’s williing to be tortured to resolve that question.
I think the other posters are right that torture was generally used as a means of punishing people or getting them to do whatever the torturers wanted rather than providing information. But I think it works pretty much the same way regardless: they had a bad person. He wasn’t doing what they wanted. After torture, he probably agreed to do what they said or told them what they wanted to know - or else he died, proving he was really bad. That was all they needed. Torture was satisfying to the torturers because it reinforced their beliefs and made them feel like they were getting something done. And yes, it also sent a serious warning.
Here’s the thing. Torture does in fact produce confessions reliably, which is a completely different thing than producing reliable confessions. So maybe all this history has just been a tragic mistake of sentence parsing.
Have you ever read the Milgram papers? They were not about mild pain. They were about escalating pain. The “victims” (who were actually researchers pretending to be hooked up to the learning machine) begged the subjects to stop, faked extreme agony and even death:
That means every person who participate was willing to cause severe pain, and 65% were willing to kill. Just because someone in authority told them it was ok. The video was taken down from Youtube, but that site has audio clips if you want to judge for yourself:
No, they werent. Come on, this is America. All the dudes in that study knew full well that you cant really kill people or torture them. They were acting.
What are you basing that on? I have never heard that. From what I have read, some of the test subjects cried and begged not to have to continue. What makes you think they knew it was fake?
The whole “this is America” thing? Come on, you and I KNOW no one can torture people and not end up in handcuffs. I’d be going along with the joke, mugging for the cameras and waving to Alan Funt.