The problem is, that doesn’t work when you are arguing with morally bankrupt people - like torturers and their supporters.
I’d like to think a fair number of torture “supporters” are simply misguided. They do not especially like the notion but feel protection of their families and/or country is paramount and do not give a lot of thought to the moral aspects and how that actually hurts our country. Debates on, “do the ends justify the means” are a remote and academic concern to them.
Those people I think could be persuaded and it is not entirely fair to call them all morally bankrupt and as such could be persuaded on the error of torture as a means to an end without all that inconvenient philosophizing.
Why is this so strange? I live in a small town in PA, and I know people who are witches. You can say they aren’t real untill you are blue in the face. But they are out there. Now if you say you don’t think they have any powers, I would agree with you. But it dosn’t change the fact that they call themselvs witches.
You’ve missed the point, I’m afraid.
There was only one (rather brief) period in European history when witchcraft was considered a viable threat and people were tortured to confess to witchcraft. For that period, an examination of people who were accused of witchcraft demonstrates that most of them were simply the victims of political outrage, mass hysteria, or personal vendettas and almost none of them who confessed to the crime were actually attempting to practice sorcery or necromancy before they were grabbed by the authorities.
There are a number of cultures in which people are probably practicing something that might be identified by the word witchcraft, today. That has no bearing on the fact that a claim that the few thousand people subjected to torture during the Renaissance would have included only a miniscule number of people who actually thought that they were, themslves, witches. In the context of witchhunts, the statement “In addition, I imagine a lot of the confessed witches were in fact witches.” is simply ludicrous and lacking any basis in fact.
This is a false statement.
I never “excluded” the testimony of such people. All I said was that they are not “experts” in something with which they have no experience, and the value of their testimony needs to be considered in that light.
Do you disagree with this? If so, why?
Do you have a source for this claim?
Here’s someone who studied the matter and disagrees with you.
Per that same link, it was effective, just that it didn’t stop any specific attacks.
22 year CIA veteran is a vague credential.
By way of some additional context, this is also a guy who believes that “evidence points at” US government involvement in 9/11 (as part of an apparently broad conspiracy). http://www.911blogger.com/2006/06/former-cia-member-robert-baer-comments.html
Yes, I think they were.
Here’s an example of someone who engaged in it and defended it as effective, and suffered the consequences.
No.
So, in other words, their testimony is worthless, because they’re not “experts”. So we can dismiss it. Can we also dismiss whatever historians say about anything because they weren’t there and thus have no experience of what they’re talking about ?
Nevermind the inherent conflict of interest **tomndebb **underlined : if you’re into torturing, and people start to question the legitimacy of it, you tend to say it was the only effective way. Whether you believe that or not.
Ah, yes. “There haven’t been any major terrorist attack on the US since 9/11, so it must have worked !”. Of course, there haven’t been any major terrorist attacks *before *9/11 either…
Oh good. Do support your position with a war the prosecution of which we French are even more ashamed than about what we did in WW2, and the mere *mention *of which is a social taboo. Strong argument, there.
You have been provided numerous cites of people in WWII and the Vietnam War and present day who view torture as useless (heck, so did Napoleon…the bleeding heart liberal he was known to be). How do you know they did not try it? Why would you think professional interrogators would hold that opinion? An opinion they all agree on. Why do you think a scientific review of interrogation methods concluded it is an ineffective means to gain information?
Do you really think they are all just basing their opinions on a guess?
Well, she turned me into a newt.
Most of these guys said explicitly that they didn’t try it.
It’s a valid opinion based on their understanding of interrogations and human nature. It’s an opinion that other professional interrogators disagree with.
This would have meaning if they were randomly selected, which they were not.
It did not conclude this.
Part of the problem with this discussion is that any number of people seem to have confused “no conclusive evidence that torture is effective” with “torture is ineffective”. They are not the same.
No. It’s a valid opinion. There are other valid opinions.
I didn’t bother citing to various people who reviewed the same evidence and concluded otherwise, because I don’t think they’re conclusive either. E.g. I don’t think Aussaresses’s assessment is conclusive, or that of Admiral Blair or others. But as above, there are undoubtedly a large number of people who have experience with these matters and believe it’s effective, as evidenced by their actions (unless you wave them all away as misguided sadists as some have attempted) and ISTM that to point to some number of individuals who think all these people are wrong and claim that it’s conclusive because these particular individuals happen to share an opinion is flawed logic.
Especially if, as is the case here, most or all of these people don’t have actual experience with the method anyway. This does not mean that their opinion can be excluded, dismissed or declared worthless. But it does mean that it’s less conclusive in the face of other dissenting opinions than it otherwise would be.
If they had proof that it worked they would broadcast it across the world. They have not because it does not work. Those being tortured will say anything to make it stop. How do you decide what is potentially useful? When you are torturing a lot of people ,you are not connecting any dots. you are just obscuring anything real with piles of chaff.
Is it safe?
“Most” did? Where?
Try it this way:
Does EVERY up-and-coming dog trainer need to start by beating the shit out of some dogs and then compare it to positive reinforcement to come to the conclusion of which is the better means of dog training? That a dog trainer who has done it for 20 years cannot state conclusively that positive reinforcement is a better method of dog training and beating them up is not effective even if they had never personally beat a dog? Up-and-coming dog trainers cannot look at the body of evidence and draw the same conclusion without trying it themselves?
It is a valid opinion from experts who spend their life studying this stuff. Please cite “other professional interrogators” who disagree with this. Some thug working for Saddam back-in-the-day likely had no professional interrogation training and only knew how to torture. Does that guy count as a professional interrogator? Is his opinion meaningful?
We have cites from professional interrogators who say they know of no one in that community who think torture is effective. Presumably they do not know all the interrogators in the US but I bet they know plenty as I am betting it is a small(ish) community.
Semantics. There is not “conclusive” evidence that Evolution is correct either but there is a lot of evidence to suggest it is. To niggle “it is not conclusive” is disingenuous in the extreme and the last resort of someone whose arguments have failed miserably. May as well go on to an existential argument that no one can “prove” they exist.
Evidence so far, as related by professional who have made a study of it and an actual scientific study, point to torture being an ineffective means of gaining useful information.
Ok…by your own measure, did Aussaresses try non-violent means of information gathering so he could make a relevant side-by-side study? Looks to me like he was brought in explicitly to strong-arm and terrorize the rebels which, unsurprisingly, he did.
As has been noted torture IS an effective means of extracting false confessions. Great at it in fact and if that is what you want then it is probably the best method to do that. All the regimes you have pointed to are keen on such false confessions. If you are Stalin and want to purge the government/military of your opponents then torture someone till they finger the next guy and so on. Now they have “proof”.
Of course it is proof of nothing.
As a means of reliable intelligence it does not work. As was noted even the Brits, who had zero reason to be nice, opted for non-violent means to gain information from captured spies in WWII. Guaranteed they would have used whatever means they thought best…they were fighting for their very existence and (not that it likely would have mattered) the Geneva Convention did not prohibit this for spies.
If we conducted a double-blind study to investigate whether carrying garlic to scare off vampires was an effective measure, the study would undoubtedly come back with, “There is no evidence that garlic is effective in warding off vampires.”
And so, if you read that study, you might continue wearing your garlic necklace?
I disagree with it, because it’s a nonsensical argument. If a person can only be an expert in something because they’ve personally done it, then that means we better lock up the criminal forensics experts because they’re obviously all murderers and rapists and thieves. You’re trying to claim that it’s not possible to study torture methodology and results and come to any conclusions without actually breaking out the bamboo splints and giving it the ole Hanoi Hilton try. A moment’s thought should show this assertion for what it is.
From the first cite:
Bold added.
From the second
He can say it and if it would be a valid opinion, as the opinion of these interrogators who oppose torture is valid.
But suppose there were also a lot of dog trainers who used the beating method, and you were trying to prove that all those trainers were wrong by pointing to the assessment of dog trainers who had never used the method, I would say the value of this assessment would similarly need to be discounted.
Applying that to this case, what “body of evidence” are these interrogators looking at? If there is a “body of evidence”, why not just link to the body of evidence?
I think this is circular, and based on your low opinion of torturers. But you need to distinguish between your opinion of their morals and your assessment of their skills. There’s no reason to believe that these guys did not have skills as interrogators, and all the more so in the case of the KGB et al.
The exact opposite of what you imply is the case.
I’m not the guy building a case based on the word “conclusive”. You are.
This source says that there is no “conclusive” evidence that torture works. You and yours are spinning that to mean that it doesn’t, which is not logical.
If the source would claim that there is a lot of evidence that it doesn’t work but that this evidence is not conclusive, you would have a point, and your comment seems to assume that this in fact what is claimed. But that’s not what it says. Read it.
Not so.
Quite possible. I said upfront that he was not a conclusive source. But neither are the other guys.
That would be like claiming that torture experts need to have been POWs, which is not the claim.
I do think that criminal forensics experts should have some experience with criminal forensics.
If there was evidence you would expect it show up in a double-blind study. In this case there was no double-blind study done.
That was the point of the report - that there’s no real evidence evidence either way, and no double-blind studies etc.
No, there is the evidence, you just prefer to dismiss it on the basis of (a) you reject the expert opinion of anyone but a torturer, and (b) you’re hanging your entire case on how the views of these experts is phrased, rather than the substance of their findings.
That is probably an overstatement. You have produced a cite of someone who was fond of torture who said it worked, and you have referenced your gut feeling that it ought to work.
And re: this whole “if you haven’t tortured, you aren’t an expert.” You realize that probably everything you were taught in school was taught by people who didn’t actually do the things they’re teaching? For example, many law professors don’t see the inside of a courtroom, and yet that doesn’t mean they aren’t experts in law. Physics professors don’t need to be on the moon to explain its motion.
Pursue that thought, don’t be intellectualy lazy. How do criminal forensics experts know that point blank shots leave powder burns ? Do they shoot at people point blank and examine the results ? Do they even need to have fired a gun once in their lives to know and perfectly understand the effects of gunshots on the human body ?
So a torture expert has to torture, but a murder investigator doesn’t have to murder? Nope, double standard. You do not have to murder people to have experience with murder, and you do not have to torture to have experience with torture. You’re just arbitrarily defining the definition of expert you’ll accept to the point where you only get experts that agree with you. The experts that have been cited that you disallow on these ground show your bias.
That’s preposterous. A murder expert needs to to have been murdered. If he hasn’t, his opinion is not an expert one.
No, Fotheringay-Phipps is claiming that in order to be an expert on torture, you have to have tortured. So, logically, for one to be an expert on murder, one would have to have murdered. And a rape expert would have to have raped. And a theft expert would have to have stolen. Going down the list, you eventually come to the animal husbandry expert, and I suddenly don’t want to think about it anymore.