The OP’s title is: “Torture is Most Likely Very Effective”
From my post above, last line, is this tidbit from someone with experience in the field: “Rothrock, who is no squishy liberal, says that he doesn’t know “any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea.””
Ball is in the OP’s court to prove torture’s effectiveness methinks (again totally ignoring the morality of it all which is the 800 pound gorilla in the room even if torture is shown to be effective).
Sir, as the descendant of a Cooke who was forced to leave Salem, which our ancestor founded, under threat of being charged, and a relative of several others, I can categorically deny that charge. They were puritans, members of the church.
He gave hard evidence for something that was not in question and had been acknowledged up front.
I discussed in several paragraphs ways to avoid this. i.e. refraining from demanding confessions of specific facts, use of corroborating info, and combination with other techniques.
I’m not a professional here, but it doesn’t seem hard to imagine. You force a guy to testify about who he knows, where the safe houses are, what the methodology is etc. etc. Then you spy on those people and locations etc. Also you compare it to what other prisoners tell you. And so on.
This seems dishonest to me. I never claimed anywhere that I had proved anything, and I was pretty explicit in the penultimate paragraph that I was offering my opinion in the absence of hard evidence. I imagine there’s some fancy Latin term for what you did as well, but am too lazy to look one up.
I would. But that doesn’t happen to be what I’m interested in discussing here. (I noted this in my “It goes without saying …” paragraph.)
It’s not a damn sight more than anything. It’s zero.
And that betrays the kind of thinking process you employ. Or expect us to employ. Either way.
“People believed there were witches in their midst, people tortured people they thought were witches in their midst, lots of “witches” confessed ergo we can assume that some of them must have really been witches”.
But just because a majority of people believe in werewolves doesn’t mean werewolves exist. Or God, to give you a more relatable example.
Contrast to “I believe torture works, we torture people to get information, ergo we can assume that torture works”.
The truth is, there’s a reason every culture dropped torture from its legal investigation framework at some point in its history. Because it’s abhorrent, is always abused, and doesn’t work.
Napoleon wrote that. In seventeen fucking ninety eight. In an age where torture was understood and very, very common. Do you think Napoleon was an achy-breaky hearted liberal ? That he was the sort of man who’d let ethical reasons dictate his course of action ? As far as “ends justify means” go, French revolutionaries in general and Napoleon in particular would be the textbook reference.
My evidence against it being effective = 2 experts in the field one of whom categorically notes that he knows of no intelligence officers who think torture is effective
Of the two of us who has the more compelling evidence?
Even if it was shown that torture was effective, and you could get accurate info, do you really end up with important results?
If someone is capured who has sensitive info about location of weapons, plans for upcoming assaults, and other relevant stuff, wouldn’t the other side know that he had been captured, was probably revealing what he knows, and then just change their plans accordingly? [yes, I majored in “run-on sentences” in college]
In other words, wouldn’t any info a soldier had become obsolete fairly quickly?
First of all they aren’t 6 years old or George McFly from Back to the Future.
Second, doesn’t Afghanistan have the highest production of opium-based drugs in the world? I don’t think the concept of mind altering drugs is foreign to them.
I can’t believe I’m dumb enough to once again enter this fray, but here goes.
Once again, the standard disclaimer: I do not advocate torture. Torture is wrong. Torture is a crime. Torture is bad. I do not like torture in any way.
Sure, I seem a bit excessive in making this point but I usually find in these threads that somebody ends up saying “If you think torture is so great why don’t you marry it?” So moving on.
I understand that people being tortured will tell lies. But the point is that people being interrogated in general tell lies. Little children being gently questioned by their loving mothers tell lies about who broke the lamp. Suspects being grilled by the police tell lies about who robbed the bank. Husbands being questioned by their suspicious wives tell lies about where they were last night. Most people being interrogated are going to tell lies.
So why does any do an interrogation? Because it’s possible to get the truth out a person even if that person is trying to tell lies. No interrogator walks into an interrogation with a blank slate. They already know something. And they can use that knowledge to make intelligent estimates of when the other person is telling a lie.
So torture doesn’t make people tell the truth. Torture makes people talk. And once they start talking it’s just another interrogation. They talk and the interrogator decides if it’s true or false based on the knowledge he has.
*Rothrock, who is no squishy liberal, says that he doesn’t know “any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea.”
Similarly, it only seems logical that christians regularly raise their loved ones from the dead using the power of Christ. In a culture where everyone believes that’s possible, it only makes sense if some people would do it. And it also makes sense that if you accuse a random christain of raising the dead, you’re probably right, by the well known law of Random Accusations Are Usually Correct.
Wikipedia ties it to : Napoleon Bonaparte, Letters and Documents of Napoleon, Volume I: The Rise to Power, selected and translated by John Eldred Howard (London: The Cresset Press, 1961), 274.
And considering Napoleon is the primary instigator of the modern legal system, a system which doesn’t happen to involve torture, I’m disinclined to doubt the veracity of the quote in the first place.
“Yet – as he remembers saying to the “desperate and honorable officers” who wanted him to move faster – “if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy’s genitals, he’s going to tell you just about anything,” which would be pointless.”"
In other words, torture is an ineffective means to gain information.
The next quote I cited says:
“You need to be aggressive to get the information you want, but if you treat people inhumanely, they’re just going to tell you what they think you want to hear,” he said. “They’ll do anything just to get the mistreatment to stop, so you get nothing from mistreatment.”
In other words, torture is an ineffective means to gain information.
ETA: I will also note you have yet to provide sources that claim the effectiveness of torture.
Which is why their loving mothers usually *have *to put the tykes to the blowtorch, in spite of the fact that they really don’t like having to do so. But the children don’t really give them a choice, do they ?
And if he decides it’s false, he cranks the dial to eleven and tries again until he gets what he decides is true. Even if the first answer was the truth.
Don’t waste your breath. The OP made it very clear that conclusive scientific studies showing that there is no evidence torture is effective are not good enough to conclude torture is not effective.