I like this option.
I would definitely try to escape, though, if I saw an opportunity. If it was entirely hopeless and I was about to be dragged off to be tortured, you’d better believe I would do my absolute maximum to kill or be killed by the bastards dragging me off.
. . .do they know that I know it?
I mean, if I’m random grunt X, and they don’t know that I know Big Secret Y, then. . .well, suicide’d be kinda idiotic.
The options would then be–A.) turn traitor, and tell them everything BUT that, or B.) let them torture me, and do my damndest to tell them everything but that. Maybe even do my best to forget it. But, that early in the scenario, offing yourself isn’t heroic–it’s poor planning.
This does not apply, of course, to Really Obviously Evil regimes. But. . .I’m 25. I’ve never been around for the US being in a war with a Really Obviously Evil regime.
Actually, a better option would be to stick your fingers into their eyes and blind them. That way they are a burden on their society and others can see what happens when they tangle with the enemy (you).
The Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq were obvious evil regimes. I think even a guy like Der Trihs would acknowledge that. As to what the solutions should have been, if any, is where the debate comes in.
The pill is the soft option for me; I have no dear of death. But I would never give up on getting back to the Celtling if she needed me. In the end, people do survive torture and make it back to their families alive. (ahem, John McCain, anybody heard of him?) and my primary goal would be to concentrate on survival and escape plans.
Assuming she is an adult and has a happy life of her own, I would still have my pathetic ego to contend with. A part of me would want the chance to face off against trained interrogators. Hopefully I would have the humility to use the pill if it was truly a matter of National Security.
I have to say though, in that situation I would already have a plan with my unit/handlers. “If taken, here’s what I’m going to tell them; I’ll hold out as long as I can to give you a chance to plant back-up for the lie.”
The academic point is I can’t imagine anyone knowing anything that would be quite as valuable as this. Perhaps Enigma, but not much else applies. It’s the reason governments compartmentalize information-- no one disclosure (or one captured individual) is likely to give up a goat valuable enough.
That said, accepting the conditions of the OP, everyone breaks under torture. Everyone. The U.S. put its Air Force and Navy pilots through unnecessary hell during the Vietnam War by failing to grasp this basic point-- there may be (and surely is) honor in resisting as long as practicable, but there is also no shame in eventually divulging information. Unfortunately, the example of pilots breaking under Chinese interrogation during the Korean War led to the counter-ethos during Vietnam.
Since then, from the 1991 Gulf War on, counter-interrogation training has recognized this point, that everyone breaks eventually. Doesn’t mean there aren’t tactics that can be employed to slow this down, or gum up the works, but America in 2009 believes that its military personnel are more valuable than (most) any secret.
As for the “torture never works” argument, obviously, they’ve been hashed and rehashed countless times here at the SDMB. I’ll just make my vote clear: of course it works, or else it wouldn’t be used. The question is how effective it is in comparison to other methods. Everything is situational. A “honey pot” interrogation may be the most successful in the long-term, but in a “ticking clock” scenario, harsh interrogations may be more effective.
ESPECIALLY when cross-referenced with known intelligence-- a point nearly always forgotten by the “torture never works, the victim says anything to get out of it” crowd. Call it harsh interrogations, call it torture, but in the absence of independently-known calibrating intelligence, it’s not very useful at all. When you know nearly as much as your subject does, however, harsh interrogation can be extremely useful in obtaining additional information.
What it’s NOT useful in doing is obtaining a confession, because it will, whether the subject is guilty or not. But that hasn’t been the debate in the U.S.-- no one is looking to know whether these guys were Al Qaeda or not, we knew that already, we were looking to find out what they knew.
And the argument that you can shred a terrorist with a Hellfire launched from 20,000 feet but the moment you capture him you can’t rough them up strikes me as fallacious, even pernicious. We respect lawful combatants because they in return will respect our lawful combatants. Once you afford unlawful combatants the same rights and privileges we would, say, POWs from a uniformed military, then the uniformed militaries of the world lose their incentive to operate under the lawful rules of war.
By any classical standard of international behavior, we would be entirely within our rights to summarily execute captured Al Qaeda on the spot as brigands, just as we could execute pirates.
Alas, we’ve “evolved”.
Anyway. . . I take the pill, because I wouldn’t have taken the mission otherwise.
It’s sadly a bit harder to say this now then it was a couple years ago.
This appeals to me on an instinctual level but instead i’d probably do this:
If I didn’t have any particular reason to think they’d find the pill, I’d hold it in reserve initially. Then I would see if i could sell them on the notion that I didn’t know crap. I’d probably resist for awhile and then attempt to sell them outdated low level intel and claim it was all I had. I would be most disappointed that I could not be of greater assistance. If that didn’t work, then pill. If i know that they are certain i have valuable intel, then pill immediately because I can’t imagine they’ll not think to look for it in that circumstance.
My question with physical torture has always been whether I’d be reduced to utter incoherence before breaking. Securing my cooperation would be rather unhelpful if the process of doing so left me speaking gibberish for the next 6 months (especially since I’d also recover my willpower in the same time).
It is an entirely different story if i would be on the receiving end of the (general more effective) psyc ops techniques. I’m a psychologist; mind games are my profession.
As pointed out in the GD torture threads, that’s not so. Torture is if anything LESS effective. And “ticking bomb” scenarios are the next thing to non-existent according to the experts, and the one actual case that someone came up with ( some would-be bombers in London ) was stopped because their parents went to the authorities. Which would have been much less likely if those authorities had a reputation for torture.
As for why torture is done, despite not working ? Out of cruelty, or the desire for false confessions, or out of the quasi-religious conviction that it MUST work, regardless of the evidence.
The experts disagree. And where are you going to get all that other information, when your sources stop talking to you ?
Garbage; we knew no such thing.
No, we’ve become monsters. Twisted and vile. That’s what torturers ARE, not “evolved”.
Torture is pretty freaking scary, I’d like to think that I could stand a little pain but it would be hard to bet the security of my country on my perceived machisma. I’m with Uzi and Ninja, I’d try to escape and take some of the rat bastards with me.
Aren’t you duty bound to resist, to attempt escape, and to refuse release if one of your fellow soldiers has been imprisoned longer?
This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Okay. Really obviously evil regimes. . .but, you know, if we really needed to, we could blow them to smithereens. It’s very hard for me to think of a population as evil when a good chunk of them don’t have, like, electricity. They’re no more inherently evil than some of our allies.
Which, okay, isn’t the point. But the Iraqi army isn’t likely to storm Washington anytime soon, no matter what intel I give them. You couldn’t necessarily say that about Germany and (possibly) Japan.
My new motto!
I disagree with your notions of the effectiveness of torture, but wholeheartedly agree with the above and almost posted as much in the other torture thread. I’m reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Americans recklessly shoot up the innocents on the sampan. One survives the onslaught and priority one then becomes getting that survivor to medical help.
Just FTR, neither Germany nor Japan could conceivably have occupied the mainland US during WWII. They simply didn’t have the manpower, and wouldn’t have had it even if the Germans had managed to hold all of mainland Europe and pacify the Eastern Front.
The Wehrmacht was stymied in Russia by the combination of cold + distance + sheer numbers of Russian soldiers. To conquer the mainland US they’d have had to deal with all those things plus the difficulty of maintaining the supply chain all the way across the Atlantic.
I like to think I’d have the stones to stick it out. I guess I’m an optimistic wuss. I am scared of pain, and I don’t have any illusions about the swiftness with which I’d be broken, but you never know what might happen. And death is really the only thing I’m *guaranteed *not to survive.
Skald, its your thread but how about this one
Your a redshirt like you postulated above, but you and your squad are required to protect some crypto guys that have knowledge and possession of codes. You are required to assist them in the destruction and get them off on the first available transport, air or sea in the event of the possibility of capture.
However in the event of imminent capture your orders are to ensure that the crypto guys cannot reveal any sensitive information.
In short, you are their executioners.
Do you
Let them fall into enemy hands
Two follow orders and kill them
Three, try and find an alternative solution.
Declan
Declan, of course I’d try to avoid shooting my brothers in arms but in the situation you described, if there was really no other alternative that I could see, yes, I’d shoot those poor smart bastards.
I think I could off my fellows or myself to save my country, those are tough but hardly impossible decisions. It’s always the when of it that gets me, particularly Skald’s scenario. What if the enemy discovers your means of suicide and then your forced by principle and necessity to do something like outlierrn described and gnaw yourself to death?
Torture is a reality of warfare and it is effective.
I think it would be nice if nations didn’t use rape or dismemberment as means of torture and if we could all agree not to use chemical warfare. I’m sure others would prefer we duke it out with paintball guns.
Our opinions about the Geneva Convention aside - If diplomacy has failed so utterly that we are reduced to killing one another, it hardly seems productive to debate the ways in which we do the job.
This is pretty much what I’d say, too. I thought of McCain as soon as I saw the thread title. Where’s there’s life, there’s hope, however small and elusive.
That’s why I put in the qualifier about having the crucial information that you may give up under torture. Your fellow servicemen will be endangered if you break, and everybody breaks.