Probably not, but then they’d be in a very small minority. Over the eons, torture has proved effective.
Look, I’m not advocating torture. It’s wrong 99.9% of the time. But don’t try to tell me it doesn’t work. Go ahead and pull the other leg.
If you’re going to use words like “proved”…maybe you should have some proof?
I told you already that you are defending then the use of torture by authorities. Authorities that do not have really the idea of finding the truth, what they do is to obtain incriminating testimony by any means necessary and then telling the people how good a job they are doing in keeping the people “safe”. It is actually a racket to allow the powerful to remain in power over the eons.
You bet it works, but not in the way that you think.
Worked for what? Compelling action? Yes, torturing someone can force them to capitulate.
What’s the real issue is getting useful data at a rate superior to other methods of interrogation.
If they are torturing you, or her to get to you, then they ARE sadists and they do not value life. Why would they leave you and her alive, two witnesses kidnapping and torture? Your best bet is to hold out as long as you can and hope help arrives, because you are dead as soon as you give it up.
But let’s flesh this out. You (yes YOU) are torturing a woman to get information from ME about a safe. How do you know it’s my wife? How do you know it’s my safe? We may be house sitting! I may be her lover and her husband is out of town. Would you believe me if I told you that? How do you know that in a state of panic I would be able to remember a combination? Do you think pain and fear are conducive to memory? In times of stress, I have forgotten my wife’s middle name.
And here’s the big, really big question. How do you know there is anything in the safe?
How do I know if my torture is working? Because every time you give me a combination, I try to open the safe. And if the safe doesn’t open, I torture you some more.
I have an easy way of testing whether the information you’re giving me is true or false. How long do you think you’ll be able to get away with giving me false information?
No. You just say what you reckon the torturers want to hear. It’s generally not difficult to judge from their reaction whether what you are saying is hitting the spot, and tweak what you’re saying accordingly.
The whole point about torture is that - if successful - it breaks your will, and your actions are controlled by your interrogator’s will, rather than your own. The result is that the interrogator decides what you will say. Thus if the interrogator has suspicions which he wants you to confirm, you will confirm them. Whether the suspicions are objectively correct or not is irrelevant; hence your confirmation of them ought not to increase our confidence in the correctness of the suspicions.
If you’re torturing me to get the combo to a safe, or some other easily and immediately testable information, yes, you will succeed in that. But your confidence in the validity of the information doesn’t come from the torture, but from the subsequent test of actually trying to open the safe.
For information not of that class, torture is pretty useless. You’ll get information readily, but will have no way of knowing whether it’s reliable information.
And even for information of the safe combo variety, your torture won’t yield reliable results unless one of the answers you are prepared to accept is “I don’t know” (which is of course an answer you can’t test in the way that you can test a combination offered). Otherwise you may just torture me to death, and never obtain any reliable information.
[QUOTE=UDS]
If you’re torturing me to get the combo to a safe, or some other easily and immediately testable information, yes, you will succeed in that. But your confidence in the validity of the information doesn’t come from the torture, but from the subsequent test of actually trying to open the safe.
[/QUOTE]
Seems to me it would be testable wrt information to penetrate a spy ring or cell as well. And unless you want to posit that the torturers really innately knew ahead of time who the other members of the spy cell were and were just torturing someone for the hell of it, it’s fairly easy to see examples of this in action in relatively recent history…there were plenty of such spy or resistance cells that were compromised using information gathered using less than savory means by everyone from the USSR, Nazi Germany and the CCP to the US, France and the UK. Saying that this stuff never worked is ignoring all the myriad cases where it did.
Really, whether it works or not we shouldn’t use it, especially when there are viable alternatives. This argument of trying to ‘prove’ that it categorically ‘doesn’t work’ just detracts from this, since it’s fairly easy to find examples where it did work…not only that, most people can imagine how it would work on them. I certainly know that it would be laughably easy for a torturer to get me to give them information if I had it. True, I’d almost certainly give them anything I thought they might want or need in an attempt to get them to stop, and much of it would be simply me trying to anticipate what they WANTED me to say just to get them not to do things to me. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that if I had information they wanted I’d gladly give it to them. I’m sure there are people out there who think they could stand anything and spit in the torturers eye, and maybe there are folks with that level of conviction to do that. But I doubt I’m the only one on this planet who is made of less stern stuff and spill my guts out to stop what I know would break me.
[QUOTE=Human Action]
What’s the difference between saying that it’s ineffective, relative to other methods, and saying that it “doesn’t work”? When I say it doesn’t work, that’s what I mean: it produces worse results than the alternatives.
[/QUOTE]
It doesn’t work means, in terms of what we are debating here and what the OP asserts that it categorically gives all negative results, i.e. you never get anything useful out of it…ever. Saying it’s less than optimal concedes it works, to some degree, but that it’s obviously not always or even ever the best method to achieve the goal. Myself, I say we shouldn’t care one way or the other…doesn’t MATTER if it works or not, we shouldn’t do it regardless.
[QUOTE=GIGObuster]
And again, the answer to the argument if we should use it is NO.
[/QUOTE]
Yes…exactly. Again.
And so would I. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that if I didn’t have the information they wanted I’d gladly make it up.
Which means that the defining characteristic of information obtained through torture is not that it’s accurate, or reliable; it’s that it’s what the torturer wants to hear.
And this is important, because it is in fact one of the characteristics that makes torture so attractive. Psychotic serial killers aside, people aren’t detaining and torturing their victims on a caprice. Torturers are people already involved in a struggle or confrontation, with a goal in mind, with ideas about how to get there. They are doing dreadful things, and they want reassurance that they are right to do them. The torture victims supply that reassurance because, hey, they’ll give you want you want. Want confirmation for this hunch, or that theory? Torture will give it to you. Need evidence that you’re on the right track, to satisfy your superiors? Torture will give you that, too. Want to be able to face yourself in the mirror each morning without flinching? Torture will yield information showing that you are right to do the soul-destroying things you do in the defence of truth, justice and the American* way.
[* Insert nation of choice here.]
The information obtained by torture may or may not be reliable in the objective sense, but that’s of secondary importance, really. Even if some of the information turns out to be dud, you have broken the guy; if he does have any useful and reliable information, you know you can can get it out of him. (You also know that you may not recognize it when you get it, of course, but that’s another problem.)
I agree with you that torture is morally objectionable regardless of how well it works. But I also think it’s important to recognize that the simplistic justification traditionally offered doesn’t really hold water. Torturers know that the information they get from their victims is not reliable, and to a significant extent is of a kind whose reliability cannot be tested. But they torture anyway, and it’s important to understand why they do.
It’s been said before that telling a lie requires significantly more complexity and brainpower than telling the truth.
If that were the case, and torture, as mentioned, has the effect of doing damage to the brain, then it is a reasonable theory that torture would make lying more difficult. Granted, it might make telling even the truth difficult. But lying is, by its very nature, a more complex endeavor than telling the truth.
So while torture wouldn’t ensure that the victim can recall the details or facts that his interrogators want him to cough up, it does make it likely that the victim won’t lie, or that any lie he tells will be a pretty shoddy one, easily spotted as a lie.
The aim of torture isn’t to damage the brain; it’s to overbear the will.
And, given this, if there is damage to the victim’s brain, that won’t affect matters, since the lie he tells will not be one of his own creation, but one created and shaped by the torturer (whose brain is presumably in full working order).
To the extent that the victim does have to come up with any detail on his own, that detail may be unconvincing. But that doesn’t matter greatly. It may not bother the torturer, who knows that much of what he is told is untrue. Or, if it does bother him, he carries on with the torture until the victim comes up with something satisfactory. But “something satisfactory” is no more likely to be true, except in the case where the torturer already knows the truth and merely wants the victim to confirm it.
Depends on the type of information wanted. If the torturer wants the combination to a safe or computer, there’s only one correct answer. “Confirming what the torturer wants to hear” isn’t applicable; if the correct password is “A7B82JK9” and the victim supplies an incorrect password, then the torturer isn’t going to be “satisfied.”
Now if the torturer is just trying to get the victim to admit, “Yes, I am an enemy of the state, a member of the counter-revolutionaries, and I did not support our Great Leader,” then, sure, the victim’s response may “satisfy” the torturer. But if the torturer wants actual, truthful information, then that’s something else.
He’s going to be temporarily satisfied, at least until he gets to try out the combination, which may take some time if the safe is not immediately present. That buys the victim at least temporary respite.
He won’t be permanently satisfied until he gets a combination that works. But that’s not the same thing as being permanently satisfied by the truth; the truth may be “I don’t know the combination”, and that will never be a satisfactory answer, not least because it can’t be verified.
If the torturer wants actual, truthful information he won’t try to get it by torture because, for the reasons already discussed, torture is generally a really poor way of getting information which is reliably factual and truthful. The very fact that he’s employing torture tells you that he’s not that pushed about eliciting information which is both new to him and reliably factual and truthful. I’ll grant the safe combination example as a counterexample but, in the real world, very little of the information they are trying to waterboard out of people is of the safe combination variety.
And of course you can’t discount that Clinton was using politician speak either…
“doesn’t work” to me, implicitly assumes that it isn’t as effective as other methods readily available.
One thing I am very sure of though - if she had said “torture is not as effective as other methods of interrogation” the headline on Fox news the next day would be
“Clinton Advocates Torture”
You can cite all you wish. I rather doubt O’Mara has been at the coal face of many torture sessions. I would rather believe the evidence from torturers themselves; and by-and-large torturers throughout history say it works. In my previous posts I have been willing to admit torture in unskilled hands can be less useful, and may indeed be counter productive. Also, using torture against a captive who can be “turned” may be counter productive, using torture against someone who would otherwise give no information is a no brainer in terms of effectiveness.
Im willing to guess a large number of these “witches” believed they were practising witchcraft.
I’m willing to believe a large of those “witches” were simply accused by the bigots of the day on the basis of nothing more than said bigots did not like something about the accused “witches”.
But less willing, I hope, to guess that the defendants in Stalinist show trials believed that they were guilty of the various treasons and sabotages to which they confessed.
And as for . . .
. . . well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? People who do dreadful things nearly always cling to the belief that they are justified by the outcomes in doing so.
I’ve already pointed out that what torture works at is getting the victim to say what the torturer wants to hear; naturally the torturers are gratified by that and believe they have achieved something.
Missed the edit window. Please consider the above post to read as follows:
I’m willing to believe a large number of those “witches” were simply accused by the bigots of the day on the basis of nothing more than said bigots did not like something about the accused “witches”.