You seem to be under the impression that people are arguing that torture doesn’t work because people can resist it. This is missing the point to a high degree. Torture doesn’t work because people break too easily. The case of William Buckley, for example. Sure, he was undoubtedly tortured into giving up the names of his agents, which got a lot of them killed or kidnapped. What we do t k ow is how many completely uninvolved people were also killed or disappeared based on Buckley’s information.
See, let’s say Buckley knew ten spies. He gets captured, first he says he doesn’t know any spies. They torture him, and he gives up five guys,meaning tahts everyone. They torture him some more, and he gives up the other five, saying he doesn’t know any more. But his torturers don’t know if that’s the truth or not, so they torture him some more. At which point, he starts giving any name he can thinking of, because people will say anything under torture just to get the pain to stop.
Now, if you’re a bunch of terrorist scumbags who don’t care if you kill a lot of innocencent people, so long as you get your target, then torture works great. If, one the other hand, you’re a liberal democracy with a purported interest in the rule of law and protecting the innocent, then torture doesn’t work at all, because people being tortured will say anything to get it to stop, including implicating completely innocent people. That’s the context we’re talking about here.
Again, the key as to whether torture is effective or not depends entirely on whether the information is readily verifiable or not. If so, yes - effective; the subject’s lies will be exposed immediately. If not, no - ineffective - the subject can lie (although probably not very convincingly).
Sure, but sorting out the good intel from the crap would take more work than getting the intel from less stressful sources would entail. Like Psychics giving clues to police- usually it’s bullcrap, once in a while they get lucky but also once in a while they get their “Psychic” info from another source- like they committed the crime themselves. Does that make them useful to police? No, since wading thru the bullcrap takes too much valuable time.
And then there’s the deleterious effect on your staff and on your reputation.
Why not? Hackers do it all the time (in regards to the passwords).
In other words: No necessity whatsoever.
Actually, it feeds into my theory: torturers and those who support torture aren’t really interested in any supposed information to be gleaned from torture; they’re just interested in the torture for its own sake.
“If you’re a society that’s okay with torture, though, you’re probably not a society that’s too bothered by punishing the innocent because you, as a society, already consider those innocents to be guilty because of their membership in a group that you, as a society, has already deemed to be guilty.”
Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound as snappy as yours, but I think there’s plenty of truth in it.
Well, not necessarily their membership in a group that you’ve deemed to be guilty. Legal systems that use torture judicially are usually those legal systems that don’t have a concept of circumstantial evidence. There have been legal systems throughout history where the only way to convict someone was either through a direct witness or a confession. Torture then becomes a way to get a confession so you can convict somebody you’ve determined has done whatever you need to get a confession for.
Or, more recently, lets say you’re Stalin, and you want to cloak the purges of your enemies or rivals in a shroud of legalism. Torture’s good for that, too. Or you’re Bush, and you want to get confirmation that Iraq helped fund al-Qaeda as a justification for war.
That’s when torture works; not when you need new information, but when you need to get somebody to give you information that you already have determined you need. Because it can be really handy, sometimes, to get somebody to confess to what you want them to confess to. And torture works like a charm for that.
How exactly would you prove that a less stressful method wouldn’t have gotten the information?
I can show you plenty of cases where torture has produced actionable information but you can ALWAYS argue that you had some other method that would have produced the same information without the torture.
As part of some special forces SEAL SERE training, they give each candidate a code word and then waterboard them. I think the average time before they divulged the code word was shorter than the average time they could hold their breath.
So of COURSE torture works. It’s not a silver bullet that produces the equivalent of a vulcan mind meld but it works. The question isn’t whether it works. The question is whether we are doing more damage to ourselves than its worth.
Torture has a corrupting influence on the people and organizations that engage in it. If the use of torture during the cold war is any example, torture is eventually used as punishment rather than interrogation by the organizations that use torture. Torture exacts a moral toll on the torturers. The people who engage in it frequently start to break all sorts of other codes of conduct, you have asked them to cross a pretty bright line and there are not a lot of other bright lines between torture and flat out rape or murder.
For example the secret intelligence agency of South Korea used torture to extract information about communist activity during the cold war. Eventually, they just started to torture suspected communists to punish them for being communist sympathizers. Then they started to use torture to punish political enemies and then just people that got on someone’s bad side.
What you didn’t get was a lot of torturers standing around frustrated that they couldn’t get the information they wanted from people that had them.
Of course it works at getting the victim to say what they think you want to hear. I don’t think there’s any debate about that. But that’s not the real question. The real question is whether it works at getting the truth.
I have family members that were tortured by the KCIA and they didn’t ask you questions and torture you until you gave them answers. They frequently just tortured you until you convinced them that you were telling them the truth. They weren’t begging you for information, you were begging to give it to them.
In what way is torture less likely to get at the truth than asking nicely?
Of course torture works. People say torture doesn’t work for the same reason people say “crime doesn’t pay” when it clearly does sometimes.
People want to avoid the moral argument because this inevitably leads to torture being justifiable in some situations and some people don’t want us to use torture no matter the cost. They simply don’t trust the rest of us to reject torture if we accept that it can be useful sometimes and because they place their values and sensitivities ahead of the safety and security of everyone else and they say torture doesn’t work.
Your problem as a torturer is, how are you going to know that what you are getting is the truth? Torture is going to yield you an absolute torrent of information, if you conduct it on any scale, but it will be very poor-quality information. (This has long been recognised, even by torturers, as discussed earlier in the thread.) There will be some objectively correct information in there, but your problem will be identifying it. To a large extent, you’ll only recognise it if it deals with something that you already know about, in which case there’s not huge added value in hearing it a second time from a torture victim. Practically nothing that you hear from a torture victim is both new to you and dependably true.
When people ask “does torture work?”, we need to think about what work we want it to do. As an intelligence-gathering tool, torture is really poor, and has long been recognised as such. As a method of terrorising an enemy, it can be quite effective. As a method of combatting terrorism it’s just dire; you get a small amount of really poor-quality information at the expense of trashing your own reputation, demoralising or alienating your supporters, giving aid and comfort to the enemy and generally conceding the very thing you claim the terrorists are working towards, which is the destruction of democratic values and the rule of law.
Among the criminals that were involved in the off shoring of money and laundering of money from criminal activity there was a report noting that money from the notorious British Brinks Mat Robbery had passed trough there or through a scheme just like the one reported now in the Panama Papers.
I then looked at a documentary on that Bank robbery incident and there it was… a real scenario for the bank safe and torture to get the combination, and what took place there was that… The guard that knew the final combination forgot it in the panic. :smack:
Torture then was not useful and not even the matches put closer to the hoods put on the guards that were soaked in gasoline worked to get the information. The lives of the guards were likely spared because the gold the crooks took was by happenstance still outside the main safe, in boxes ready to be shipped. The crooks just found them while they were attempting to get the information.
That was one problem pointed out by a real bank safe scenario, now in your case I have to say that the issue of torture for intimidation and to maintain power is the main reason there, in those scenarios the torturers do not care about the information they are getting, because they already think they know what you know. What counts is the fear and what the rest of people will find about what happens to the current “enemies of the state”.
If the code word is “Rainforest,” and you divulge the code word “Rainforest” within 90 seconds of the waterboarding beginning, then you’re divulging the truth.
Yes. But unless the torturer already knows the codeword, he doesn’t know that what you’re saying is true. And he knew that you would certainly say something, so the fact that you did say something isn’t, in itself, significant at all.
All of which means that the knowledge that you said “rainforest” is pretty low-grade intelligence.
Your problem as an interrogator is, how are you going to know that what you are4 getting is the truth?:smack:
The sort of people you would torture are also the sort of people who would lie to you. These people are inclined to lie to you whether you torture them or not. This is not a particularly relevant argument against torture. If I am torturing you, I am going to make you convince me that you are telling me the truth.
Verification of data is valuable
It sounds like we have some pretty incompetent people doing our torturing for us if we are getting random false information peppered with an occasional fact here and there. Torture is a tool like bribery, it is not a panacea for gathering intelligence. It doesn’t work all the time and it can to be applied correctly like anything lese for it to work.
Practically nothing you hear from an interrogation subject that you might consider torturing to begin with is going to be both new to you and dependably true.
Cite?
Do you think we are using torture to terrorize our enemy?
Torture is simply deliberately inflicting pain on another. So, as long as the other can feel some form of pain, I would say it works.
Torturing for a purpose, like coercion. You can twist somebody’s arm and make them say “uncle.” Even pretty tough MMA fighter will tap out pretty consistently rather than having a joint snapped once the pain becomes excruciating, so yeah, I’d say that works too.
Torturing somebody to get information that is immediately testable. You are strapped down in a chair, somebody has your iPhone, and wants the passcode. They torture you for it. I’d say that if they have any commitment to torture, they are going to get your passcode no matter how hard you try to resist. Your only hope is that they are an unusually stupid and incompetent torturer.
Torturing somebody to get information that is not easily testable. “When is the next terrorist attack”. “Who are your associates?” I dunno, maybe it could work. I guess it depends upon how good the torturer is and how committed the torturee is. In “Get the Truth,” written by former CIA interrogators, the authors seem to think that torture is a poor way of doing this, and that there are lots better ways to get someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell.
This article seems to imply that they got into the safe to find the gold rather than just find it lying around.
"the gang tied up the guards and poured petrol over them, threatening to light it if they didn’t comply.
Thanks to Black, they were able to identify the two most senior guards who, between them, held the keys and combination numbers for the vault where three safes were located.
Inside was more than three tonnes of gold bullion"
Your soul isn’t nearly dark enough to be an effective torturer. I think you have to be a bit of a sociopath to be any good at it. The Khmer Rouge recruited young children because they hadn’t developed the sort of empathy that would hold you back from really effective torture. If I was to conduct an effective torture program, I would have to use interrogators that didn’t care about the welfare of the people being tortured OR the people that might be saved with the information extracted by torture. If there is a ticking time bomb scenario and you can hold out until the bomb goes off, then you win and I have no further reason to torture you. If I torture you and make you realize that you will have nothing of value to me once the bomb goes off, then you are on the clock, not me. But that is a very dark place for the greatest democracy in the world to go.