Just in case, and for the benefit of all the people who were convinced by Forthingay’s rethoric (crickets chirping), here’s a 1960 CIA interrogation manual. No censorship, blood-curdingly clinical. Remember, this is from the '60s, the blessed time before dirty hippies fucked everything by introducing a touchy-feely element in politics. It’s from a time when men were men and fought Communism, when the nation wasn’t threatened by desperate madmen flinging planes at buildings, but visceral madmen threatening to fling THOUSANDS OF NUCLEAR BOMBS AT CONTINENTS.
Just in case you want to cut to the chase, the chapter on “violence” is rather brief, in fact it spans on a whole page, in a 100 odd pages dedicated to the subject of “how to get hostile people to spill the beans”. In fact, fuck it, let’s have the whole chapter right here, shall we ? :
I actually know a guy who was once arrested by the Israeli police on suspicion of being a terrorist, and the way he described his interrogation was what this manual calls the “Alice in Wonderland technique” - they had a couple of interrogators asking him questions rapid fire, with no time for him to even answer let alone gather his thoughts.
As to the topic here, the manual certainly raises some important issues to consider with regards to inflicting pain and takes a dim view of it generally, but by no means concludes that it is not effective if used with these in mind (e.g. “pain which he seems to inflict upon himself” versus “pain inflicted on a person from outside himself”). If you look at the Conclusion section, it lists pain as one of the “principal coercive techniques”, and the manual goes to some length in promoting “threat to inflict pain” as a useful technique without addressing the downside if the threats were not carried out.
I don’t know why you wrote that the manual has “no censorship”, the manual is heavily censored throughout, including 10 lines in the Restrictions section of the coercive techniques section.
Known is scientific circles as the “Gish Gallop” But, although it’s quite a powerful technique, it’s certainly not torture.
Any pain that an interrogator inflicts on an interrogatee is “pain inflicted from outside himself”. Pains inflicted from inside are much more devious and subtle - things like “Am I really on the right side ?”, “Is the cause worth that much ?” and so forth. These are not the kinds of mental processes you set up by shocking one’s nuts. Any individual whose nuts are being shocked will automatically know (not think, or feel, but know) this simple fact : the people who are shocking my nuts are Evil. Capital E not optional.
Precisely : the idea is to capitalize on the fear of pain, not on the pain. Which is exactly what I said (either in this thread, or the other torture threads) : what works isn’t “break his thumbs”, what does work is “good cop, bad cop”. Make the bad guy *believe *a gruesome fate awaits him, then make him *believe *someone opposes said fate, and can help him get await from it, assuming he helps the Good Guy by spilling some beans. And some beans. And some more beans.
Torture itself is entirely unnecessary in that process.
My bad - I confess I skimmed through it. Still, the tone does seem ice cold to me, and considering the source it seems fairly objective a document.
Understood. I was merely remarking on something I found interesting and thought others might too.
I don’t think so; the example that the manual specifically suggests is forcing the guy to stand at attention for long periods of time. IOW, physical pain but pain whose “immediate source” is the prisoner himself.
Yeah but no method is foolproof and if you threaten and don’t deliver you lose credibility, which could presumably affect the interrogation process. I would have expected the manual to address that concern if the idea was to bluff and never actually follow through.
So ? The part on actual violence clearly states “it doesn’t work much, and it may even work *against *you”. In my non professional, non nut-twister experience, I’d rather just isolate a prisonner on whom non-violent methods have failed to work, because 1) it’s quite probably a vanishingly small percentage 2) Sociopathic characters who fail to respond to social trickery are quite likely to fail to respond to direct, talk-or-we’ll-crush-your-gonads methods and 3) there are those annoying “soul” and “humanity” concepts to deal with.
Let me put it this way : if a guy doesn’t buy a convincing “I’m here to help you” argument, engineered specifically for him, to push exactly the kind of buttons that make him tick, torture won’t help. You take that guy, and put him in some other part of the prison, and make everyone else believe he’s beeing nutshocked, raped, and worse.
Morally, that method may be as evil as actual torture. But it’s still short of the wrongness of actually torturing someone.
See : Pratchett’s Nightwatch and the Ginger Beer Trick. Hint : it involves expansive gasses, fragile sinuses, and more importantly, the prisonner’s belief that you’re the kind of guy who’d but the first two items together.
I’m not questioning that. What I’m discussing is the interpretation of this manual. I had suggested that the manual did not mean to rule out use of force completely, but merely to raise concerns about it. I pointed to some of the language, and to the distinction between types of force to be used. But along these same lines, I believe I have some support from the fact that this manual did not address the issue of the failed bluff.
IOW, I’m not saying the fact that the bluff might fail is a reason to never bluff. But I’m suggesting that if the manual was truly anticipating that all threats of force would be bluffs, it would presumably have addressed the issue, considering the thoroughness with which it addressed other concerns about this and other methods.
So I think this lends some degree of support to my contention that this manual did not intend to completely rule out use of force as an interrogation method, but rather to raise some concerns and point out issues that need to be kept in mind and limitations that needed to be recognized.
That said, I should add that for this very reason, I would consider this manual to be the best of the anti-torture cites that have been cited to this point. Because this is a manual that seems to reflect some experience with use of force, so the cautions that it gives and reservations that it expresses have that much more credibility. I still think the manual does not contradict the notion that torture can be effective if used properly, but it’s possible that it would have a more limited and narrow use than I had supposed at the outset.
Yes, I know. And the manual (as well as my own opinion) is : you never have to substantiate the bluff. If someone calls it, just let it go. There are other suspects out there to bluff.
Well I’ll be. My first inch gained on GD. I’mma pop the bubbly, if you don’t mind
No it doesn’t. The title of your thread is, “Torture is Most Likely Very Effective” and it is not.
The important distinction is effective compared to what? What other means are available, their likely effectiveness at obtaining a desired result and the up-and-down sides to it and alternative methods? If no other means but torture proved capable of gaining useful information then you’d have a leg to stand on (if we ignore the moral aspects). But provably this is not so. Other methods exist, other methods are superior and other methods do not have near the number of downsides that torturing someone does.
Therefore torture is not “very” effective when placed on a continuum of methods to educe information from an unwilling person. Can we posit that sometime, somewhere there is someone who will only spill the beans if tortured? Perhaps but the exception does not prove the rule that torture is very effective.
BTW: I pointed out the KUBARK manual to you before and the assessment that it was not keen on using torture. For all your complaints that we read up seems you ignored it till someone did it for you.
The quotes and manuals all seem to indicate that the greatest risk (from the “find-the-information point of view”) is that it can, in many cases, result in the turtured guy saying whatever he thinks will stop the pain, therefore negating the effectivness.
I think the OP pointed out the simply grabbing people and torturing isn’t very effective (to say the least). However, if you have good intel and you’re pretty sure the guy has the information, torture might prove more reliable.
In conclusion, it doesn’t work as a means to simply making people speak, but it may be better when you have “done your homework”.
(I have, on purpose, NOT discussed the moral and ethical aspects of torture. By the way, torture is BAD)
But given it’s track record, it’s ineffective no matter what.
But the moral aspects matter; first, because only monsters torture, you will get the kind of results you can expect from letting monsters get their hands on prisoners. They aren’t likely to care if they get good information or not.
Second, it dries up your other information sources ( people don’t talk willingly to torturers ); so in order to be even useful, much less “very effective” it would have to be better than all your other sources combined. And third, it makes more people into enemies and makes the ones you have more ferocious. So it would have to be incredibly effective to offset all of that.
Instead, its proponents struggle to find examples of it working at all, much less well.
When the short statement, lacking any nuance, “torture does not work” is uttered, it is probably not correct. It is very unlikely that no person has ever given up valuable information under torture.
When the pro-torture people begin their defenses, they start with a denial of that four word claim, reject it as silly, and they are off. If one denies that torture ever can or ever has worked to secure any information at any time, one loses on facts.
The more realistic statement is that torture is, overall, ineffective because it produces numerous false positives for information so that its reliability is extremely low. Combining low reliability with the way that it makes the subject less cooperative in the long run while its use provides more recruits for the group in danger of being tortured makes it counterproductive, even before we wander into ethics.
“Torture does not work” uttered to mean that it is mostly ineffective and always counterproductive is accurate.
“Torture does not work” uttered to claim that no person has ever given valid information under torture is pretty surly an error.
In that ultra-literal sense, pulling the names of random people out of a hat and shooting them for terrorism can also be said to “work” - you’re sure to kill an actual terrorist, eventually. Or a medicine that killed nine of ten people but cured the tenth could also be said to “work”. Or that throwing darts on a board with predictions written on it “works” to predict the future; you’re sure to hit a right one, eventually.
A certain minimum level of performance is normally implied in saying that something works. I’m saying that the evidence is that torture doesn’t meet that level of performance. Even if you get the rare bit of true information it’ll be lost in the flood of bad information. Which is exactly why the actual experts don’t torture.
The pro-torture people who defend torture like you say, are using a special definition of the term “works”. And they seldom if ever actually even meet their own standard, given their difficulty in finding verified examples of any truthful data coming from torture. I only accept that it exists due to the effects of sheer chance meaning that they have to get lucky sometime. But I don’t see it being produced, so it’s clearly very rare.
And this is a key point. Torture chambers invariably come to be run by sadists because normal people can’t stomach it, they find other work to do. And what happens when you put a sadist in charge of your torture chamber? He tortures people for the fun of it, not to gain information. Sure, he has to keep his superiors happy, but that can be done easily by getting his victims to confess to whatever it is that his superiors want.
And so anyone who ends up detained in a place with a torture chamber ends up tortured for no other reason than that they were detained. Why shouldn’t they be tortured–they’re prisoners, so they must have done something to deserve being there. And after torture the victims confess to horrible crimes, which proves they deserved to be tortured.
It is absolutely impossible to have a scientific torture chamber, where dispassionate investigators weigh competing interests and only torture when the benefits outweigh the costs. Because dispassionate patriots will never run those torture chambers, only psychopaths will.
So the claim that torture would work if only people would do it correctly falls apart, because it will never happen that way. No sadistic psychopath is going to follow the script, because that doesn’t give him a hardon. And no normal person is going to follow the script, because it will make him throw up. Therefore, torture will never follow the script, and therefore it will never be done “correctly”.
If anything it is an indictment of the failure of organized religion.
Aren’t tenets of Christianity things like “Love thy neighbor” and “Turn the other cheek” and “Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do”?
Americans have a retributive streak. I think also a lot of people are too “informed” by mass media. They see TV shows where the “good guy” punches the “bad guy” once or twice and the bad guy spills the beans with a litany of exactly all the good guy needs to know to get the real bad guys.
I really think people in those surveys assume this is how things work. Sadly most never give it serious thought much less go through the research and discussion we have had here. They “think” the world works like the movies coupled with a desire for retribution. The fuckers have it coming in their view.
Unfortunately they spend little time thinking about the morality of it all. That is advanced thinking and people are lazy about it in general. Add a complete lack of understanding of how these things work in the real world and mix in some religious fervor and voila…you have real, capital “E” Evil on your hands.
Not really; “Kill the unbeliever” is much more central to Christianity. That’s how it because so widespread in the first place, not by Peace And Love. All this stuff about how nice Christianity is, is simply revisionism about a barbarous belief system that spread itself by the sword.
The problem with this statement is that if you have good intel and you’re pretty sure the guy has the information, every interrogation method is going to prove more reliable, almost by definition. Even an Ouija board is going to prove more reliable, if you already have enough intel to discount half your incorrect attempts.
But, although it’s quite a powerful technique, it’s certainly not torture.