- The average person’s ability to detect liars may very well be strong enough.
- If a study uses a guinea pig, they will be unable to recreate the stressful conditions of being a criminal. The “suspect” will also generally be a college student rather than someone boozed out of drunk out of their mind with an IQ of 40. In cases where they use videos, the police officer has no ability to ask his own questions and try to defeat the person through mind games, and is arguably handicapped by the 2D, pixelated format.
- The low crime rate in Japan indicates that they do indeed get the right people, and the lack of a popular outburst against current methods indicates that the wrong (i.e. innocent) people aren’t being picked up and tortured regularly.
- I can find just as many studies which show a positive correlation as zero correlation when looking through the first page of Google Scholar, so your argument that “studies” show there to be no relationship is innacurate.
No, I don’t believe either of those follow through. Deterrence is deterrence no matter whether the person convicted is guilty or not; while a criminal may find themselves more courageous when facing sloppy, poor justice, that’s a very different issue to dedicated yet wrongheaded justice. Sure, if they pick up someone else, you might get away with it; but on the other hand, if they do pick you up, you’re going to be quite screwed. And lack of a popular outburst doesn’t mean anything either, since you could equally explain that by supposing that the majority of people agree with you rather than me, or by them agreeing with me but finding the ends justify the means. IOW, your points here are possibilities, but by no means are they certainties.
Oh, so innocent people are not tortured very often? Well, that’s very different, then, isn’t it? And since the record shows that innocent people are never picked up, we can rest assured. Well, not never, exactly. Hardly ever. Same thing, really, if you stand back a few feet and squint.
This is the part that usually confuses me. If we know the guy has the information we’re after, then how do we not know the information itself? I would bet that in a lot of cases, we don’t actually know what we think we know.
Also, I don’t agree that this is where torture would work best. For example, what if we instead devoted all of that time and energy towards gaining the suspect’s trust? If we could successfully do that, we would get the information we’re after voluntarily (if they have it to begin with), while not having created another permanent enemy.
Oh. You mean those morons I went to high school with who can barely spell and joined the police force because they thought it would be cool to get paid for playing with guns and sirens all day can somehow gleen whether someone is nervous because they committed a crime and are lying or because they are being questioned for one?
I agree with you that in some cases it’s obvious. Some dude snaps and kills his wife or they catch some idiot on camera robbing the liquor store next door. But those cases don’t really require torture, just good policework.
Suppose you’re a crook with a special talent for inflicting enough pain to make someone fo your bidding. Further suppose, you know another crook, say a Wall Street type with lots of money stashed in a Cayman bank account.
You don’t have time to be friendly. So you torture him - ripping a fingernail off, then another, etc., until he tells you everything you need to clean out the account electronically, bouncing the funds all over the earth like they do in the flicks of this genre, until you deposit it safely and secretly in your People’s Bank account. (I didn’t say you were very bright.)
And then, you dirty rat, you kill him.
The key is that intelligence work is like building a mosiac. You already have some pieces before you begin the interrogation. The torture gets the victim to talk and then the existing information lets you determine if they’re telling the truth.
For example let’s say you intercept a phone call saying that a terrorist will be entering the country through Atlanta airport next Thursday. You grab somebody in the organization and question them under torture.
“Tell me what the plans are.”
Torture ensues.
“Okay, I’ll talk. Bob Smith is going to fly into Philadelphia next Monday. He’s bringing in a bomb to blow up Liberty Hall.”
“You’re lying. Now tell me the truth.”
More torture.
“Pete Jones is arriving in Washington next Friday. He’s got anthrax virus we’re going to release in the White House.”
“You’re still lying.”
More torture.
“Tom Brown is flying into Atlanta next Thursday. We’re going to release nerve gas in Disneyworld.”
“You’re still not telling the truth.”
More torture (because you’re a dick).
“Uhhh…Carl Scott? Is going to fly into Chicago? And then switch the faces on Mount Rushmore?”
“Still don’t believe you.”
More torture.
But you also tell your boss that he should arrest Tom Brown when he arrives at Atlanta airport and increase security at Disneyworld.
As always, I’m not saying that torture is justifiable or moral. I’m just saying claiming it doesn’t work is disingenuous.
It’s easy to construct hypothetical scenarios were torture is useful. The question is whether or not these scenarios correlate with how intelligence gathering typically works in the real world.
In the real world you rarely have clear-cut situations where the information you gain is immediately useful and verifiable. Much more likely are situations where you cobble together a whole collection of tiny little details – a stray email address, a random name mentioned in conversation, an overheard phone call – into an incomplete and vague picture of what’s really going on.
Because a torture victim will say anything to get the torture to stop it generates a lot of crap data. In a situation where you’re working with incomplete and vague information, collecting lots of unverifiable crap data actually makes it harder to draw useful conclusions.
Torture is a tool of intimidation, not intelligence. If your goal is to cow a population into submission, torture away. But if your goal is either security or justice, it’s counterproductive.
Can you name a single instance in the history of the world where torture has actually prevented an act of terrorism?
If not, then what’s disingenuous about claiming that torture doesn’t work?
Can you name a single instance in the history of the world where somebody has publicly released plans of how to build an atomic bomb?
If not, then what’s disingenuous about claiming that atomic bombs don’t exist?
Meanwhile, in the real world, clandestine work is done clandestinely and the people who do it don’t talk about just so other the public can keep score. Especially when it’s something that is illegal and immoral. But illegal and immoral and clandestine things happen in the real world even if nobody calls you up on the phone afterwards and tells you about it.
Like I said, disingenuous.
So you’re telling me that torture works, but you have no evidence, so I’m just going to have to take your word for it.
Sorry, I’m afriad I don’t believe you.
Which is exactly the reason why torture can work as a means of intelligence gathering. You take the information you do know is reliable and use it to determine if the other information is also reliable. In the example I gave, the fact that the victim told you that the person is flying into Atlanta on Thursday indicates that he knows the facts and is telling you the truth. So his information about the person’s name and plans are likely to be equally reliable.
Reality doesn’t require your belief and refusing to believe something doesn’t make it untrue.
If you want to try to prove me wrong that show me how what I posted wouldn’t work as a hypothetical. And when you concede that it hypothetically would work then explain why nobody has ever chosen to use it in relaity.
The person you grab doesn’t know anything about a terrorist coming into the country.
So you torture him until he confesses that he does.
Then you torture him until he says “Atlanta.”
Then you torture him until he says “Thursday.”
Then you torture him until he gives you a name.
Then you torture him until he gives you a common name that matches someone coming into the Atlanta airport on Thursday.
Then you torture him some more (because you’re a dick).
Then you grab an innocent person at the Atlanta airport and torture them, etc.
Exactly. And then whatever you can get that guy to confess to proves that the first guy was really a terrorist. Win!
Your only criterion for torture utility here is that you elicit a response other than silence, and that the response elicited is in some way a falsifiable claim.
But the problem is you don’t put any weight on the danger of false positives, the possibility for an infinite regress of answers from an innocent party simply inventing new answers each time to make the pain stop, and counter-productive efficiencies, where acting on investigating the signal to noise ratio generated by torture becomes a huge opportunity cost loss in terms of displacing more reliable methods of interrogation, and police and intelligence resources investigating the claims.
Taken together, that’s such a low threshold of utility that it this is a pointless debate.
You know what works better than torture? Genocide!
Why stop at torture?
Why I would do that? Because I’m an idiot? To make you feel smarter in comparison?
You don’t interrogate somebody with a checklist and run them through the items one-by-one. You make them tell you a complete statement and then you determine whether or not the statement is true by using the information you already have.
There are lots of people who do legitimate non-torture interrogations. I do them all the time. We know what we’re doing.
Check it out:
*Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, Fourth Edition by Fred E. Inbau, John E. Reid, Joseph P. Buckley, and Brian C. Jayne (editors)
*Effective Interviewing and Interrogation Techniques, Second Edition by Nathan J. Gordon and William L. Fleisher
*Essentials of the Reid Technique: Criminal Interrogations and Confessions by Joseph P. Buckley
*Interviewing and Interrogation by Don Rabon
*Practical Aspects of Interview and Interrogation, Second Edition by David E. Zulawski and Douglas E. Wicklander
These are just some random examples. There are plenty of others. It’s not the voodoo science you seem to imagine. There actually are techniques to conduct an interrogation in a way that will obtain information.
So if these techniques exist and are public knowledge, why isn’t a torturer going to use them? Torture exists - nobody is disputing that. The people who are torturing other people claim they’re doing it for the purpose of gathering information. So why wouldn’t they actually do it? If they have a choice between torturing somebody in order to conduct a real interrogation and torturing somebody in order to conduct a pretend interrogation, why not do the real one? They get to torture somebody either way and if they get real information then their boss will be happy and let them torture more people in the future.
I think that is a stretch. I think most people will admit that some verifiable information can be extracted by torture but that the practical use of the method is much, much less than most would believe for several reasons like some people will be able to withstand torture and not talk, others will not have the information, etc. so, in practice you torture people to get little or nothing and the main reason torture is opposed by decent people everywhere is because it is immoral and degrades those who do it and those who condone it. That is the main reason.
Coming up with unlikely scenarios like the “ticking bomb” is silly even if they were slightly plausible. Society sets limits on what can be done in specific instances for the greater good, even if in the specific instance it would be beneficial. Civilised countries set limits to police powers even though the inevitable price to be paid is an increase in crime. The same can be said about torture. It could be that torture could prove useful in specific instances but we recognize that the harm done to the body of society would be much greater than any benefit gained.
The countries in South America have still not healed from the barbarities of torture and killings that happened more than 30 years ago and it will take generations.
So why bother with torture if there are better ways to do this?
(Because torture seems to be faster and because some people enjoy inflicting torture.)
I am sure that torture can get information.
The problem is that it is routinely unreliable information. A number of the claims by the Bush administration leading up to the Iraq debacle were provided through torture–only to be demonstrated as false.
I think that it would be a gross exaggeration to claim that torture never works. However, it is no exaggeration to say that it provides enough unreliable information, accompanied by an increase in hatred, (and resistance), by those associated with the tortured, as to make it a worthless tool of interrogation.