Verification of information is not entirely worthless. If they didn’t tell the interrogators what the code word was, they could interrogate the next few guys and see if they all came up with the same codeword.
That’s the thing about ANY interrogation, you can never tell if any of it is true without verification. that’s why verification is not actually worthless. Tips about who to follow and keep track of is not worthless, it might tie up resources but in these cases, you make the source convince YOU of its truth before you commit resources.
I think most people agree with everything up to here but some people will claim that these scenarios are as rare as unicorns in the interests of national security.
Torture is not a panacea. Its a tool, a very blunt instrument that you use when you are out of options, its a bit like drilling out a stripped screw, it might work, it might not but you probably want to use every other technique before you drill out the screw. In some cases its like trying to screw in a toggle bolt with a chainsaw, just not an appropriate tool for the job you need to get done.
They interviewed the guards and recreated the safe setup with computers, there were really 3 safes inside a big safe room that had a safe door. The crooks got the keys and combinations for the main room, but once inside the crooks did not know about the location of the gold so they expected it to be inside one of the 3 safes in the room.
It was there that the guard forgot the combination and it was looking hairy for the guards, until the crooks found that the gold was outside the internal 3 safes. AFAIK the crooks did not know about the gold, as the guards explained that the values that they dealt with changed from day to day and based on the effort the crooks got into later they did not expect to find that gold but other valuables.
Expertise. Hacking requires much skill, many people don’t have it.
The torturer sees the time and effort it takes to crack the code, over days, vs. the time and effort to sweat it out from a subject sitting right there.
To use the example someone else gave: Why would bank robbers spend hours trying to break into a safe with equipment when there are bank employees standing right there who know the combination?
Do you really think you would forget your passcode? I find that difficult to believe.
i think if you thought the torture would not not stop until the phone was open, and that if the phone got permanently locked it would never end that would be pretty compelling.
Also, if the guy was so distressed that he couldn’t remember his passcode, one could always give him a minute or two to gather his wits and find a balance between terror and remembrance.
I think it would work pretty well in this scenario… But let’s not test it.
Sure, but what happens when the phone is unlocked? Let us say it then reveals the location of your wife and kids, who the torturer will then proceed to dismember in horrible ways.
Then, you’d lie 10 times, right?
But if all they are getting is the shot of your naked ass at Cancun and the $84.38 in your bank account, then sure.
AFAICT, there are as many credible sources saying that torture works as there are that say it doesn’t and frankly there is little to no incentive to saying torture works when it doesn’t while there is plenty of incentive to say torture doesn’t work even when it does.
That’s a really good point. I’d say that if you knew the phone would lock after so many attempts you might have a chance of holding out. If you didn’t set the phone to lock before you got tortured and there were unlimited attempts, I’d say you’d be pretty much doomed.
I somehow doubt the following conversation happened very often in Nazi-occupied France:
“Marie! I just saw Francois get arrested by the Gestapo!”
“Oh, mon dieu, he knows all of our names and all of our plans!”
“And then drove him away to Gestapo headquarters… everyone knows that you can hear the screams from their basement at all hours”
“Oh, well, then, we’re perfectly safe… because all they’ll do there is torture him, and of course torture doesn’t work.”
“You’re right… no need for us or our families to go into hiding, or for any of our plans to change or anything”
“Thanks god those Nazis are so dumb”
“Agreed”
Seriously, if you were part of some secretive group struggling against an evil group (say you’re part of a team of undercover agents infiltrating organized crime), and one of your team, who could expose you, gets caught, and you’re fairly sure he’s being tortured, what would you do? Are you so confident that torture doesn’t work that you’d feel safe just continuing as before?
Interrogated extensively on a daily basis in Lyon by Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo there, and later more briefly in Paris, Moulin never revealed anything to his captors and died near Metz on a train headed for Germany[4] from injuries sustained either during torture or in a suicide attempt. Moulin’s ability not to provide information to the Gestapo was extraordinary given the ferocity of the torture he was subjected to, which reportedly included hot needles being put under his fingernails, doors being closed on his hands until his knuckles broke, the use of screw-levered handcuffs to cut into his wrists and whipping and beatings.[5]
or http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/barbie.html
*Lise Lesevre, frail and upright despite her 86 years, described the defendant as “Barbie the savage,” saying she recognized him decades later because of his “pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal in a cage.”
Lesevre, who belonged to a resistance group, said the Gestapo arrested her on March 13, 1944, while she was carrying a letter intended for a Resistance leader code-named Didier.
She said Barbie spent almost three weeks trying to learn if Lesevre was Didier, and if not, who was. She was interrogated for 19 days, she said, and tortured on nine of them.
First she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar by Barbie and his men. “Who is Didier, where is Didier?” were Barbie’s main questions, she said.
Next was the bathtub torture. She said she was ordered to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub and Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater.
"During the bathtub torture, in the presence of Barbie, I wanted to drink to drown myself quickly. But I wasn’t able to do it. I didn’t say anything.
“After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel,” she said.
“It was a beast, not a man,” she said. “It was terror. He took pleasure in it.”
During her last interrogation, she said, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she still suffers.
“He told me, ‘I admire you, but in the end everybody talks.’” But she never did, and she heard Barbie say finally, “Liquidate her. I don’t want to see her anymore.”*
or Noor Khan
then there’s this:
*“What is surprising is how difficult is to find specific cases where torture produced information that was not known by other means.” “These interrogations’ were not especially productive. Even under the most brutal treatment, few prisoners revealed information not already known to the Gestapo’.” *
In other words, even when you are as brutal as the fucking Gestapo, torture doesn’t work.
Again, “Torture doesn’t work” isn’t meant universally - it’s meant specifically in the context of gathering data that’s both accurate and precise. If you’re the Nazi regime, and you don’t care how many innocent Frenchmen you kill in your sweep of potential resistance members, then torture away - it’s a great tool for you. You’ll get lots of French Resistance members - and even more random French people who are just going about their lives. But if you’re a Nazi, you’re not really concerned about killing a bunch of innocent people.
On the other hand, if you not punishing innocent people is something you’re actually concerned about, then torture does not - wait for it - work at all. Because if you’re using torture as an intelligence gathering tool, you are absolutely going to grab up a bunch of people who have never done anything wrong, but were implicated by your victim because he would say anything - absolutely anything - to make the torture stop.