Will everyone eventually break under torture?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Ever seen the movie “Marathon Man” with Dustin Hoffman? He’s being tortured (by a dentist) with the line “Is it safe?”. He initially says he doesnt know what “It” is. Then he resorts to say “yes”. Then he says no. So they basically dont get anything useful from him. The way they finally do get the right information is thru a set of cleverly planned deceptions.

Is it safe?

Lately I’ve heard that the new interrogation technique is to simply make friends with the person and get them to realize that giving information is in the best interests for everyone.

22

Torture didn’t work for Giles Corey- I guess you’ve never been to the Salem Witch Museum…

23

The Ops coworker is full of shit. Anyone can say they’d never break while sitting at work, that is easy.

People have been tortured without breaking, but I have no idea how common it is. I think part of the goal of the military is to avoid breaking long enough, or have enough plausible cover stories to last until the info you have isn’t useful anymore.

A big part of torture is getting the victim to cooperate in their own torture. Strapping someone down is one thing but making them play an active role breaks them more. Stress positions for example require the victim assist in their own torture. If you do that, they break easier. Forcing someone to shove a broken bottle up their own ass was a technique used in saddam husseins Iraq.

24

Torture is good for getting secret information you can easily check. Like say the combination of the safe. If they give you the wrong combination you can keep beating them until you get the correct one. For things you can’t check like the invasion plans it is hard to know if the prisoner is lying or not.

25

There isn’t anyone who can hold out indefinitely. Torture done…properly… isn’t about pain or damaging the person, necessarily. It’s about finding out what will get them to cooperate in the shortest possible time. Think about Winston Smith’s reaction to the rats in 1984 or Scylla’s waterboarding self test as fairly physically undamaging examples . I know people that have had interrogation training and they have said that even they were limited to the heavily restricted modes they used against each other they cracked, every last one of them. It’s a matter of when, not if.

26

My Opinion Only.

Interrogation is part science, and part art. It has both physical and psychological aspects. With the right application of both parts, you can get anyone to reveal information. Some soldiers are taught resistance techniques, but the other thing they are taught is to try to hold out only for a set period of time, in order to give others in their unit a chance to escape or relocate. Very few soldiers have more than tactically useful information, no one gives them launch codes or major troop movement information. The same is true with lower level insurgents, terrorists etc.

While most here are familiar with waterboarding, there is another technique which requires more time to implement but is more effective in the longer term.

Basically, you dose the detainee with Fentanyl (or a similarly addictive substance) with only light (easily verifiable) interrogation occurring while they are under the influence. After they are physically addicted (and everyone will become physically addicted, it’s a process that’s chemical and neurological and “willpower” is irrelevant), you put them through controlled withdrawal while asking more serious questions.

You then repeat this process for verification and re-verification.

Assuming you don’t accidentally OD the patient, effectiveness of this technique is at around 100% initially (if they were previously addicted at some point before capture) or 100% over time (if they are newly addicted) by repeatedly putting them through a withdrawal loop. They become both physically and psychologically completely dependent on the interrogator, and will thoroughly and honestly discuss whatever lines the interrogator wants to pursue. They will, on their own, bring up secondary lines of interrogation.

Mental resistance to questioning is beat down by the subjects physical craving both for pleasure and avoidance of pain/misery (two distinct things), as well as their emotional reliance on the interrogator for relief/pleasure AND the fact that their body has turned against them. Remember, after addiction has occurred, the interrogator is doing nothing physically to the detainee. They’re not hitting, kicking, slapping, punching dousing with water or anything else. The detainees OWN BODY is causing them complete misery/pain and so resentment actually turns inward. They can even come to hate themselves because they perceive themselves as “weak”.

Depending on the addictive substance used, this can be further enhanced by use of medication which causes an “instant detox”. And the cycle can be repeated as long and as many times as necessary without significant injury to the detainee. It requires little to no physical “healing time” as might a dislocated joint, broken bone etc.

The only person who can offer relief and validation from this cycle, is the interrogator. The detainee will eventually start to actively assist the interrogator, they are much less likely to attempt escape, and they are much more passive (though they must be monitored for suicide attempts).

Eventually they can be detox’d in a controlled mechanism via Methadone (or other drug) and released with no significant scarring or other outward physical indicators of their interrogation. This then makes their claims of interrogation less believable both to third parties, and to their own allies.

They’re not going to go back to the Haqqani network and reveal this as they’ll end up dead and they know that. In point of fact, it’s now an avenue for exploitation/coercion since you have audio and video (carefully edited) of them calmly giving up all manner of information.

This is my opinion only.

Regards,
-Bouncer-

27

Bouncer has a very good point about watching for suicide.

Most of this thread is about not telling & surviving.

There is only one sure way to prevent what is in your head from getting out. In the military there may be times when delay is good if they do not behead you later. If you’re dead anyway, are you willing to die. If not, then you should not be there. person can go into combat or where ever with the internal decision already made that you will not be taken alive.

I gave my life over to the protection of what I felt was needed by joining the military.

Then I had a wife & children, hostages to fortune so to speak.

If a person is in that position & has not already decided what would be done in as many scenarios as possible, then they have failed already IMO.

Anyone can be made to tell, except a dead person.

28

And yet I recall reading about one fairly high ranking military officer in Stalin’s time who refused to give in and sign a statement despite months of ill treatment. And they weren’t messing around, he lost an eye during it.

Sorry, I can’t recall any further details than that, and generally I agree that everyone will eventually break, the only real hope of not giving in is that you die first.

*edited to add, I think they shot him anyway, but he didn’t confess

29

Not thinking of Rokossovsky are you? They knocked his teeth out, but he refused to sign anything. Stalin later reinstated him, though never fully trusted the half-Pole. Evidently there are going to be some hard-as-nails bastards who eschew the trend.

30

Interesting, create an addiction and withdrawal cycle to break someone and make them dependent is something I haven’t heard of. It would take time but with drugs like narcan you could create instant withdrawal.

I’ve always wondered if torturers sometimes used things like opioids and narcan to assist in torture.

For example, torture someone until the pain is unbearable, then apply opioids to make them feel safe, then apply narcan, and resume the torture.

There is also the fact that opioids work on parts of the brain that govern social interaction. I read in a book on neuroscience that that could be why heroin addicts lose social contact with people, the pathways the drug affects are the same reward pathways that people normally experience rewards for having meaningful social relationships so people lose the motivation to engage in rewarding social behavior. Considering that one of the biggest obstacles to interrogation is the fact that people have strong loyalty to fellow soldiers or rebels, using opioids could disrupt those emotional connections. I don’t recall if the book said that all recreational drugs affected the social reward systems, or just opioids. But either way, in theory, the drugs could disrupt a person’s existing social ties and possibly make them socially dependent on the interrogator.

I’ve also wondered if drugs like vasopressin or oxytocin have been used to fuck up people’s sense of attachment and trust.

We humans are evil sometimes.

31

J M Coetzee’s great novel is Waiting For The Barbarians, published in 1980 it concerns a waning Empire’s fight against the people whose land they have occupied. It deals at great length with torture, it’s effectiveness and usefulness, and the ways in which it destroys both the victims and the culture that condones it. Beautifully written book, very prescient of the course of U.S. history since Cheney stuck his thumb in the pudding. Rare novel that avoids the failing of making everybody incredibly attractive charming witty and tragic. Hate everything else JMC has written, though, reading Foe and Heart of The Country and his latest I forget, now that is torture…

32

Military information is time sensitive. Any delay may make the value perish.

Good questioning techiniques, the kind the teach lawyers and police officers, will get good information. The questioner needs to be very prepared, respectful and listen and convince the subject that accurate information will be helpful and make them liked. You make the subject feel smart, important, liked and listened to. Being an ass, unpleasant, or even torturing isn’t nearly as effective. There are studies on the effectiveness of torturing, and the results don’t recommend torture as an information gathering technique. It does get revenge, humiliate and degrade everyone involved every time.

33

That sounds like how they got the BTK killer to confess all his crimes. The interrogator acted more like a fan and built up the killer’s ego by getting him to brag about who he had killed, how, and what he did with the bodies.

34

Corey was the first person I thought of, but I wonder about his psychology, and his religious belief. Other people confessed, because the chances were that they would be convicted at trial, executed, and given a burial without Christian prayers, in unconsecrated ground, which by their theology meant they wouldn’t go to heaven. If they confessed, however falsely, they would still be executed, but then they would get Christian burials, and go to heaven. I wonder if it is possible that Corey was a non-believer-- or at least did not believe that he could be consigned to hell by his manner of burial, and that falsely confessing would be the sin of “bearing false witness,” and that would be much worse for his immortal soul than his manner of burial.

FWIW, some people are much more susceptible to addiction than others, and some people experience highs more powerfully than others, as well as getting better pain relief from narcotics. Ashkenazic Jews on the whole are resistent to getting “high” from narcotics, and don’t easily become addicted, nor suffer the same withdrawal after long-term use. I don’t know why. I don’t get euphoric, or even sleepy from narcotics, unless I’m already sleep-deprived, and I don’t sleep well when I take them. I also get poor pain control from them, and do much better if I take them with steroids or Tylenol (depending on the situation). I suppose if someone tried to force me to become an addict, I might become an addict, but the fact is that if I happen to get a migraine, narcotics actually make them much worse, and can even trigger them if I take them for several days. The only thing I find them really useful for is codeine for cough suppression.

So, I might confess long before I could get addicted, if I had a bad migraine, but I might be a tough nut to crack if you are relying on me becoming an addict. The two times in my life I took narcotics post-surgery for more than a week, I was feeling lousy, and was relieved to get off them and on to plain Tylenol.

35

My methods have worked for me hundreds of times. Ask nicely, listen attentively and follow up asking for clarification as though it is the most interesting thing in the world. It doesn’t fail completely ever, but does have varying levels of forthcomingness in people who have been coached to not cooperate.

36

I’ve read that some people managed to resist Gestapo interrogation dispite torture during WWII. It’s not the sort of thing I’d want to rely on, though.

37

I tend to believe that people who resist torture do so only in cases where the torturers are inexperienced, unserious, or do not have the time to go about it properly (because of time pressure, interruption, or the subject’s death).

Can’t cite this from this phone, but during the discussions of waterboarding, there was a story (not Scylla’s) of a U.S. Marine who volunteered to be waterboarded to demonstrate his conviction that it was not really torture and could be resisted. Bear in mind that this test took place under the most favorable circumstances imaginable…a tough, fit young man, surrounded by concerned friends and medical personnel, the technique administered gingerly and with care to avoid long-term damage, to a “prisoner” who knew it would end whenever he called “enough!” And his pride was at stake too. Thus, the fear and lack of control present in “real” torture were entirely absent.

He broke in, if I recall correctly, 17 seconds.

He demanded a rematch now that he knew what he was up against.

He broke in 14 seconds that time.

38

To this day I am still not clear on exactly what waterboarding involves. I read descriptions of it and come away, for whatever reason, unclear about what’s going on. Something about a towel and water being poured over the face, I think? And people emphasize it’s not “simulated drowning” but “actual drowning.” Okay, but why the towel? What’s going on? And why couldn’t that soldier get past 17 seconds by simply holding his breath?

39

I agree with you here.

I also think that most people would break. I’m not sure about all though. I feel like there are some people in the military who have had training and sufficient will that they would be able to withstand torture of all forms. Then again, that could just be a mental glorification of the military brought about through Hollywood films…

40

General Jack D. Ripper: Were you ever a prisoner of war?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Well… yes I was, matter of fact, Jack. I was.
General Jack D. Ripper: Did they torture you?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, yes they did. I was tortured by the Japanese. Jack, if you must know; not a pretty story.
General Jack D. Ripper: Well, what happened?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Oh, well, I don’t know, Jack, difficult to think of under these conditions; but, well… what happened was they got me on the old Rangoon-Ichinawa railway. I was laying train lines for the bloody Japanese puff-puff’s.
General Jack D. Ripper: No, I mean when they tortured you. Did you talk?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Ah, oh, no… well, I don’t think they wanted me to talk really. I don’t think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.