But what would a torturer who wants genuinely accurate information do something pointless like that for? Call the folks at the KGB, Mukhabarat, North Korean SSD or Nazi SS evil, but I don’t think “dumb enough to the point of demanding, and accepting an obviously false answer” describes them.
The torturer that you describe is trying to get a victim to say something the torturer wants *even though the torturer knows full well that it is false. * That’s not what this thread is about. You might as well describe a torturer who demands that his victim say that 2+2 = 7, a wholly useless and inaccurate statement. This thread is about a torturer who wants to elicit useful, accurate information.
In other words, the torturer would NOT say, “Tell me that Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave in eastern Afghanistan! I want you to say that! Repeat after me now: Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave in eastern Afghanistan!” What would be the point? That would be the interrogation equivalent of leading-the-witness.
The torturer would probably demand, “*Where is *Osama bin Laden?”
If you are asserting that is “extremely likely”, then you must have something akin to actual evidence for that assertion. And I don’t mean “because it just makes sense to you”.
Threat of greater torture would not stop the victim from lying.
Thad Phillips was a boy kidnapped and repeatedly tortured by a seventeen-year-old named Joe Clark (aka “Bonebreaker”), who broke his ankles and legs, and then twisted them for hours because he got a thrill from it. Periodically Thad would claim he heard someone approaching the house, because then Joe Clark would stop torturing him to go see if someone really was coming. When Joe Clark returned, he would torture Thad even harder in retaliation…but Thad kept doing it, because he needed that tiny respite…even if only for a few seconds, even if he’d get it worse afterwards.
Fear of greater consequences does NOT keep you from lying under torture, because in the midst of agony, you literally cannot imagine any worse consequence, and you will do or say anything to make it stop right now.
Also: I think people assume that torturers wouldn’t enact “quality control” because of a belief that those who torture another human being will fall under the effects of the guard-prisoner dynamic discovered in the Stanford Prison Experiment; that the mere fact of torturing another person would cause the torturer to lose his own perspective – to shift his focus away from finding out the truth, and toward dominating and crushing the will of the prisoner.
And which of those “cite after cite” is more than opinion? There is one article where the author uses game theory which is highly subject to the “rules of the game” If I changed the rules the results would change as well.
Because these are guys training to become NAVY SEALS. You don’t get there by half assing things and just giving up because, “well, why the fuck not”
Of course, but that is only a pathetic counter, to be a good counterargument you need to show why his parameters are not valid, particularly after it was shown that his conclusions were supported by real life reports after his paper was published. And it should be mentioned again that the peers that looked at his numbers did approve of them prior to publication.
You are still missing the point, it was not a controlled experiment nor science. Based on what we know your SERE point is analogous to researchers ignoring that a great cancer cure for mice in the lab just does not work on humans outside the lab (and that IIRC has happened many times before in cancer news). And you are now ignoring that SERE was used and deemed a failure outside the controlled environment that was made by the NAVY seals.
Did you look at the link? The link does not talk about torture. The OTHER link where the author creates “rules” that makes it rational for the torturer to never stop torturing no matter what the prisoner says and makes it rational for the prisoner to keep quiet no matter what the torturer does is dependent on a particular set of assumptions. Change those assumption and you get different results. Sorry but that article provides no evidence other than the notion that torture SOMETIME doesn’t make sense and that SOMETIMES it makes sense to keep your mouth shut no matter what.
Which person is that? Who did I point to?
[quote]
The reality is that the published paper also pointed at the SERE training and noted that your “100%” success is based on a situation where the “torturers” are omniscient. Game theory showed that SERE can not be applied to real life just as the senate report showed later.
The fact that he mentions SERE training doesn’t mean he discredited the results.
The senate report was written by one side of the argument Or did you forget that?
There is science behind vaccines. There is science behind… well… science. What science is there behind your statements?
Are you saying that the military is lying about the results of SERE training? And have been doing so for years?
The fact that someone dismissed it with little to no discussion other than to say its not real world (when they are using FUCKING GAME THEORY support their conclusions) is fucking laughable.
That’s retarded. NOTHING in that article addresses the fact that Navy SEALS divulge information 100% of the time when tortured. It merely points out that is has been used to elicit false confessions by the Chinese. NONE is saying that torture cannot be abused to get false confessions.
/sigh.
Nothing in the OP or the link in the OP mentions Trump. Is not knowing the context of her entire speech your definition of disqualifying ignorance? You are bringing trump into the conversation for the same reason people bring Hitler into conversations.
Yes, all true. Torture can elicit false confessions. But the exercise that they conducted was to give each Navy SEAL a codeword and then they waterboarded them to see how long it would take for them to give up the codeword. On average they gave up the codeword in a matter of minutes 100% of the time.
Noone is saying that torture is 100% effective at getting the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth 100% of the time. Noone is saying that torture cannot be abused to elicit false confessions. NONE of that is relevant to the discussion.
The fact of the matter is that some of the most mentally tough guys in the world give up information that they are told NOT to give up within minutes of being tortured.
It has long been an assumption of the “torture doesn’t work” crowd that torturers are really really bad at what they do. I am not an expert interrogator but I bet I could devise a torture protocol that is better than that in a few months with the help of a few psychologists.
And they also criticized him for the underlying assumptions. Or at least that is what the blurb said.
His assumptions are that the torturer has no idea if the prisoner actually knows anything or how likely they are to resist torture if they knew something. The prisoner on the other hand has no idea if the torture would stop if they got the information and game theory basically pushes the torturer in this case to keep torturing no matter what the prisoner says. The prisoner realizing this will keep his mouth shut because there is no benefit to divulging the information. That is a highly stylize scenario and I agreed that torture is not useful for fishing expeditions on random people.
Really? Where’s the real life proof? Oh that’s right, the opinions of a bunch of “experts”, most of whom have never been involved in torturing anyone. The fact that people are willing to come out and publicly condemn torture says NOTHING about its efficacy it only says that people feel pretty comfortable about condemning torture.
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/~afilre...st/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.”
“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.
And as usual you cherry pick, the overall point remains. The ones that reviewed his numbers did not found any issues and the paper was published, the reality remains that he has been highlighted in many recent reports because his paper matched the results seen in the Senate torture report (As the author tells it, the real life results of torture were worse than in the model). His results showed that his research and paper was just as valid as many others that use the tool properly in other issues.
And that is what did happen in real life, it was not useful because real life was not a training exercise. Like SERE was.
And the research quoted makes the point that the inefficacy observed when using torture in the model does not use or refers to any moral judgment, it is just logic that points to torture as not working at the levels the proponents claim in real life. Outside of training torture continues to be messy and ineffective.
Your cites are not convincing. They are a combination of opinions, anecdote, reasons why torture might not work in some cases and the partisan created senate report. None of it is really science that concludes that torture doesn’t work.
So lets just make a few things clear.
Torture does not work every fucking time it is used. Its not a magic bullet for every situation.
Torture can be abused to extract false confessions.
Torture has a set of confounding factors that are unique to it.
Throwing up arguments against torture along these lines are entirely useless in supporting the notion that torture does not work.
We already know there is no scientific study on torture so people string together anecdotes to support their position. But the weight of evidence is that torture works sometimes.
And like I have said several times the senate report is a partisan paper. It was created without the input of anyone on the right.
The tool you are referring to is logic. That’s mostly what game theory is, a subset of logic. The results are highly sensitive tot eh rules you put in place. The rules he used leads to the results he got, no question there. The problem is that his assumptions are not axiomatic.
If you have a prisoner that you know has useful information, his analysis doesn’t apply. It only applies when you have no fucking idea the person you are interrogating knows anything.
Game theory is not really research. It is just the application of logic to assumed facts. The game in this case assumes facts that are not always true. But the point stands that you are going to get a lot more people standing up against torture than you will get people standing up for torture because of the moral implications.
No, torture is designed to extract false confessions. There is no need to ‘abuse’ torture for any particular bad outcome. Of course, I’m happy to hear an example of a regime that used torture and didn’t ‘abuse’ it, but I don’t think one exists.
That is an even more pathetic reply, you are depending on the same group that got it wrong regarding the WMDs to be correct also on this. There is really no logic on thinking that either the left or the right have the truth, one has to see the evidence and clearly you are an ignorant of what the right did in this case: they ignored what the experts told them it was going to happen. That it was not going to work.
A lot of the rest of your reply is nonsense, and then we have this:
And so we can dismiss the rest as usual, the paper quoted was not only using logic, he did however some research before hand to get the most likely numbers in place.
I was also just remembering why that bit about “And like I have said several times the senate report is a partisan paper. It was created without the input of anyone on the right.” sounded so pathetic, it is because it is also wrong like almost all of what you have been pushing around in this thread.
One has to note that the investigation, hearings and preparation of the Senate Report was a bipartisan effort. So the point of being created without input from anyone on the right is as wrong as deforestation. And it was worse later, one has to note that the partisan vote was to decide if it was going to be published, not that the ones on the right were pushed out. **After a revision the vote then was 11-3 to publish. **
I did take a look at the minority report, it really went downhill right away when as a first point they resorted to red herrings and smoke screens, of course one could make the point that the report lacked context, the point of the majority report (that had input from Republicans) still remained.