Let me say off the bat that I don’t condone torture, so before you Pit me or something 
try and understand I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate, sort of.
People always stress the unreliability of torture / truth serum / lie detectors, but don’t these things actually do find some utility in cases where the suspect is known to know something?
For example, torturing/drugging someone to determine who his commander is or what X terrorist cell plans to do could easily yield jibberish, but let’s say you apprehended a suspect who was caught dropping off a bomb, say, in the subway. You know there is a bomb, and you know he knows where it’s going. The alternative is to wait for it to explode, and if the suspect gives you false information and sends agents on a wild goose chase, you’re no worse off than you were at the beginning. Wouldn’t torturing/drugging have some value?
I’m embarassed I didn’t know that. My apologies.
I’d never make it in the military, because the thought of physical violence would get me to talk.
The real reason we use torture is that Bush won’t allow the use of truth serum on al queda prisoners who don’t have Medicare.
“It’s another example of my fiscal responsibility,” he added, parsimoniously.
The problem, of course, is that this pretty much never happens. The FBI wasn’t smacking around the 20th hijacker on the morning of 9/11, trying to find out what planes were going to be hijacked. It’s a nice scenario for a movie, but the reality is that, outside of Hollywwod, we never actually find out about a “ticking time bomb” scenario in which torturing one individual could save innocent lives. It’s purely hypothetical, and using it as a rationale to keep torture in our toolbox is foolish–esp. since, with torture as an option, we’ll be more likely to use it in other situations.
It requires at least some medical knowledge to use drugs in interrogations without accidentally killing your subject. Most people who have that knowledge (doctors, nurses) are not likely to help with interrogations, because they have codes of professional ethics that don’t allow assisting with torture, or indeed administering drugs for any nonmedical purpose.
**If ** there were “truth serums” that worked reliably, and didn’t cause permanent physical or mental damage or carry a high risk of death, the ethical argument would change; it could be argued that the duty to society (to expose criminals or foil terrorist plots) overrides the duty to the individual patient. There is precedent for this; if a patient is spreading a communicable disease or mistreating a child or making credible threats to kill people, medical people can (and may be required to) act to protect the public safety first. But since such a truth serum doesn’t exist, the ethical rule for medical personnel is simple: no assisting with torture.
I agree that this pretty much never happens, luckily. However, there was a kidnapping case in Germany where a police officer, desperate to find the victim in time to save him, threatened the already captured kidnapper with torture in order to make him tell the place where he kept the boy.
The officer reported himself immediately afterwards. He knew it was illegal what he did but he believed it was necessary to save a life.
This is a unique case and caused much debate in Germany. Here are some links in English about that case: Google
Uncertainty is useful in any interrogaton. If I know for a fact that I will not be tortured then any amount of threats will not illicit information from me. One of the most effective techniques used against the prisoners in Cuba was to tell them that they would be repatriated to their countries of origin if they didn’t cooperate. While the detainees could be certain that there are limits to what what we will do to them they are equally certain that there are no limits to what most other countries would do to them. This worked very well. In some cases they took the charade as far as to separate those scheduled for “repatriation” and have a plane land at night to take the uncooperative individuals back.
In short, the threat of torture is often a very effective tool. If you remove the threat then you remove much of the incentive to talk.
A debate on the morality of what we should and should not do is probably useful to have but a certainty and foreknowledge as to what we will do on the part of our enemies is one price we will have to pay for it.
As a side note, I saw a special on TV once where people volunteered to be subjected to interrogations that involved stress positions and sleep deprivation. The interrogators were able to extract quite a bit of information using these techiniques. Still getting information often boils down to making someone make a choice between telling you what you want to know and something less pleasant. In the US the something less pleasant is often a stiffer sentence etc… How unpleasant you are willing to make the alternatives is a choice each society makes based on a lot of factors and when unpleasantness crosses over into torture isn’t always clear.