Torture doesn't work

Great Debates
341

I’m not disparaging people who write books. I am saying that the author of THAT PARTICULAR book has a point of view. He is not some objective observer that is giving us an unadulterated objective version of the facts. The guy doesn’t win human rights awards because he is open and objective to the beneficial uses of torture.

So your answer is “no, I have no science that says that torture doesn’t work, not even one study just opinions and anecdotes, but I will continue to act and talk like my position is backed up by science rather than opinions”

You see the thing is that there is SCIENCE behind things like vaccines and global warming. Where is your science?

Oh, so its not science but its JUST LIKE science? You have opinions and anecdotes. That may be a form of evidence but its not science.

You realize this is the book written by that author that I was talking about upthread, right? His book is an argument against torture, not a scientific study.

Navy SEALS gave up a codeword almost 100% of the time within minutes of being waterboarded. That’s a lot closer to science than the opinions and anecdotes you present as science.

"Schiemann is the first to say game theory is not an ideal method for looking at torture, but given that most of the relevant data is secret, and direct experimentation using actual torture techniques is unethical, a theoretical model of torture is “the third best option of the only three options available.”

Schiemann must not be familiar with SERE training where we do in fact use actual torture techniques on human beings to see whether they will divulge information.

I have stated my position on torture pretty clearly. Are you calling me a liar?

What you really have is opinion. A mountain of it to be sure but a mountain of opinion is still not science, it is a poll.

But please go ahead and tell me how torture is like a box of chocolates “you never know what you’re going to get”

342

No, it is not a “poll” and the opinion is one held by people who know what they are talking about. It is an opinion that has been known and shared by militaries and police for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years.

I am not sure what you are trying to prove here. Are you trying to get someone to say that one time, somewhere, someone was tortured and they totally spilled the beans? Well sure then…I have no doubt that has happened and more than once.

That does not indicate it “works” in any normal usage of the word. We do not say a car works because you can turn it on in one out of one hundred tries.

Over and over people who are in these positions of interrogating prisoners tell us that torture is a really poor means to gain reliable and actionable intelligence. Worse, it can be counterproductive.

The only things torture is really good at is extracting false confessions and terrorizing people with the threat of it.

343

Not accurate at all. The cite I made does link to the research that was published in a peer reviewed journal, but go ahead and show to all that you are not paying attention.

As pointed before he is using history, you do not like that it is evidence and it is you the one that has not debunked any of the sources he used. You are also spectacularly missing the point of why I cited that article, it demonstrates that many experts do recognize the evidence that the professor reports in his book.

Sorry, it you the one who is not using science, a training report is not that. Again the problem you have there is that you have an omniscient element: namely that the trainers did know the number and that the subjects did know it, if you can not ever figure out that a situation like that is not common in real life your opinion can be dismissed.

Again, not a real life situation and not a peer reviewed science article.

:rolleyes:

Read it again, I said that you can be sincere in your belief but you are wrong anyhow.

Straw man, read what Whack-a-Mole reports about thinking that something “works”. You are the one who is trying to make torture more effective than it really is. You are really using arguments that are very similar as the ones coming from pseudo scientists that can identify exceptions, but nevertheless exceptions that prove the rule.

344

I don’t know if anyone in this thread disagrees with that. I certainly agree with that, and I’ve for some perverse reason found myself on the “pro-torture” side of this debate. But some people (particularly DrDeth) take that one step further, from “almost never” and “counterproductive” and “only in really specific circumstances with ticking bombs” to “absolutely never ever ever” and “only by pure chance”. Which just offends my common sense.

The claim that if even in the freakishly unlikely situation of having captured a bad guy with a safe and in the safe was something we needed, and there was a high level of confidence that the bad guy knew the combination, that torturing the bad guy would not be any more effective than pure chance; is so contrary to my understanding of human nature as to be frankly bizarre. Now, I’m perfectly happy to concede that for certain bad guys, and certain lengths of time we had before we needed the safe to be open, there might be other more effective psychological techniques. But again, I’m not claiming torture would be the BEST way to proceed in that (again, admittedly extremely unlikely) scenario, just that it would at least some of the time (depending on the bad guy) increase our odds of getting the safe open.

Cite?

345

How many times have US soldiers needed to open a safe in a hurry, and knew for sure that the guy who knew the combination was right there?

Oh, it happened once, so now torture is justified.

People who approve of torture do so because it gives them a hardon. It makes them feel good inside. They don’t approve of torture because they think it will save lives, they do it because they think the victim deserves it. And when I talk about hardons, I’m talking literal erect penises.

346

I completely agree with you. And why does the torture supporter think their victim deserves torture? Simple. Because the victim is "One of those {insert ethnic/religious/national/whatever slur here}.

Generally, when I get into discussions with those who support torture, it ends up basically as follows:

Supporter: Put a gun to his head. He’ll talk.
Me: And what if he doesn’t actually know anything.
Supporter: Shoot his ass!

So, it’s not the idea of obtaining information that’s driving the [del]pychos[/del] supporters of torture; rather, it’s the idea of dishing out some “good clean justice to that {insert ethnic/religious/national/whatever slur here}”.

347

Relevant Poltifact article:

"*Our ruling

Wilcox said, “I can tell you that the enhanced interrogation techniques that have since been banned by this administration — specifically waterboarding — work.”

While many top officials defended the CIA’s use of waterboarding in the past, there is no irrefutable evidence the practice provides results. Experts said there are few historical accounts of success, and even those are suspect. Meanwhile, there’s scientific proof that a technique like waterboarding would affect brain function enough to make any prisoner’s statements unreliable. They may say anything to make the waterboarding stop, and could actually be physically unable to provide any cogent intelligence.

Wilcox didn’t provide concrete proof and experts say virtually none exists. We rate the statement False."*

348

Just like the ticking bomb. Let’s make a hypothetical situation so contrived that it could never actually exist, and then use it to justify torture.

349

I’m not seeing where Max is saying it’s justified. He just said that it does sometimes work, which is what this thread is about.

For instance, I noted much earlier in this thread that I thought an even more effective use of torture would be to torture the target person’s wife or children. That would probably “work” even better or faster than torturing the guy himself. Do you think I’m claiming that such an action is “justified” just because I say it “works”?

350

By that definition, there is NO interrogation technique that “works”

And we have people on the other side who disagree but their opinions don’t seem to count because they are torturers :smack:

351

Well, that plus their opinions are all based [del]bullshit[/del] conjecture.

352

You mean the one behind the $36 paywall?

Yes, he is using history, his selected anecdotes from history. I can select anecdotes from history to show torture in a different light.

People are making absolutists statements about torture because they want to removes the issue from debate. Its a technique that some pro-choice folks use to avoid debate when they say that a fetus is not a person so the debate is over. They are trying to establish an axiom that resolves the debate in their favor. To say that torture may work but is morally wrong means we have to have a debate about the morality of torture, one that you may or may not win. To say torture doesn’t work removes any moral question. A lot of people prefer not to have to address the moral question.

So you make absolutist statements and then walk them back by saying “well shucks I didn’t mean torture NEVER works, I mean that torture almost never works and is counterproductive” The difference being that you can have a debate about whether torture is counterproductive, you cannot really have a debate if you establish “torture doesn’t work”

A training report is a lot better than the anecdotal shit that seems to eb the bread and butter of your side of the argument.

Facts are stubborn things aren’t they? Torture consistently breaks Navy Seals but torture doesn’t work because I have a peer reviewed article? You know that peer reviewed articles are not science, right? Peer reviewed SCIENTIFIC articles are science, peer reviewed POLITICAL science articles are probably just articles where the footnotes have been fact checked.

Please read the title of the thread.

If you are willing to admit that torture does work on occassion and that you simply think that it is bad policy because it is counterproductive, immoral, toxic to democracy, unreliable or anything else, then I don’t know why you are arguing with me. I have never said that torture is not counterproductive or that it is moral or that it is not toxic or that it is any more reliable than any other form of interrogation.

You seem to be the one strawmanning my objection to the absolute statements made by the anti-torture crowd into more general statements in support of torture.

353

+1

+1

This used to be at the top of every google search but this is all I could get on short notice:

Torture is really really effective in getting information from people that actually have it. The trick is knowing who has it and verifying the information. In the case of SERE training, the interrogators know you have it and can verify the information immediately.

354

That’s not the argument we are having. We are not justifying torture in any way. we are taking offense to the notion that torture doesn’t work so we don’t even have to have a debate on the topic.

:rolleyes:

355

Are you trying to say that Sere training was contrived to justify torture?

Noone is arguing that torture is justified in this thread. I am arguing that the OP is incorrect when he says Torture simply doesn’t work.

356

The definition of torture includes harming or threatening to harm a loved one.

This is how the Soviets got Hezbollah to release some russian hostages. They went around picking up the friends and family of Hezbollah leaders and sent back their genitals and corpses in separate packages.

357

Opinions mean nothing. Facts are what count.

358

Some of the time it would work. Some of the time it would make the subject so stubborn he’d refuse to talk, whereas chatting him up would have worked and some of the time, the pain would make him forget so you’d *never *get the info out of him.

Experts have shown that over a wide range of experiences, other techniques work far better without the chances of the bad results.

359

Torture sure worked for the British against German POWs

360

Yeah.:rolleyes: “Fritz Knöchlein, a former lieutenant colonel in the Waffen SS, was one such case. He was suspected of ordering the machine-gunning of 124 British soldiers who surrendered at Le Paradis in northern France during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. His defence was that he was not even there.
At his trial, he claimed he had been tortured in the London Cage after the war. He was deprived of sleep for four days and nights after arriving in October 1946 and forced to walk in a tight circle for four hours while being kicked by a guard at each turn.
He was made to clean stairs and lavatories with a tiny rag, for days at a time, while buckets of water were poured over him. If he dared to rest, he was cudgelled. He was also forced to run in circles in the grounds of the house while carrying heavy logs and barrels. When he complained, the treatment simply got worse.
Nor was he the only one. He said men were repeatedly beaten about the face and had hair ripped from their heads. A fellow inmate begged to be killed because he couldn’t take any more brutality.
All Knöchlein’s accusations were ignored, however. He was found guilty and hanged.”

Boy that sure got us some solid intel.:rolleyes::dubious: