Torture doesn't work

Let’s give Hillary the customary two weeks she needs to flop-flop before judging her too harshly
Among those who facilitated the passage of the Military Commissions Act was my opponent, New York’s Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton. She took the floor of the Senate to condemn the legislation. Calling attention to the section of the bill allowing the president to issue executive decrees establishing what methods of interrogation are permissible, Clinton asked rhetorically, “Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach?” Yet she, like the other Democrats in the Senate, stood back and allowed the measure to be brought to a vote on the Senate floor, knowing it would pass.
Within barely two weeks of making her anti-torture speech, Ms. Clinton made it clear that she herself has a stomach for torture after all.
Speaking to the New York Daily News editorial board on October 11, Clinton said she recognized that in some situations interrogations called for “severity.” According to the newspaper, the conversation included mention of waterboarding, hypothermia and other methods recognized internationally as torture.
“I have said that those are very rare, but if they occur there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing that,” she responded. “Again, I think the president has to take responsibility. There has to be some check and balance, some reporting. I don’t mind if it’s reporting in a top secret context.”
Asked again about the permissibility of torture, she declared: “In those instances where we have sufficient basis to believe that there is something imminent, yeah, but then we’ve got to have a check and balance.”


Last month, the Democratic senator’s husband, Bill Clinton, made a similar statement, proposing that a court be established to issue torture warrants. “If they really believe the time comes when the only way they can get a reliable piece of information is to beat it out of someone or put a drug in their body to talk it out of ’em, then they can present it to the Foreign Intelligence Court, or some other court, just under the same circumstances we do with wiretaps. Post facto…”
In other words, the former Democratic president is proposing to set up courts that would provide legal sanction for torture—after the fact. Interrogators would have the comfort of knowing they could torture suspects, including American citizens, and concoct a justification for their actions after they had extracted a confession.

**Bill Van Auken and SEP candidate for US Senate from New York
28 October 2006

And under the Extraordinary Rendition to obliging countries Bill Clinton arranged to persuade the obstinate, waterboarding would be minor.
**

From your cite:

Your article outlines some difficulties with torture. It does not assert or prove that “torture doesn’t work”.

But the torturer assumedly isn’t stupid. He/she would have a fairly good idea of what’s a plausible and not-plausible answer, based off the context and situation.

How would you propose to contend with those “difficulties”, in such a way that torture could be said to be effective at extracting accurate information? Obviously it’s impossible to say whether it could ever work with any hypothetical victim, but we can look at the evidence and make an informed judgment. That article contains such evidence, as does this one.

Use it when the veracity of the information is easily and quickly verified. For instance, if the San Bernardino shooter had survived, and we wanted to get into his iPhone. Better yet would be to torture his child to get the information, while the watched. Make sure the tortured guy knows that the level of torture is going to escalate rapidly if the information proves false.

https://www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/sbos/costanzo_effects_of_interrogation.pdf

*The evidence is in, and it is very clear: Torture as an interrogational theory and practice is a complete and utter failure. This seems almost counter-intuitive: After all, we are bombarded with images and scenes from movies and television where torture is a great success at extracting information from the unwilling. Surely, the thinking goes, applying extremes of pain, torment, and stress to captives before (and during) interrogation will enhance their capacity and willingness to recall and reveal past events, as well as their current plans and future intentions? And, surely, the contents of their brain’s long-term memory systems will remain unaffected by the extreme stressors used during torture? The flooding of the brain by stress hormones will obviously have no effect on the structure and functioning of the brain itself. And we can surely assume with certainty that the conduction mechanisms coupling the brain’s memory and intention circuits to speech will be unaffected by torture…There is overwhelming evidence (detailed in my new book, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (link is external)) that the extreme stressors employed during torture force the brain away from the relatively narrow, adaptive range that it operates within. Furthermore, these stressors attack the fabric of the brain, causing tissue loss in brain regions concerned with memory (especially in the temporal lobes, adjacent the temples). *

*What does a prisoner’s mind do under these conditions?

We know that memory is fragile and suggestible even under low stress conditions, and recall [in mice] is impaired under stress. The reason that the recall is impaired in mice is that neurons in the hippocampus fire at and increased frequency. But torture is an attack on this part of the brain particularly – it is the systematic use of trauma to provoke a change in consciousness. It is a deliberate, systematic attack on the emotional centers of the brain. The point is to overstimulate the limbic and autonomic nervous systems enough to cause an emotional breakdown. Memory failure results in confabulation: The brain will record highlights of major events, and the mind will fill in the gaps with plausible but false events that the brain’s owner believes to be true.

It is important to stress that confabulators are not lying: they are not deliberately trying to mislead. In fact, the patients are generally quite unaware that their memories are inaccurate, and they may argue strenuously that they have been telling the truth.
It turns out that the part of the brain that controls memory function is most sensitive to hypoxic stress – low oxygen conditions sometimes results in permanent damage that renders a person not just suggestible but unable to distinguish fact from fiction…The exact causes of confabulation are unknown, but basal forebrain damage may lead to memory impairments, while frontal damage may lead to problems in self-awareness. Thus, the patient may have a memory deficit but be unaware of his deficit.The problem quickly becomes not “will they” answer the questions accurately – the problem becomes “can they”.*.

**It never has worked- it has never gotten info that could not be got thru less stressful methods. Find me a cite that shows it has. **

I’ll just leave this here.

I don’t think torture works as an intelligence policy, and is in fact counter-productive (creating more terrorists than it helps capture/kill; being unreliable; being morally repugnant; etc.). It may work in some individual circumstances, but I think it’s reasonable to say, when discussing what intelligence-gathering policies are appropriate, that “torture doesn’t work” – other ways of gathering information work better, in general.

I’m not advocating the use of torture. I just think “torture doesn’t work” is a lazy way out of dealing with the difficult moral questions that arise when considering torture. And if you are going to debate someone, best not start with a premise that is easily debunked.

So, it does work then?

Having read the CIA study on torture (which you can find online), Hillary’s (and most of the people on this board’s) summary of its results is incorrect.

Specifically, what it says is:

  1. Torture is unnecessary to get good intel out of the majority of prisoners.
  2. Prisoners, in all cases (torture or free-will discussion) tell lies and all of their information is untrustworthy, unless double-checked.
  3. Torture does not prevent nor reduce the rate at which prisoners lie. It is not a truth serum.
  4. In all cases, suspects can and possibly will give answers that they think will appease their captors. So, if you give them any information or ask any leading questions, over time, they’re going to confirm your expected answers, regardless of whether your expected answers are correct. Under torture, this scenario is more likely.
  5. Torture is really only useful in causing someone to talk, who had refused to talk.

So, theoretically, if you prevent your interrogator from asking leading questions and you disregard all information which can’t be verified through another source (who, again, you would need to not lead into verifying the information), then torture can be useful, if you have a prisoner who is refusing to speak.

If you have a set of willing prisoners, then torture is unnecessary, but you still need to double-check everything you get for lies (at the same ratio) and you still need to refrain from leading your suspects (at a slightly smaller rate), as those problems still exist.

Disregardling moral quandaries, torture is an imperfect technique but not significantly less perfect than standard interrogation techniques. It is principally a tool that can be used to prevent prisoners from staying silent.

If I know, or remember it. But what if I don’t? If I say I don’t know, you apply more torture. If I make up a number, I get a temporary reprieve while you test my information… and then more torture. At what point is it in my best interest to cooperate with you?

And once the torture is over because you got (or didn’t get) what you needed, and all my friends and community learn that you torture people to get what you need, has your security situation gotten better or worse?

Again, that’s not the context for “torture doesn’t work”. You’re talking about compliance, not developing intelligence sources, extracting confessions, and the like. Apples and oranges.

Some people have (presumably) broken into my home and started to torture my wife.

Why am I taking the word of these people that, on giving an answer and the answer being revealed to be true, that there won’t simply be more torture? Or death?

So, you would not give them the combination?

Where in the OP is he talking about those things (emphasis added).

Look, if you want to claim that torture doesn’t work in the vast majority of the times when intelligence operatives are collecting information, that’s fine. But “torture doesn’t work” is false.

Once I do, if they’re going to kill me and my wife, that’s it, we’re dead. A lie, at the very least, buys time to try and figure some way out of that situation.

Frankly, though, I don’t know what my answer would be. It’s the kind of situation so far from me sitting calmly in a chair debating abstracts that I couldn’t guess how I would really respond. It’s an unknown.

Of course torture works–for certain values of the word “work.” It’s excellent at compelling a specific action. What it does not do is work reliably or efficiently as a method of gathering information.

Both common sense and history show that if you subject them to enough pain, the vast majority of persons will do anything to stop it. So if your desire is to force the victim to perform specific action whose effects are immediately apparent – open a bank vault, confess to worshipping Mephistopheles, strip naked – torture or the threat of torture is quite effective, even if the victim knows she or he is likely to be killed afterward. The vast majority of us will do anything to stop pain if it gets bad enough.

But that’s only effective if what you desire from the victim is a specific, observable action. If what you want from the victim is information that you cannot instantly confirm, then torture fails, because most persons about to be set on fire will say anything to delay it, regardless of whether they know it to be true.

So let’s take the archetypical torture scenario: the ticking nuclear bomb. If you’re trying to disarm it and have a man capable of doing so in custody, breaking his ribs one at a time will probably get him to comply. But that’s probably not necessary, because if the person is close enough to the bomb to disarm it, he’s going to be killed by it, and simple fear of death will probably persuade him to defuse it. If what you’re trying to do is FIND the bomb, and you have a woman in custodyt you think knows its location, torture is probably contraindicated, because you don’t know of a certainty that what she tells you is true (because the only way to be sure of that would be to know where the bomb was in the first place). Start breaking those ribs and she’ll say anything to make you stop, even if she doesn’t have any idea where the bomb is. She’ll send you on wild goose chases because, while you’re hunting those birds, the pain will stop. All torture does in that case is waste time

Short version of the above: torture works in the sense that an axe works. Fine for chopping down a tree, but useless for changing a flat tire.

Please do not misinterpret anything I wrote above as commenting on the morality of torture; I wrote only of its utility.

You’re assuming the torturers would let you live and set you free to tell the world what they’d done to you…a big assumption.

Wow, you must have some damn valuable stuff in your safe!! I would sing like a bird and count on them not being sadists, just thieves. I wouldn’t want to bet my spouse’s life on thinking I was sure they were the latter.

I don’t condone torture, but to say that it simply “doesn’t work, end of story” is a very convenient overly simplistic fairytale.

I know for a fact that in a hypothetical scenario where I didn’t want to disclose certain information to authorities or criminals, that I would be able to withhold giving out the info… UNLESS I’m being tortured. I’d break under torture. This of course requires, that I have the info being asked of me in the first place, and that those inquiring KNOW FOR SURE that I have the info they want.