My question to anyone who believes this article to be correct is whether they would have found the same sources and type of evidence credible if it had produced the contrary result. If the answer is no, it shows that you should not expect this article to convince any of your intellectual opponents.
For the record, I am not sure whether torture works or is morally justified in the circumstances where it has been applied over the last 20 years, but I find this article entirely unconvincing.
One other thing to remember in discussions around torture is that the "ticking bomb" situation simply doesn't happen, as reported by professional interrogators. This means that "ticking bomb" is an outlier scenario and the base moral discussions should not start from there.
It has actually happened in at least one case (, at least there was believed to be a 'ticking time bomb').[1] In addition, thought experiments are meant to shed light on the limits (if there are such limits) of certain moral principles, or problems with paradigms, much like reductio ad absurdum is a useful tool for reasoning.[2][3]
This is not to say that the torture is justified in the case of a 'ticking time bomb', but it is both a possible situation, and a useful scenario to think about.
It is frequent that it's believed to happen. It's possible, but seems unlikely, that it has literally happened, torture has worked and then the US government has somehow not crowed about it.
They are looking very hard for scenarios to justify their use of torture, and the results they have revealed (e.g. from waterboarding Al Qaeda members) aren't inspiring, so far.
It appears, for instance, that waterboarding people many times (in a few cases, 100+ times) isn't enough to keep them from lying to you.
Whether the US government is 'good' at extracting information through torture is irrelevant to any discussion of the efficacy of torture, or its morality.
Some might argue that the US was simply too restrained in the pain and suffering it subjected the subjects to; others might argue that the US 'tortured hard enough', but it is not possible to achieve 'better' results. Similarly, there could be a discussion of whether it was morally permissible for the US government to torture.
I feel the entire point is whether torture can work. Because if it cannot, there's no point to making people suffer. If we can get the information in some other way, then those should be tried instead. Bribing could work. Offering them a safe place to live for them and their family could work. A lot of things other than making them suffer could work.
Whether the US gov't is good at it is irrelevant, if we assume somebody else could plausibly be better.
But if they're anywhere near an upper bound, then whether they (a well-informed first-world superpower with a huge budget and a willingness to extradite people to places like Syria where there are effectively no rules) can make torture work is very relevant.
Because if they can't, and torture is useless, then clearly the question is effectively resolved, at least in the real world. If torture is simply ineffective in real-world scenarios then the question goes away.
Making decisions on whether torture is moral based on extreme outliers is the same as arguing about the morals of abortion based on third-trimester abortions, which in the US comprise 0.4% of abortions. It's not the main event. Yes, it is useful to discuss these items, as long as it is clearly understood that these are outliers.
It's also significant to note that even though police thought it was a 'ticking bomb' situation, it actually wasn't. "But the police honestly believed X" is a real example of the 'slippery slope', that we see violated time and time again. There have been sting operations to expose the misuse of "honestly believed X" - my favourite being the guys (in Texas, from memory) who put high power heat lamps in an empty house, pointed at a christmas tree. Police helicopters illegally using FLIR noted the heat, and had an officer walk past and "smell cannabis" coming from the house, which lead to a SWAT raid. All caught on cameras positioned inside the empty house.
If by some astonishing bad luck some that type of scenario did happen (highly unlikely, but the probability is not zero), that's what "extenuating circumstances" is for.
We already have provisions in law to allow for the very rare and unusual situations where someone is guilty of a criminal act for a good reason. Therefor the people using the mythical "ticking bomb" scenario are asking for something else.
Exactly. You should also raise your guard whenever someone is trying to convince you that reality never presents you with hard choices: "So I never have to weigh my aversion to torture against my aversion to the loss of thousands of lives? Hooray!"
Quite often, the person doesn't realize he wants it to be true, so this raises the question: don't you have similar motives unbeknownst to you, and are you skeptical about them too?
Yes I am skeptical about my ideas, often excessively and to my detriment! But I don't believe I or anyone else can completely remove this bias, and I think that beyond a certain point it's not healthy or productive to do so. Taken too far, you can find yourself unable to think any thought without arguing against it with twice as many counter-thoughts. It can lead to paralysis where you aren't able to do or think anything for long enough to actually accomplish something.
I think we have to accept that sometimes we are, at least temporarily, operating according to ideas we can't fully justify. We have to be willing to be temporarily wrong or misguided.
A civilization-ending meteor will probably never head toward the earth, but your ethical worldmodel should be able to handle this scenario without special exceptions, rather than just try to assure yourself that it can't happen so you don't have to think about it.
A civilization ending meteor has relatively few additional questions to ask. Like are we sure there's a civilization ending meteor? Which as it turns out, actually makes quite a difference in our response to it!
Whereas whatever the hell people want to talk about with 24-esque do-or-die scenario begs dozens if not hundreds of follow up questions, all of which have one thing in common: they've nothing to do with torture as conducted by the US to date, which has taken place over the course of years in a systemic fashion in which no assurances that the people we're torturing are even involved with "the enemy" have been able to be given.
It's reasonable to say "this specific government will use this tool irresponsibly, in ways that hurt people and damage credibility without corresponding upside".
But that's a different argument entirely from "this tool can never work."
About 4 years ago I went to a talk given by the author of the book, the subject was along the same lines as the book: how torture is ineffective because it damages the subject's ability to recall information. Afterwards someone asked a question that a lot of us had been thinking: that in a lot of situations where torture might be used, the information being asked for is very well known to the subject, so unless serious brain damage occurred, the subject wasn't going to forget after torture. Like, "who is your cell leader?" or "where are the guns hidden?". He seemed confused by the question, even after a few other audience members tried to rephrase it. Got the impression he was being intentionally obtuse. I guess it deflated the gist of his work, which more accurately should be something like "torture ineffective when the concealed information is hard to remember".
I haven't read the book, but I hope in the meantime he has worked a little to address this question. Seemed like a well meaning guy though, and maybe my memory of the talk has been eroded by the torturous years of grad school in between
Here's the reason that it doesn't work. Imagine that your village has a 1000 people and someone is torturing you to find out "who is your cell leader." At first you are resisting, and so you name random people in the village. After you've named 50 people or more, you break and name the real person.
The torturers though don't know that this is the real person, so they'll keep torturing you, and you'll just go through every name in the village to make the torture stop.
How can they separate the real person from the ones you lied about either out of resistance or to make the pain go away?
In some cases this could work. They want to find out where you hid the guns, and every time, they go and dig till you break and give them the right place, and then they do find the guns.
What you've said sounds like a reasonable argument why torture doesn't work in that case. My point wasn't that torture does work (I have no idea about that), just that the research outlined by O'Mara doesn't address situations like this (and so the research isn't enough to prove that "torture is ineffective" as is suggested).
I think the comments of the FBI revealed wrt. the CIA torture programs shows that CIA officers a) don't know how to interrogate people, and b) do need to be reminded what a lie is.
I agree that if what you want is some concrete information that the subject is reluctant to give up ("Where have you buried the guns I need in order to kill the rest of your family?") -- you could probably get at that via torture. I don't know if that would typically be the fastest or most reliable way to get that information (Consider, eg: Staging an escape, allowing the subject, helped by an under-cover agent, point you to said guns).
I think people get hung up on the "bomb plot theory" too much. My impression is that while such simple cases make for great TV, that's not the kind of real-world questions intelligence organizations really are concerned with. So if we say: "ok, use torture to save the children!" -- if that was taken at face value -- it means: "Disband most (all?) large-scale operations that allow torture today, such as the CIA programs."
I also think there's a bit of a hang-up on "effectiveness". If you're fighting an illegal war, kidnapping and killing people that are clearly innocent -- it's hard to accept an argument from "effectiveness". At least if there's no indication that atrocities would stop if you "won".
Taking it from a more political point of view rather than neurological, Shakespeare did a political play on this subject which was summarily all about blow-back or stone cold revenge — "Titus Andronicus." (A movie by Julie Taymor of the play "Titus" is quite powerful)
In politics and war The dirtiest fighter makes the rules and now that the United States tortures people, I suspect we will be "one-upped" in the next war.
Indeed, once you resort to torture or other "questionable" means, you can't accuse or deny enemies from using them too; this sets new standards. The argument is generally "but they already do it", and in my opinion it fails to recognize 1) the large scale validation for every belligerent, 2) the race to "no-rule" warfare, as limits are one-upped once (de facto) accepted. So it's not because _some_ belligerents are willing to use banned means that everybody should start using them too.
Yes, many of my worries about what my government get up to are based on the fact that they lose all moral standing when others do the same, see Russia bombing Syria for a recent example.
I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing.
So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you're pretty likely to initially withhold whatever you can. But by the time you reach an actual breaking point...well it's called that for a reason. You are in fact very unlikely to remember much of anything because of pain, shock etc. You're pretty likely to say whatever the torturer is asking to hear.
Waterboarding is torture because once water gets into your oesophagus your rational mind shuts down completely - this post (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717) pretty much summarizes it and the experience has been confirmed by everyone else who has had it done to them.
That's the point about torture being ineffective. By the time it's effective, you're dealing with someone who is pretty much going to confabulate whatever you want to hear.
> I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing.
It almost sounds as if you are trying to define away torture for a fringe case where it's guaranteed to be useless. This is a legalistic approach not anymore convincing than attempts to define waterboarding as "not torture".
Torture is used in the armed conflicts depressingly regularly: the corresponding clauses in Geneva Conventions for treatment of POW were added not for purely theoretic reasons. Torture is used by criminals around the world on daily basis. The reason they haven't given up after millenia of practice is that it tends to work in their unsophisticated, easily verifiable cases: getting the combination to a safe or finding where a merchant keeps their money stashed.
Anyway, torture should not be used because it's simply an abhorrent thing to do to a human being. Trying to frame it in terms of performance is damaging to the moral aspect of it, as you descend to the same inhuman cost/benefit mindset as torture proponent.
AFAIK, torture does not work for "getting the combination to a safe or finding where a merchant keeps their money stashed". It is still used because it is a very effective way to frighten the opposition. Torture is often shown on TV, where the good guys force the bad ones to tell the truth. It is completely unrealistic.
Back in the 1990s in former USSR bugrlary-torture-murders were daily occurrences. It sure as hell worked, for purposes far more simple than "frightening the opposition". Stuff much too savage for TV shows typically, like soldering iron up one's anus.
Such barbaric methods makes almost no difference for the victims who will probably die. The difference is the effect on population. If the purpose was to get information, I think there are more effective ways: chemistry or hypnosis for example.
The purpose of information, however, is money. Which adds more data to this: if you're in early 1990s former USSR and you want to steal a great deal of money, there were far less brutal ways to do so... Here's how one fellow made $10bn (no home invasions and soldering irons required...): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_(Ponzi_scheme_company)
Ah, "racketeer" (written as "PAKETEP" in Cyrillics, iirc -- a borrowed word from English, but used to mean an individual extorting someone vs. organized extortion of a business) with a soldering iron or a clothes iron... the reason my parents for the longest time told me 1) never tell others we have a home computer 2) the model of our home computer was a "Sinclair" (it was actually a 386, but they were afraid I'd blab about having a computer in the first place... of course I blabbed about having a Sinclair, to someone who first volunteered information about having an actual Sinclair, leaving him confused as to why our Sinclair ran MS DOS and why I programmed it in Turbo Pascal...).
The general big fear was being burgled and tortured for money you were presumed to have had but actually didn't. I suspect this was the intent of the burglars: most any rational person would prefer to give up their money rather than being tortured with a soldering iron -- and these were heavy soldering irons used for repairing 220v home circuits (culture shock coming to the US: people didn't fix simple things like an outlet/switch failing to work, but I digress...) -- but the stories of those who didn't have money but were tortured and murdered anyway, made those who had the money (and might decide to volunteer only a portion of it) realize that the threats weren't kidding.
However, that's not the full story. I really do wonder how much the soldering iron added over simply barging into a home, demanding the money. I suspect there is also huge element of, as Orwell said in 1984, torture for the sake of torture itself (sadistic personalities amongst the criminals, rather than pure rational calculation as means to making money).
Re, TV: the soldering iron thing _did_ make it into some Russian/late Soviet movie I watched back in the 90s, not in a graphical scene, but the threat: the militisia agent -- it was stilled called that back then -- was refusing to take the reported threat seriously and was simply cracking jokes about it.... A graphical scene (albeit comedic) with a clothes iron did make into one the more famous movies of that era, ironically as something that happens in US (ah, projection!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Is_Good_on_Deribasovsk... )
That said, growing up in former USSR (Belarus, specifically), I was also surrounded by plenty of stories of partisans (anti-Nazi resistance fighters) saying nothing when questioned by the Gestapo, as well as tactics the partisans used: assume anyone can be captured or be a traitor, make any one piece of information useless by itself, and so forth. This couldn't be propaganda, as the French resistance stories I was exposed to in the US were also quite similar. I suspect resistance to giving useful information under torture when 1) one has a lot more at stake than money 2) the organization one is a part of has a choice about how to distribute the information.
In fact in France, there is a strange concept called "juge d'instruction". Basically a district attorney with the power of a judge. And this power includes sending someone to jail pending a trial.
Over time, these judges have been known to send people against who they only have a weak case to jail to make them talk. The state of French jails is appalling, many date from the XIX century, infested with pest, and all are overcrowded.
One could argue that this is a form of torture. Particularly for white collar crime.
If it's intentional infliction of suffering then it indeed can be argued that way.
This is some other thing though: police/prosecution using torture as coercion into admitting guilt. They don't really care whether it's true or not, their goal is just chalking up some bureaucratic milestone ("case closed").
> Trying to frame it in terms of performance is damaging to the moral aspect of it,
Well, I prefer performance-based explanation as to why not use torture. The problem with morals is that they change. And they tend to provide a lot of backdoors. Like, it's obviously bad to torture, but what if you could save X lives by torturing one person?
With a performance-based explanation it's easy: nothing because torture won't give you reliable information and you won't save the people that way; better start thinking about some other way.
But arguing from a performance perspective on torture is often dishonest, because people start from a conclusion they would like to reach, and then work backward in any way possible to make their claim intellectually respectable.
It's dishonest because high-quality research into torture is not really done on a scientifically known level (maybe governments have such knowledge), and it's nigh-impossible for any serious body of scientific evidence and insight to occur. The consequence of this is that people are free to speculate anything at all, insofar as they erect an intellectual barrier capable of thwarting an audience. Like that author did as they appeared deaf to audience questioning.
We make cost-benefit analyses all the time. With any military operation the collateral damage has to be weighed against the target. The fact that we freak out over torture yet kill innocent people in collateral damage is completely irrational. On the scale of harm, torture that leaves no physical harm is behind cutting off people's limbs, and that is far behind killing people. Now, torturing innocent people is worse than torturing (most likely) guilty people who (most likely) know something that can save lives. But for some reason mentioning torture reflexively shuts people's brain off yet killing innocent people in collateral damage is fine if subject to a cost-benefit analysis.
Are saying that collateral damage is not justified under any circumstance? Otherwise your witty response does nothing to adress the point that I made. We already do not condone murder nor rape.
War is a barbarism at industrial scale, which humanity, unfortunately, haven't managed to eradicate. There are however certain undertakings to reduce human suffering: bans of certain particularly inhumane or indiscriminating weapons, prohibitions of deliberate targeting of civilians, and yes, elimination of torture.
If you make an effort to reduce suffering it comes as a complete package: people quick to torture are the same people who would use Sarin on civilians. There is simply no middle ground. The concept of innocence doesn't come into play anyway. Wars are mass murders stemming from greater social and political processes; a conscript soldier guarding a fuel depot is not any more "guilty" apriori than his civilian relative.
There is more or less intellectual consensus that wars cause suffering, and attempts are made to reduce the misery. Propagating torture is not serving a good cause here. You essentially argue that a "lesser" crime is acceptable in context of a "greater" crime going on anyway. If one's going to kill the victim might rape her anyway.
That is not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that compared to collateral damage the discussion about torture is completely out of proportion. Of course the concept of innocence comes into play. I'm not talking about war. I'm talking about drone strikes against terrorists which also kill their wives and children vs torturing a terrorist. The drone strikes are an almost unimaginably greater evil, and yet time and time again you have people taking a hard line stance against torture yet are willing to make a cost-benefit analysis in the case of drone strikes or special forces operations.
Note that I am not taking any pro or contra torture position. I'm merely pointing out the moral inconsistency.
Given that one of the most commonly discussed and unpleasant torture methods involves simulating the experience of drowning, I've often wondered why so few people consider inflicting that exact same experience on many enemy sailors by means of missile or torpedo to be even remotely bending the rules of engagement. Granted, the person that fires the fatal shot probably isn't an incorrigible sadist and may even be at imminent risk of a similar fate themselves, but they're still inflicting that suffering with a similar level of intentionality and certainty to a CIA operative with a bucket...
Hurting enemies while they're fighting, presumably to make them stop being able to hurt you or whomever you're protecting, has always been granted a special moral free pass.
But if there is no fight occurring, and the enemy is subdued and unable to cause harm, then the situation has changed a bit, into a greyer area.
I've also met a guy who has used water-boarding in the field, and he didn't seem like a sadist. He felt pretty bad about using it, though he thought it effective and necessary.
The intent of e.g. a drone strike is to kill the target. So even in terms of intent that is worse. The thing is that nobody even cares about that: arguments against drone strikes are virtually always about collateral damage of innocent people. Compare and contrast with the discussion about torture where people are not even willing to make a cost benefit analysis.
Well, lets talk about people who are not like that, but people who think drone strikes are might be okay in certain circumstances. My point is that those are the same people who say that torture is not okay under any circumstance. That is the inconsistency I'm pointing out.
I think in case of drone strikes those people can claim that people (other than target that should in their opinion be killed) are killed by accident.
In case of torture you can't claim that individual you torture is somehow accidentally hurt. Probsbly those people would be fine with torture if they thought hurting the tortured individual is desired outcome.
It's not really an accident though if it's a likely outcome. The point is simply this: on the one hand people accept a substantial probability of killing innocent people and intentionally killing guilty people if the upsides are good enough, but these same people are unwilling to accept mere torture of guilty people no matter the upsides.
Maybe it's something about drones being remote. Torture was shown so many times on tv that it's closer to home. Not many pictures of people blown to bits by invisible thing in the sky.
The question why people are so bad at intuitively weighing harm is a different but interesting question. There have been some studies that suggest that there is an inverse relationship. When asked how much money they would give to save 2 lives people offer less than they do when asked to how much they would give to save 1 life. Not less per life, less total. As the number of lives goes up, what they offer goes down. This may have something to do with abstracting the harm. With torture it's easy to understand what's happening. With a single death it's harder to fathom how much is lost. The thousands that die in traffic each year hardly register.
The incompetence of humans to intuitively make moral judgements is precisely why we should think rationally about morality rather than emotionally.
There isn't much evidence for torture being used except as a form of punishment. Even the famous medieval torture was intended as a part of the punishment and to deter crime, rather than finding valuable information. Torture was only used on people convicted by other means, because it was technically illegal to punish anybody who didn't plea guilty.
But isn't inability to remember much because of pain/shock the point? That fragments of actual memories of places been and instructions given might be a little stronger than a torture subject's capacity to invent alternatives, or even recall why they were so keen not to give that information in the first place. Useless to establish guilt or complex plans, but quite possibly better than nothing for a few elusive details, assuming that "nothing" is what more acceptable interrogation techniques have yielded.
Of course, it's even easier for the subject to simply agree with the torturer if the torturer actually has a narrative they want agreed to, but in those case actually obtaining information was obviously never the reason for the torture in the first place...
This is not how torture works in real life. At least, not the one made by security forces.
Both of my parents were tortured, both faced it several times. My father was in prison twice and my mother was never in prison but took directly to military places. But not only they were tortured, several people from the circle of family friends were tortured too. One of them now works in a state program trying to help the people who were tortured to continue with their lifes, even if they were tortured in 1974-1980.
While the 1973 was made with support of US and brazilian governments, there was no support when the firsts arrests came. Most of people faced strong pain under different methods, including electricity, beating to almost dead, removing nails, etc... but it was only after the US experts arrived that torture became effective.
Torture is about removing will. A common practice after that was not only rape by military, but they put dogs to rape woman. They took their fingers off and put them in cells full of shit so they had to avoid the infections. Put them in really small spaces until they were lost.
This were process made by days, they didn't get into shock status, they were destroyed as human beings. When they go out, torturers didn't ask them: "hey, how do i find this person"... they just took a bunch of pictures and check the reactions. Or they put them in a car and go around the city and let them see somebody they knew.
By the way, when you reach this point you don't care about torture anymore like to try to avoiding it letting the torturer hear anything they want to hear. You are broke, you don't have will, the only thing you can wish is to be dead. You don't resist anymore.
Torture was so effective that political organizations who were fighting the dictatorship adopted the policy of when somebody is arrested, all their known people had to run and disappear in 24 hours.
Most of the people the US was holding at gitmo and other black sites around the world were simply people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. But you never know that for sure. It's unconscionable that random innocents be tortured for they may yield some information. But allowing torture by using extreme cases like your's, in reality it is almost never that cut and dry.
> so unless serious brain damage occurred, the subject wasn't going to forget after torture.
Really? You have data on this? I'd love to see it.
However, there are multiple problems with your scenario.
The biggest being: what happens if the individual DOESN'T KNOW? He's going to tell you anything he can to get you to stop, and, if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place.
So, even if I concede that torture works when you know you have the right person (and I do not), the problem is that you can't distinguish whether you have the right person and whether he actually knows the information you want.
Well yes. But I think the parent was framing it with reference to the intelligence world conflicts. At least that's how I Read it.
Imagine you torture a guy to get the name of it's cell leader. You can't verify this easily. You have to capture that other guy, torture him and repeat the process. While in any of those steps you have the chance of getting false information without knowing it.
I would think most intelligence from a war zone would be of this type, i.e. hard to verify, and I think the parent was thinking along those lines as well.
All information is hard to remember when you are in serios distress. Even your name after few nights of sleep deprivation doesn't sound obvious at all.
You will trash subject ability to be sure about anything well
before you make him cooperaive.
You greatly underestimate how much the brain shuts down in stress situations. People may not hear being talked to, recognize familiar people or notice severe wounds. It's the reason behind such rules such as no cleanup during training - it lead to people picking up spent ammunition in real gunfights.
During torture, the stress levels must be high enough so that the subject forgets that they don't want to tell you anything important, and at that point they may not be able to recall their own name. And of course people tell intentionally inaccurate, false or otherwise misleading information to avoid further torture.
So torture may work for those who somehow ended up on the enemy side and don't actually care that much one way or another, but not people who are likely to have valuable information. Even the Nazis knew that and instead tried to convict the interrogated they are civilized, well meaning people.
I don't at the moment have time to read the article, but I will note that you do NOT need to have brain damage from the torture in order for it to interfere with recall.
Memory is state dependent. You recall things best when in a similar state to when you usually access that information. Placing someone in an extreme altered state can interfere with memory access of "normal" memories, without brain damage needing to occur.
The degree to which memory is state dependent was really brought home to me when I had a serious medical crisis some years back. The birth of my first child was very difficult and I usually have trouble remembering the details. During my medical crisis, I was in constant extreme pain for 3.5 years. During that time, I was able to remember the birth of that child with tremendous clarity after years of remembering it foggily.
You do not need to cause brain damage to interfere with mental processes like recall.
Torture isn't conducted to improve the ability of the victim to recall information but as a negotiating tactic. I'll give you what you want: to stop being tortured, if you tell me what I want to know.
There is a problem with that - even true facts could be deceiving. The only way to verify outside of checking is to continue torturing which defeats the reasons for the person surrendering the information in the first place.
Not necessarily; you could torture someone for something like a key to an encrypted file. This is something difficult to guess, but easy to verify the correctness of. I am not saying that torture is justified in this scenario, but only that it is not true that "to verify outside of checking is to continue torturing which defeats the reasons for the person surrendering the information in the first place".
The introduction of plausible deniability in encryption is actually the ultimate nightmare from an ethic perspective:
The torturer, of course, knows about plausible deniability. And of course, technically, plausible deniability is not limited to two levels (outer and inner volume), but can be performed on an arbitrary number of levels. From the torturer perspective, he has to continue to torture forever, because any passphrase revealed might not be the one for the "true" stash of information. In reality, the torturer does not stop at the first possible instance of revelation, but on the last (which will never be in this case).
Plausible deniability actually prevents the torturer from rewarding the victim for the revelation of information by ending his/her pain. Instead, plausible deniability opens the spiral of endless violence.
We also understand that people will say anything to get the torture to stop.
When the intelligence community let it be known that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad confessed to planning 9-11, the response from the public was tempered by the almost universal recognition that he had been waterboarded hundreds of times before he "confessed".
At that point, he would have confessed to killing JFK and Lincoln just to stop them from slow-motion drowning him.
I think torture should be illegal and I think the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used at Guantanamo are abhorrent. But I also think there are real-world scenarios in which torture is not only moral, but where it would be immoralnot to torture. This sounds absurd, but consider this real-life case given in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[1]: A woman's car is stolen. Unknown to the thief, her child is sleeping in the back seat. The thief discovers the baby and ditches the car. The police soon catch him at a train station. CCTV footage shows him stealing the car. It's over 100ºF out. A police officer describes the incident:
> In the police truck on the way to the police station: “Where did you leave the Hyundai?” Denial instead of dissimulation: “It wasn't me.” It was—property stolen from the car was found in his pockets. In the detectives' office: “It's been twenty minutes since you took the car—little tin box like that car—It will heat up like an oven under this sun. Another twenty minutes and the child's dead or brain damaged. Where did you dump the car?” Again: “It wasn't me.”
> Appeals to decency, to reason, to self-interest: “It's not too late; tell us where you left the car and you will only be charged with Take-and-Use. That's just a six month extension of your recognizance.” Threats: “If the child dies I will charge you with Manslaughter!” Sneering, defiant and belligerent; he made no secret of his contempt for the police. Part-way through his umpteenth, “It wasn't me”, a questioner clipped him across the ear as if he were a child, an insult calculated to bring the Islander to his feet to fight, there a body-punch elicited a roar of pain, but he fought back until he lapsed into semi-consciousness under a rain of blows. He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car.
> The police officers' statements in the prosecution brief made no mention of the beating; the location of the stolen vehicle and the infant inside it was portrayed as having been volunteered by the defendant. The defendant's counsel availed himself of this falsehood in his plea in mitigation. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage.
As much as we may wish otherwise, the answers to moral questions aren't always simple. Every time I've related this story, it has convinced my interlocutor that torture can sometimes be moral. Again, that doesn't mean it should be legal or systematized. To make an analogy with less emotional weight: theft and trespassing are illegal, but they're sometimes right. One might trespass to get someone to a hospital more quickly. Or one might steal something so it can be used for some life-saving measure. People accept these rare, one-off situations. So too it should be with torture.
It could be. But it could be true also. But just as you have stated, what if that child is your child? And for some reason you are certain that the man is indeed the thief? Would you use torture to shorten the information retrieval or not?
> …I think the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used at Guantanamo are abhorrent.
> Again, that doesn't mean [torture] should be legal or systematized.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can say it. I despise the US policy on torture.
Moreover, I don't trust any government to implement a formal policy on torture. Not even something as simple as, "If you torture someone for really good reasons and it saves lives, you might not be charged with a crime." Even that would create too much of a temptation to torture.
If you're going for utilitarian points then yes, in the story to torture and save the child causes less overall damage. The problem is (as always with utilitarian scenarios like these) that you can only know when to torture or not if you're omniscient. What happens if the guy is innocent? Or what happens if the kid is already dead or the car is too remote to reach in time no matter what you do to the criminal? (In both cases, not torturing is the more utilitarian solution, since the kid will be dead no matter what).
In this case, the police were all but certain they had the right man. There was video footage of him stealing the car. He had valuables from the car in his pockets. Likewise, the police were pretty sure the baby was still alive. It had only been 20 minutes since the car had been stolen. Based on these likelihoods, they thought beating information out of this man was worthwhile. I can't fault their judgement.
We deal with the same sort of uncertainty when sending people to prison. We accept that at some point, the likelihood of guilt is high enough to warrant imprisonment. Set this threshold too high, many criminals go free. Set this threshold too low, many innocent people go to prison. Because determining guilt or innocence is noisy, you're always going to false positives and false negatives. It's a trade-off; you pick a threshold that does the most good.
That's true. There's also the tricky business of picking what the formula for good is. In the US, false positives are heavily weighted and false negatives aren't as much. Something like Blackstone's Principle:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
I don't know of single or any other data-point in which torture yielded useful information.
Even few cases that claimed torture yielded useful information, in the end turned out that were given without any torture and those that were given were so bad, that a routine check-up could invalidate it.
Whether torture is right/wrong good/bad boils down very simply.
First, let's assume that torture works (i.e. it gives us the answers we want). If we assume it doesn't work then there's no point in torture or this debate. There will always be people who claim that torture works, so let's just assume it does indeed work excellently and 100% of the time.
Second, assume that many innocent people are falsely accused and convicted, because that is true (if you don't believe that, just look at the Innocence Project).
Third, if we know that innocent people are sometimes falsely accused and convicted, then it means it could happen to you, your parents, your children.
So now the only question you have to answer is: Are you OK with the scenario where you, an innocent and falsely accused individual, are tortured, in the interest of public safety? If you are not OK with that happening to you or your children, then you cannot support torture for anyone else either. If you are OK with that, then you have two tasks: 1) when are you volunteering as a torture subject to prove you aren't just saying that, and 2) you must convince everyone else that they should be OK with that if it happens to them (or 51% of the population in a democracy). You might succeed on 1) (doubtful) but you will fail on 2) if all of those people also have to complete task 1).
The conclusion is that it's impossible to torture without introducing a double-standard. Sure, we can do that, but that has the same logic as a law like "I can do anything I want, and you can do nothing, because I'm me and you're not me"?
Based on your statement, the correct conclusion would be that no /innocent/ person should be imprisoned, ever. (To which I agree).
Torture, like drone murders, false convictions, does and will continue to effect many, many innocent people. It's a matter of moral; is it acceptable to to torture/kill innocent people to accomplish an object or not.
Personally, I cannot for the life of me justify torture. Torture, unlike ending someone's life, is something the victim will have to live through, and possible, with, for the rest of his life.
It's disgusting to do this to any living thing, let alone a human being.
Personally, I cannot for the life of me justify imprisonment. Imprisonment, unlike ending someone's life, is something the victim will have to live through, and possible[sic], with, for the rest of his life.
note: this is not a statement of my actual beliefs, but a foil to show the error of the post I am responding to.
>Based on your statement, the correct conclusion would be that no /innocent/ person should be imprisoned, ever. (To which I agree).
But the OP was trying to extrapolate from there to "so no one should be tortuted (simply to avoid doing so to an innocent)", and that inference is what I was criticizing.
If your daughter and wife were kidnapped by 2 people and you catch one of them, would you torture him to save them? What if you learned that they are being raped every day? Would you torture him then ?
What if you knew they do this every two weeks to another family, would you do it then?
What if you caught someone that has a habit of planting bombs in schools, would you do it then ?
I don't know if torture works or it doesn't, but it's certainly a topic worth having a conversation over.
Hand them over to the police and let them deal with it - they're far better at interrogating people for information, and far better resourced for a rescue operation.
I was giving a couple of examples in reply to the "Why is this a topic of conversation?" question. It's not meant to be taken literally as a plan to save someone.
I'm just saying that it's worth having a conversation over.
Downvotes can just mean 'I disagree'. It's stupid and wrong and confuses everyone new since it ghosts the comment, but it's the sanctioned action of HN since time immemorial. The argument has been had many times before, but it's acceptable HN behaviour. If you look in my profile, you'll see a screed against the moderation system that was written about four years ago...
Basically just suck it up and don't read too much into the "I disagree"s.
Just categorizing something does not make a defeating argument. People have always been very good to twist and circumvent ethics and morality when their own gain is involved. And ethics and morality themselves change every 50 years or so.
The option to torture is always present. We must have a good reasons and framework not to do it. Ineffective is way better deterrent than immoral.
What about rape? Should it be criminalized? Is that worth a scientific study from nature?
Why is torture in a civilized society not considered like rape. Anyone who suggests, does it, debates about its merrits, should be considered a crazy idiot, ostracized and laughed at. But notice how we as a a society are debating its merits. We have already lost so speak. We lost first when our government engaged in it in large scale. But we lost again when we start excusing and explaining, even if we reach the conclusion "ok, it is not quite working as well".
Saying that something is not debatable is exactly the opposite of living in a democracy
Excluding hate speech, surely
But since you were very fast to call anyone a "crazy idiot" I can see how worried about you are about a "civilised society" instead of your personal opinions
I agree, but who determines what is a fringe idea?
I don't agree with torture, quite the contrary, but the same discussion could have been constructed in the opposite way and the fringe idea could have been that torture doesn't work (which I'm sure happened in a lot of situations)
> but the same discussion could have been constructed in the opposite way and the fringe idea could have been that torture doesn't work (which I'm sure happened in a lot of situations)
Could be, but not in this case. This is about torture. I would say living in a civilized society, a society where torture is a despicable criminal act (that is why my original comparison with rape) is more important than living in a democracy.
Doing stuff in the name of an ideology (democracy) is a also a problem. There were a lot atrocities and murders and other horrible things also committed in the names ideologies. That is, claiming things like "it's ok to engage in these things, because we live in a democracy and that is what we do in democracy". I would rather not live in a democracy but live in a country where torture is not a debatable topic to discuss for sane people.
Exactly. To put it another way, I would rather live in a civilized society that doesn't torture or considers it a valid topic for debate, than in a democracy.
If it works, some argument can be made about "the suffering of one for the greater good of the many". The common example is the terrorist that knows the location of a bomb that may kill thousands of people. Also torture is made acceptable to some by the idea that only "bad" people are tortured.
If torture doesn't work, the argument is much stronger than the humanist one and can appeal even to "us vs them" people.
Unfortunately I think the reason many governments torture is not to gather information but to frighten and control the population. Many people will refrain to rebel against authority if they fear being arrested and tortured.
>>Even if it is working, would that make it ok?
What about rape? Should it be criminalized? Is that worth a scientific study from nature?
If raping someone could potentially be used to save a lot of lives then we would have that debate. It doesn't though so. Everyone agrees that torture is bad in itself, the problem arise when not applying it would lead to even worse things happening.
If torture works it's immoral to not use it in those situations, that's why there is a debate.
> could potentially be used to save a lot of lives then we would have that debate
One can conduct various hypothetical experiments of course. Rape is used in uncivilized societies or parts of societies as punishment (by village elders), it is used by brutal violent and primitives countries as a condoned acceptable spoil of war that commanders would turn their eyes away from, or just build a comfortable quarters for it and supply a steady stream of victims (like Japanese did during WWII in China), it increases fear and makes it easier to control people (just like torture) and so on.
What would you think of a society that does it and then also starts discussion the merits of that in a scientific journal.
Instead of treating like a topic for lunatics and crazy people we are treating it like we are discussing the results of a chemical reaction, that is what I am talking about, sane people finding excuses and studying torture as a valid topic.
Admitting anything under torture just invites more torture. The IRA "green book" and despatches from the French/Algerian war confirm how worthless torture is for gathering intelligence. Bribery should be tried instead of barbarism.
The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten.
I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people.
What made the Viet Cong so bad? They tortured people.
What made the Japanese so bad? They tortured people.
What made the Germans so bad? They tortured people.
This is the whole point of the movie the Great Escape. The allied prisoners know they won't be tortured since they're in a Luftwaffe camp and not a Gestapo one. After the escape, the ones who are recaptured are handed over to the Gestapo and are executed. Even in a 1963 film set in a Nazi POW camp, it was understood that there were rules. Sic transit.
You are very clearly begging the question here; not everyone agrees that use of torture 'cedes moral high ground', or that torture made the Germans, Japanese, or North Vietnamese 'bad'.[1]
That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, but let's say a terrorist is captured and you have to put a stop to his operation. His cell will kill a hundred or so people in the next month. You don't torture him and the bomb goes off killing 243 people. A year and a half later you capture another and you have to put a stop to his operation. What do you do?
This might happen in some (arguably extremely rare) cases, but you know that's the narrative that will be used every time it will be somewhat convenient to torture someone.
And if you torture him and he doesn't really know and he just feeds you some lies just so you will stop torturing him and you follow wrong info and cannot stop the incident. But if you didn't follow his lies you might have followed some other leads and stopped the attack.
I believe this scenario is misleading because it does ignore the negative consequences of allowing torture. The way you describe it there seem to be two possible scenarios - 1. forbid torturing the terrorist and let innocent people die or 2. torture the terrorist and save innocent people. I believe this is not what happens in real life. The real decision is either 1. authorities are never allowed to torture anyone and some innocent people whose deaths could be prevented die and 2. authorities are allowed to torture terrorist suspects and they will abuse this power to achieve what they want by torturing people they know are innocent and claiming they were suspects. As someone who grew up in a totalitarian country I am inclined to believe that real 2 does more harm to society than real 1.
thr more likely scenario would be:
"...a [suspected] terrorist is captured and you have to put a stop to [an unkown but potential] operation. [a] cell [he is thought to be affiliated with may] kill a hundred or so people in the next month...."
My point is the chances that you know everything with certainty except x or y and all you need to do is torture this guy to find out x is alsmot never the case...are you ok with "we think this guy might know x, who we know is a bad guy, lets torture him to find out"
Let's for a second say it WAS the case, the proverbial ticking time bomb, do you propose tortureing innocents that may have tangential information that may prove useful but they are with holding I.e. Children, parents, siblings, friends?
Ok, so by "terrorist" I assume you mean someone who's technically innocent, because you have no proof of a crime?
By "the bomb goes off killin 243 people", you invoke hindsight. Ok, so now we're talking about how to best prevent an attack that kills 243 (or so) people, given we have a suspect in custody.
You seem to imply the answer is that our best chance of preventing the first bomb was to torture the person we at the time couldn't know was a terrorist. But maybe the best way would be to sweep for parked abandoned cars?
You do clearly illustrate why if you don't have oversight, institutions dealing with violent crime etc are likely to degenerate.
> not everyone agrees that use of torture 'cedes moral high ground'
There probably are a few assholes who don't, but to take it seriously outside the realm of a purely philosophical discussion on formal logic is something that no sane human being should even consider.
I don't care if Germans, Japanese, North Vietnamese or, for that matter, Americans were generally good or bad.
I hear this argument a lot. That situation is as unlikely as it gets. At least in my part of the world, torture is particularly discouraged as a means of gathering information during war.
Not only are prisoners likely to confess anything that will make the pain stop, but the ones inflicting it are themselves unlikely to be able to tell when the one being tortured is telling the truth.
Furthermore, even if he tells the truth (as in information that he honestly believes to be true), it's very difficult to tell if that information is of real value or just another smoke screen -- i.e. if the man you're holding was intentionally misinformed by an enemy who became aware of his imminent capture, or who simply believe the risk of capture to be very high. History is full of cases where important plans have been withheld even from unit commanders, having been shared only with the highest political and military commanders. In such cases, field units aren't left without orders -- they're given inconsequentially fake ones.
Saying "torture would be OK in situations where the information obtained could save many lives" is basically like saying "living in the Sahara would be OK during rainy days". It's theoretically possible and it's obviously hard to disagree that you can live for 24 hours in a desert where it rains, but there's a good reason why no one is rushing to live in the Sahara.
I agree with your arguments but it seems to me you are arguing for different point: that torture is bad in almost all situations and is especially bad when applied systematically. I don't think anyone reasonable are going to contest that though.
My position is that I can imagine situations where I think torture is justified even though I see those situations as very unlikely to occur and even less likely to be judged correctly. I do agree that the history doesn't inspire optimism and that systemic torture use is a problem and it's a good battle to reduce it.
You can make that statement about anything and everything. Using your standard: Not everyone agrees that the earth is a sphere, therefore any statement which assumes it is a sphere is begging the question.
>The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten.
It wasn't forgotten, it's simply not true.
I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people.
Well of course, growing up you're a child who is incredibly naive and can't understand the complexities of the world enough to know that the idea that "under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people" is just kind of dumb.
It's not a matter of moral high ground. Carpet bombing cities to weaken the morale of the ennemy would have been treated as a war crime should the allies have lost WW2. It was deleberately killing civilians. The Good Guys is usually defined as "our own side". Even today, if you place a bomb under a car it is terrorism, but if the bomb is delivered by a drone, then it's all OK...
Similarly, we often believe that it was only the Soviets that took part in the rape of German women after the third Reich fell in 1945, but there are lots of evidence to suggest that all the allied forces participated.
I'm not trying to take away the fact that the Axis forces were vicious and committed war crimes, but we have to remember that war is horrendous and has unforeseeable and negative long-term human outcomes. I wish our countries thought a bit more about this before they rush us all into such decisions using lies and deceit.
I'm not trying to minimize the excesses taken by some Allied troops but the big difference was that these excesses were just that, excesses and not policy as in the case of the Japanese forcing women into sexual slavery or giving children candy laced with Anthrax spores.
That torture doesn't work to extract information has been known anecdotally at least since the 2nd world war - read up on Hans Scharf - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
But tortute does work when your goal is oppressing large populations; instilling fear and control. This is the discussion the US ought to be having... what wa the real policy behind torture?
Not long before 9/11, a friend of mine went through SERE training. He said the main purpose of the torture techniques they used wasn't to gain information, but to make the captive say whatever the captors wished.
Then all this torture stuff came up and lo and behold, they used those same techniques from SERE (at least, what's publicly known about them), and the "information" they came up with said there were WMDs in Iraq.
(Of course, this wasn't necessarily an unintentional falsehood. It could just be that high command said "get us information on WMDs in Iraq," and special forces soldiers who'd been through SERE used the techniques they knew.)
When and where was torture used to generate theories about WMD in Iraq?
afaik it was based on the well established fact that Saddam Hussein had once possessed and used WMDs, cynicism about his stated destruction of them and circumstantial evidence that certain facilities might have still contained them.
From a quick google, it appears I misremembered somewhat. Torture evidence was used to build the case for war with Iraq, but it was about Iraq's relationship with Al Qaida, not the existence of WMDs.
Yes. If CIA would actually worry about the terrorist, then the terrorists still free would be 1. concern. They are really hard to catch, no matter how you try.
Now if you go torture route, you might get some information that is quickly getting dated. But you also validate the terrorist cause. And terrorists in hostage situations don't want to surrender, because they know they will be tortured.
If you would treat captured terrorists incredibly nicely, that would cause huge moral decay and risk of snitching to the terrorists who are still free. This is in line with Sun Tzu from few thousand years back "always reward a traitor, never trust him". Also U.S. domestic terrorism called "mafia" was best fought with witness protection program.
CIA isn't stupid. They do torture for some reason.
I think you unknowingly answered the real question: what is the purpose of torture? Almost everyone here is assuming it is to extract information and save lives with that information, but I would venture to say that is not nearly as often the case as most would like to think.
If we look at the other possible reasons, some things make sense. One thing to keep in mind is that torture is rare. The majority who end up at places like Gitmo don't get tortured (treated badly, yes, but rarely tortured). The real people who get tortured are much more likely to be at a blacksite no one knows about.
There is an interesting pattern though, I have noticed, which is the turning of targets into double agents and releasing them back in the wild.
Now, another thing to remember is The Company started MKUltra a long time ago. They have surely highly improved the mental breakdown/buildup process since then. If you stop assuming the purpose of torture is to gather information, things will make much more sense.
Also, like you said: "you validate the terrorist cause". What a useful side effect for those who seem to be invested in destabilizing certain areas of the world...
I think that's good speculation. But with bit of Hanlons Razor, that seems bit too good picture of CIA. They are not stupid, but they are still a fallible organization.
I think their priorities are: existence of CIA, genuine concern for safety of U.S., geopolitical power of U.S.
Maybe they we're really clueless. And decided to waterboard people so they would be "doing something" so they could try to justify existence of CIA. Or maybe they wanted to show to Mossad that they get to do shit too. As an intelligence saber rattling. We really don't know.
"preying upon his prisoner's fears of the infamous Gestapo". Would you say then that torture (of other people) eventually played a role in the effectiveness of his technique ?
The basis of torture is on fear and pain. This works on those who are weak and easy to break. But like other commenters said it is hard to tell lying and truth. Sometimes, the person who finally speaks the truth doesn't even know if the information he/she has is even true.
My far biggest experience with physical pain was getting big tattoo on the back, 4x4 hour sessions. (got some bones broken, but that's not the same level of pain, and body releases some calming stuff to bloodstream, so really not comparable).
Every of those 4 hours, the experience of lying on my stomach, and having a pizza-cutter running through my back here & there. The most sensitive parts are around the spine (understandable) and on the sides of back (not really sure why). The goal is not to twitch or move much, so some sort of mental self-control is necessary. First +-2 hours were cca OK, but after that, even lower amount of pain, presented with high spikes and almost constantly ate away my willpower.
After each session, I felt like a small baby, able to navigate back home and perform simple mental tasks, but severely worn off, and mentally weak. I understand this is just a glimpse from a distance to real torture, uncontrolled, when you know you can die from it, or end up disabled in most horrible weays for human being.
But it works, to some degree, on some levels. If you want to break somebody, it is one of the ways. The question is, how usable will the individual be after breaking, and your goal (get info, instill fear, or just destroy human being).
Torture works just fine if you need readily verifiable information such as the combination to a safe, pin number, etc. Not so much for general information like "give me the names of your comrades"
Man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it. (As opposed to man who says it should not be done.)
The "should" question boils down to, "How much harm can we morally inflict on some individual(s) in order to benefit others?"
Torture is the extreme end of the "harm" spectrum, but when we vote in favor of government benefits or taxes, we vote to harm some in order to benefit others.
Individuals and societies differ in how much harm is allowable and in how much benefit justifies a given amount or type of harm.
> Torture is the extreme end of the "harm" spectrum, but when we vote in favor of government benefits or taxes
Or exclusive monopolies in the form of "property rights", for that matter. A big part of the some moral theories of benefits and taxation is that they should be aligned, so far as possible, to, taken into consideration with property rights, be a mitigator of the harms due to property rights, while reducing the benefits of those who benefit the most from those rights (without making a net harm for any, and leaving the whole system as net gain for everyone, because its not zero sum.)
I think that sometimes there's another factor that gets overseen when discussing torture.
The "problem" that I believe is also tried to be addressed with torture is the view that the society that "supports torture" (via their government, even if against the opinion of most people) can't let leniency get in the way of righteous retribution against their enemies.
Imagine if someone invents a pill that is literally the "truth serum", and that the subject taking it can't lie for say an hour or so.
Would that end torture? If torture's only objective is to get information then it should.
But what if torture is really filling another role? one that is not satisfiable by information but by inflicting pain on your enemy?
I'm not defending torture by any means, and I do think it should be something that we as humanity should strive to end. But it seems like more often than not you can find people that would not defend torture, "except in cases of extreme need", i.e. when they need retribution.
It would be interesting to do some research on what victims of crime and violence, and their families, think about what it would be "fair" to do to their offenders. Maybe it turns out most won't be willing to inflict pain in others, or maybe it turns out most people are vengeful and would like to see their enemies suffer.
If the case is the latter, then I think the main problem with torture would be not as a tool to obtain information, but as a tool to inflict retribution.
What if a society that is mainly governed by people of the second kind get a hold of the ability to torture? e.g. CIA interrogators, people that sign torture orders, etc? then in their minds it would be justifiable, even if the activity doesn't yield any useful information.
If it does, then they get the information AND retribution. If they don't get truthful information then they still get retribution.
That's why I think torture is a subject so hard for officials to understand the damage it can cause. As long as they think retribution in this form is OK, then it will be very hard to end this practice.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThe scope of this is so limited to be a self fulfilling prohpesy...
And are you really arguing that torture doesn't involve the use of force?
:).
For the record, I am not sure whether torture works or is morally justified in the circumstances where it has been applied over the last 20 years, but I find this article entirely unconvincing.
This is not to say that the torture is justified in the case of a 'ticking time bomb', but it is both a possible situation, and a useful scenario to think about.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germa...
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CasStuTerTicBom
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
They are looking very hard for scenarios to justify their use of torture, and the results they have revealed (e.g. from waterboarding Al Qaeda members) aren't inspiring, so far.
It appears, for instance, that waterboarding people many times (in a few cases, 100+ times) isn't enough to keep them from lying to you.
Some might argue that the US was simply too restrained in the pain and suffering it subjected the subjects to; others might argue that the US 'tortured hard enough', but it is not possible to achieve 'better' results. Similarly, there could be a discussion of whether it was morally permissible for the US government to torture.
But if they're anywhere near an upper bound, then whether they (a well-informed first-world superpower with a huge budget and a willingness to extradite people to places like Syria where there are effectively no rules) can make torture work is very relevant.
Because if they can't, and torture is useless, then clearly the question is effectively resolved, at least in the real world. If torture is simply ineffective in real-world scenarios then the question goes away.
It's also significant to note that even though police thought it was a 'ticking bomb' situation, it actually wasn't. "But the police honestly believed X" is a real example of the 'slippery slope', that we see violated time and time again. There have been sting operations to expose the misuse of "honestly believed X" - my favourite being the guys (in Texas, from memory) who put high power heat lamps in an empty house, pointed at a christmas tree. Police helicopters illegally using FLIR noted the heat, and had an officer walk past and "smell cannabis" coming from the house, which lead to a SWAT raid. All caught on cameras positioned inside the empty house.
We already have provisions in law to allow for the very rare and unusual situations where someone is guilty of a criminal act for a good reason. Therefor the people using the mythical "ticking bomb" scenario are asking for something else.
I think we have to accept that sometimes we are, at least temporarily, operating according to ideas we can't fully justify. We have to be willing to be temporarily wrong or misguided.
Whereas whatever the hell people want to talk about with 24-esque do-or-die scenario begs dozens if not hundreds of follow up questions, all of which have one thing in common: they've nothing to do with torture as conducted by the US to date, which has taken place over the course of years in a systemic fashion in which no assurances that the people we're torturing are even involved with "the enemy" have been able to be given.
But that's a different argument entirely from "this tool can never work."
I haven't read the book, but I hope in the meantime he has worked a little to address this question. Seemed like a well meaning guy though, and maybe my memory of the talk has been eroded by the torturous years of grad school in between
It'd be nice if he studied that instead of making us assume it, though :-P
In some cases this could work. They want to find out where you hid the guns, and every time, they go and dig till you break and give them the right place, and then they do find the guns.
I agree that if what you want is some concrete information that the subject is reluctant to give up ("Where have you buried the guns I need in order to kill the rest of your family?") -- you could probably get at that via torture. I don't know if that would typically be the fastest or most reliable way to get that information (Consider, eg: Staging an escape, allowing the subject, helped by an under-cover agent, point you to said guns).
I think people get hung up on the "bomb plot theory" too much. My impression is that while such simple cases make for great TV, that's not the kind of real-world questions intelligence organizations really are concerned with. So if we say: "ok, use torture to save the children!" -- if that was taken at face value -- it means: "Disband most (all?) large-scale operations that allow torture today, such as the CIA programs."
I also think there's a bit of a hang-up on "effectiveness". If you're fighting an illegal war, kidnapping and killing people that are clearly innocent -- it's hard to accept an argument from "effectiveness". At least if there's no indication that atrocities would stop if you "won".
In politics and war The dirtiest fighter makes the rules and now that the United States tortures people, I suspect we will be "one-upped" in the next war.
So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you're pretty likely to initially withhold whatever you can. But by the time you reach an actual breaking point...well it's called that for a reason. You are in fact very unlikely to remember much of anything because of pain, shock etc. You're pretty likely to say whatever the torturer is asking to hear.
Waterboarding is torture because once water gets into your oesophagus your rational mind shuts down completely - this post (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717) pretty much summarizes it and the experience has been confirmed by everyone else who has had it done to them.
That's the point about torture being ineffective. By the time it's effective, you're dealing with someone who is pretty much going to confabulate whatever you want to hear.
It almost sounds as if you are trying to define away torture for a fringe case where it's guaranteed to be useless. This is a legalistic approach not anymore convincing than attempts to define waterboarding as "not torture".
Torture is used in the armed conflicts depressingly regularly: the corresponding clauses in Geneva Conventions for treatment of POW were added not for purely theoretic reasons. Torture is used by criminals around the world on daily basis. The reason they haven't given up after millenia of practice is that it tends to work in their unsophisticated, easily verifiable cases: getting the combination to a safe or finding where a merchant keeps their money stashed.
Anyway, torture should not be used because it's simply an abhorrent thing to do to a human being. Trying to frame it in terms of performance is damaging to the moral aspect of it, as you descend to the same inhuman cost/benefit mindset as torture proponent.
Back in the 1990s in former USSR bugrlary-torture-murders were daily occurrences. It sure as hell worked, for purposes far more simple than "frightening the opposition". Stuff much too savage for TV shows typically, like soldering iron up one's anus.
The general big fear was being burgled and tortured for money you were presumed to have had but actually didn't. I suspect this was the intent of the burglars: most any rational person would prefer to give up their money rather than being tortured with a soldering iron -- and these were heavy soldering irons used for repairing 220v home circuits (culture shock coming to the US: people didn't fix simple things like an outlet/switch failing to work, but I digress...) -- but the stories of those who didn't have money but were tortured and murdered anyway, made those who had the money (and might decide to volunteer only a portion of it) realize that the threats weren't kidding.
However, that's not the full story. I really do wonder how much the soldering iron added over simply barging into a home, demanding the money. I suspect there is also huge element of, as Orwell said in 1984, torture for the sake of torture itself (sadistic personalities amongst the criminals, rather than pure rational calculation as means to making money).
Re, TV: the soldering iron thing _did_ make it into some Russian/late Soviet movie I watched back in the 90s, not in a graphical scene, but the threat: the militisia agent -- it was stilled called that back then -- was refusing to take the reported threat seriously and was simply cracking jokes about it.... A graphical scene (albeit comedic) with a clothes iron did make into one the more famous movies of that era, ironically as something that happens in US (ah, projection!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Is_Good_on_Deribasovsk... )
That said, growing up in former USSR (Belarus, specifically), I was also surrounded by plenty of stories of partisans (anti-Nazi resistance fighters) saying nothing when questioned by the Gestapo, as well as tactics the partisans used: assume anyone can be captured or be a traitor, make any one piece of information useless by itself, and so forth. This couldn't be propaganda, as the French resistance stories I was exposed to in the US were also quite similar. I suspect resistance to giving useful information under torture when 1) one has a lot more at stake than money 2) the organization one is a part of has a choice about how to distribute the information.
Over time, these judges have been known to send people against who they only have a weak case to jail to make them talk. The state of French jails is appalling, many date from the XIX century, infested with pest, and all are overcrowded.
One could argue that this is a form of torture. Particularly for white collar crime.
This is some other thing though: police/prosecution using torture as coercion into admitting guilt. They don't really care whether it's true or not, their goal is just chalking up some bureaucratic milestone ("case closed").
Well, I prefer performance-based explanation as to why not use torture. The problem with morals is that they change. And they tend to provide a lot of backdoors. Like, it's obviously bad to torture, but what if you could save X lives by torturing one person?
With a performance-based explanation it's easy: nothing because torture won't give you reliable information and you won't save the people that way; better start thinking about some other way.
It's dishonest because high-quality research into torture is not really done on a scientifically known level (maybe governments have such knowledge), and it's nigh-impossible for any serious body of scientific evidence and insight to occur. The consequence of this is that people are free to speculate anything at all, insofar as they erect an intellectual barrier capable of thwarting an audience. Like that author did as they appeared deaf to audience questioning.
If you make an effort to reduce suffering it comes as a complete package: people quick to torture are the same people who would use Sarin on civilians. There is simply no middle ground. The concept of innocence doesn't come into play anyway. Wars are mass murders stemming from greater social and political processes; a conscript soldier guarding a fuel depot is not any more "guilty" apriori than his civilian relative.
There is more or less intellectual consensus that wars cause suffering, and attempts are made to reduce the misery. Propagating torture is not serving a good cause here. You essentially argue that a "lesser" crime is acceptable in context of a "greater" crime going on anyway. If one's going to kill the victim might rape her anyway.
Note that I am not taking any pro or contra torture position. I'm merely pointing out the moral inconsistency.
But if there is no fight occurring, and the enemy is subdued and unable to cause harm, then the situation has changed a bit, into a greyer area.
I've also met a guy who has used water-boarding in the field, and he didn't seem like a sadist. He felt pretty bad about using it, though he thought it effective and necessary.
For you and me yes. For people who believe targets are "bad people" worth killing it's noble intent.
In case of torture you can't claim that individual you torture is somehow accidentally hurt. Probsbly those people would be fine with torture if they thought hurting the tortured individual is desired outcome.
The incompetence of humans to intuitively make moral judgements is precisely why we should think rationally about morality rather than emotionally.
Of course, it's even easier for the subject to simply agree with the torturer if the torturer actually has a narrative they want agreed to, but in those case actually obtaining information was obviously never the reason for the torture in the first place...
Both of my parents were tortured, both faced it several times. My father was in prison twice and my mother was never in prison but took directly to military places. But not only they were tortured, several people from the circle of family friends were tortured too. One of them now works in a state program trying to help the people who were tortured to continue with their lifes, even if they were tortured in 1974-1980.
While the 1973 was made with support of US and brazilian governments, there was no support when the firsts arrests came. Most of people faced strong pain under different methods, including electricity, beating to almost dead, removing nails, etc... but it was only after the US experts arrived that torture became effective.
Torture is about removing will. A common practice after that was not only rape by military, but they put dogs to rape woman. They took their fingers off and put them in cells full of shit so they had to avoid the infections. Put them in really small spaces until they were lost.
This were process made by days, they didn't get into shock status, they were destroyed as human beings. When they go out, torturers didn't ask them: "hey, how do i find this person"... they just took a bunch of pictures and check the reactions. Or they put them in a car and go around the city and let them see somebody they knew.
By the way, when you reach this point you don't care about torture anymore like to try to avoiding it letting the torturer hear anything they want to hear. You are broke, you don't have will, the only thing you can wish is to be dead. You don't resist anymore.
Torture was so effective that political organizations who were fighting the dictatorship adopted the policy of when somebody is arrested, all their known people had to run and disappear in 24 hours.
Really? You have data on this? I'd love to see it.
However, there are multiple problems with your scenario.
The biggest being: what happens if the individual DOESN'T KNOW? He's going to tell you anything he can to get you to stop, and, if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place.
So, even if I concede that torture works when you know you have the right person (and I do not), the problem is that you can't distinguish whether you have the right person and whether he actually knows the information you want.
This is not true. There are many things easy to verify but difficult to discover. For example a place the money is kept in a big house.
Imagine you torture a guy to get the name of it's cell leader. You can't verify this easily. You have to capture that other guy, torture him and repeat the process. While in any of those steps you have the chance of getting false information without knowing it.
I would think most intelligence from a war zone would be of this type, i.e. hard to verify, and I think the parent was thinking along those lines as well.
You will trash subject ability to be sure about anything well before you make him cooperaive.
During torture, the stress levels must be high enough so that the subject forgets that they don't want to tell you anything important, and at that point they may not be able to recall their own name. And of course people tell intentionally inaccurate, false or otherwise misleading information to avoid further torture.
So torture may work for those who somehow ended up on the enemy side and don't actually care that much one way or another, but not people who are likely to have valuable information. Even the Nazis knew that and instead tried to convict the interrogated they are civilized, well meaning people.
Memory is state dependent. You recall things best when in a similar state to when you usually access that information. Placing someone in an extreme altered state can interfere with memory access of "normal" memories, without brain damage needing to occur.
The degree to which memory is state dependent was really brought home to me when I had a serious medical crisis some years back. The birth of my first child was very difficult and I usually have trouble remembering the details. During my medical crisis, I was in constant extreme pain for 3.5 years. During that time, I was able to remember the birth of that child with tremendous clarity after years of remembering it foggily.
You do not need to cause brain damage to interfere with mental processes like recall.
The torturer, of course, knows about plausible deniability. And of course, technically, plausible deniability is not limited to two levels (outer and inner volume), but can be performed on an arbitrary number of levels. From the torturer perspective, he has to continue to torture forever, because any passphrase revealed might not be the one for the "true" stash of information. In reality, the torturer does not stop at the first possible instance of revelation, but on the last (which will never be in this case).
Plausible deniability actually prevents the torturer from rewarding the victim for the revelation of information by ending his/her pain. Instead, plausible deniability opens the spiral of endless violence.
When the intelligence community let it be known that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad confessed to planning 9-11, the response from the public was tempered by the almost universal recognition that he had been waterboarded hundreds of times before he "confessed".
At that point, he would have confessed to killing JFK and Lincoln just to stop them from slow-motion drowning him.
A rationale for psychotherapy! (Not that there are no other benefits, of course)
> In the police truck on the way to the police station: “Where did you leave the Hyundai?” Denial instead of dissimulation: “It wasn't me.” It was—property stolen from the car was found in his pockets. In the detectives' office: “It's been twenty minutes since you took the car—little tin box like that car—It will heat up like an oven under this sun. Another twenty minutes and the child's dead or brain damaged. Where did you dump the car?” Again: “It wasn't me.”
> Appeals to decency, to reason, to self-interest: “It's not too late; tell us where you left the car and you will only be charged with Take-and-Use. That's just a six month extension of your recognizance.” Threats: “If the child dies I will charge you with Manslaughter!” Sneering, defiant and belligerent; he made no secret of his contempt for the police. Part-way through his umpteenth, “It wasn't me”, a questioner clipped him across the ear as if he were a child, an insult calculated to bring the Islander to his feet to fight, there a body-punch elicited a roar of pain, but he fought back until he lapsed into semi-consciousness under a rain of blows. He quite enjoyed handing out a bit of biffo, but now, kneeling on hands and knees in his own urine, in pain he had never known, he finally realised the beating would go on until he told the police where he had abandoned the child and the car.
> The police officers' statements in the prosecution brief made no mention of the beating; the location of the stolen vehicle and the infant inside it was portrayed as having been volunteered by the defendant. The defendant's counsel availed himself of this falsehood in his plea in mitigation. When found, the stolen child was dehydrated, too weak to cry; there were ice packs and dehydration in the casualty ward but no long-time prognosis on brain damage.
As much as we may wish otherwise, the answers to moral questions aren't always simple. Every time I've related this story, it has convinced my interlocutor that torture can sometimes be moral. Again, that doesn't mean it should be legal or systematized. To make an analogy with less emotional weight: theft and trespassing are illegal, but they're sometimes right. One might trespass to get someone to a hospital more quickly. Or one might steal something so it can be used for some life-saving measure. People accept these rare, one-off situations. So too it should be with torture.
1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/#CasStuBea
> I think torture should be illegal…
> …I think the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used at Guantanamo are abhorrent.
> Again, that doesn't mean [torture] should be legal or systematized.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can say it. I despise the US policy on torture.
Moreover, I don't trust any government to implement a formal policy on torture. Not even something as simple as, "If you torture someone for really good reasons and it saves lives, you might not be charged with a crime." Even that would create too much of a temptation to torture.
We deal with the same sort of uncertainty when sending people to prison. We accept that at some point, the likelihood of guilt is high enough to warrant imprisonment. Set this threshold too high, many criminals go free. Set this threshold too low, many innocent people go to prison. Because determining guilt or innocence is noisy, you're always going to false positives and false negatives. It's a trade-off; you pick a threshold that does the most good.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
I don't know of single or any other data-point in which torture yielded useful information.
Even few cases that claimed torture yielded useful information, in the end turned out that were given without any torture and those that were given were so bad, that a routine check-up could invalidate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeF2rzsZSU
First, let's assume that torture works (i.e. it gives us the answers we want). If we assume it doesn't work then there's no point in torture or this debate. There will always be people who claim that torture works, so let's just assume it does indeed work excellently and 100% of the time.
Second, assume that many innocent people are falsely accused and convicted, because that is true (if you don't believe that, just look at the Innocence Project).
Third, if we know that innocent people are sometimes falsely accused and convicted, then it means it could happen to you, your parents, your children.
So now the only question you have to answer is: Are you OK with the scenario where you, an innocent and falsely accused individual, are tortured, in the interest of public safety? If you are not OK with that happening to you or your children, then you cannot support torture for anyone else either. If you are OK with that, then you have two tasks: 1) when are you volunteering as a torture subject to prove you aren't just saying that, and 2) you must convince everyone else that they should be OK with that if it happens to them (or 51% of the population in a democracy). You might succeed on 1) (doubtful) but you will fail on 2) if all of those people also have to complete task 1).
The conclusion is that it's impossible to torture without introducing a double-standard. Sure, we can do that, but that has the same logic as a law like "I can do anything I want, and you can do nothing, because I'm me and you're not me"?
Therefore, no one should be imprisoned ever.
Torture, like drone murders, false convictions, does and will continue to effect many, many innocent people. It's a matter of moral; is it acceptable to to torture/kill innocent people to accomplish an object or not.
Personally, I cannot for the life of me justify torture. Torture, unlike ending someone's life, is something the victim will have to live through, and possible, with, for the rest of his life.
It's disgusting to do this to any living thing, let alone a human being.
note: this is not a statement of my actual beliefs, but a foil to show the error of the post I am responding to.
But the OP was trying to extrapolate from there to "so no one should be tortuted (simply to avoid doing so to an innocent)", and that inference is what I was criticizing.
What if you knew they do this every two weeks to another family, would you do it then?
What if you caught someone that has a habit of planting bombs in schools, would you do it then ?
I don't know if torture works or it doesn't, but it's certainly a topic worth having a conversation over.
> If your daughter and wife were kidnapped by 2 people and you catch one of them
Does this happen often to your wife and daughter? Did it happen to anyone you personally know? Or is it a movie plot you are remembering.
I'm just saying that it's worth having a conversation over.
PS: what's up with the downvotes in this thread ?
Basically just suck it up and don't read too much into the "I disagree"s.
The option to torture is always present. We must have a good reasons and framework not to do it. Ineffective is way better deterrent than immoral.
What about rape? Should it be criminalized? Is that worth a scientific study from nature?
Why is torture in a civilized society not considered like rape. Anyone who suggests, does it, debates about its merrits, should be considered a crazy idiot, ostracized and laughed at. But notice how we as a a society are debating its merits. We have already lost so speak. We lost first when our government engaged in it in large scale. But we lost again when we start excusing and explaining, even if we reach the conclusion "ok, it is not quite working as well".
Excluding hate speech, surely
But since you were very fast to call anyone a "crazy idiot" I can see how worried about you are about a "civilised society" instead of your personal opinions
I don't agree with torture, quite the contrary, but the same discussion could have been constructed in the opposite way and the fringe idea could have been that torture doesn't work (which I'm sure happened in a lot of situations)
Could be, but not in this case. This is about torture. I would say living in a civilized society, a society where torture is a despicable criminal act (that is why my original comparison with rape) is more important than living in a democracy.
Doing stuff in the name of an ideology (democracy) is a also a problem. There were a lot atrocities and murders and other horrible things also committed in the names ideologies. That is, claiming things like "it's ok to engage in these things, because we live in a democracy and that is what we do in democracy". I would rather not live in a democracy but live in a country where torture is not a debatable topic to discuss for sane people.
If torture doesn't work, the argument is much stronger than the humanist one and can appeal even to "us vs them" people.
Unfortunately I think the reason many governments torture is not to gather information but to frighten and control the population. Many people will refrain to rebel against authority if they fear being arrested and tortured.
If raping someone could potentially be used to save a lot of lives then we would have that debate. It doesn't though so. Everyone agrees that torture is bad in itself, the problem arise when not applying it would lead to even worse things happening.
If torture works it's immoral to not use it in those situations, that's why there is a debate.
One can conduct various hypothetical experiments of course. Rape is used in uncivilized societies or parts of societies as punishment (by village elders), it is used by brutal violent and primitives countries as a condoned acceptable spoil of war that commanders would turn their eyes away from, or just build a comfortable quarters for it and supply a steady stream of victims (like Japanese did during WWII in China), it increases fear and makes it easier to control people (just like torture) and so on.
What would you think of a society that does it and then also starts discussion the merits of that in a scientific journal.
Instead of treating like a topic for lunatics and crazy people we are treating it like we are discussing the results of a chemical reaction, that is what I am talking about, sane people finding excuses and studying torture as a valid topic.
I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people.
What made the Viet Cong so bad? They tortured people. What made the Japanese so bad? They tortured people. What made the Germans so bad? They tortured people.
We should never torture anyone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_a_question
Your whole argoment falls apart from whenever direction you look at it.
My point is the chances that you know everything with certainty except x or y and all you need to do is torture this guy to find out x is alsmot never the case...are you ok with "we think this guy might know x, who we know is a bad guy, lets torture him to find out"
Let's for a second say it WAS the case, the proverbial ticking time bomb, do you propose tortureing innocents that may have tangential information that may prove useful but they are with holding I.e. Children, parents, siblings, friends?
By "the bomb goes off killin 243 people", you invoke hindsight. Ok, so now we're talking about how to best prevent an attack that kills 243 (or so) people, given we have a suspect in custody.
You seem to imply the answer is that our best chance of preventing the first bomb was to torture the person we at the time couldn't know was a terrorist. But maybe the best way would be to sweep for parked abandoned cars?
You do clearly illustrate why if you don't have oversight, institutions dealing with violent crime etc are likely to degenerate.
There probably are a few assholes who don't, but to take it seriously outside the realm of a purely philosophical discussion on formal logic is something that no sane human being should even consider.
I don't care if Germans, Japanese, North Vietnamese or, for that matter, Americans were generally good or bad.
Not only are prisoners likely to confess anything that will make the pain stop, but the ones inflicting it are themselves unlikely to be able to tell when the one being tortured is telling the truth.
Furthermore, even if he tells the truth (as in information that he honestly believes to be true), it's very difficult to tell if that information is of real value or just another smoke screen -- i.e. if the man you're holding was intentionally misinformed by an enemy who became aware of his imminent capture, or who simply believe the risk of capture to be very high. History is full of cases where important plans have been withheld even from unit commanders, having been shared only with the highest political and military commanders. In such cases, field units aren't left without orders -- they're given inconsequentially fake ones.
Saying "torture would be OK in situations where the information obtained could save many lives" is basically like saying "living in the Sahara would be OK during rainy days". It's theoretically possible and it's obviously hard to disagree that you can live for 24 hours in a desert where it rains, but there's a good reason why no one is rushing to live in the Sahara.
My position is that I can imagine situations where I think torture is justified even though I see those situations as very unlikely to occur and even less likely to be judged correctly. I do agree that the history doesn't inspire optimism and that systemic torture use is a problem and it's a good battle to reduce it.
It wasn't forgotten, it's simply not true.
I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people.
Well of course, growing up you're a child who is incredibly naive and can't understand the complexities of the world enough to know that the idea that "under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people" is just kind of dumb.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_Wor...
Similarly, we often believe that it was only the Soviets that took part in the rape of German women after the third Reich fell in 1945, but there are lots of evidence to suggest that all the allied forces participated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_o...
I'm not trying to take away the fact that the Axis forces were vicious and committed war crimes, but we have to remember that war is horrendous and has unforeseeable and negative long-term human outcomes. I wish our countries thought a bit more about this before they rush us all into such decisions using lies and deceit.
But tortute does work when your goal is oppressing large populations; instilling fear and control. This is the discussion the US ought to be having... what wa the real policy behind torture?
Then all this torture stuff came up and lo and behold, they used those same techniques from SERE (at least, what's publicly known about them), and the "information" they came up with said there were WMDs in Iraq.
(Of course, this wasn't necessarily an unintentional falsehood. It could just be that high command said "get us information on WMDs in Iraq," and special forces soldiers who'd been through SERE used the techniques they knew.)
afaik it was based on the well established fact that Saddam Hussein had once possessed and used WMDs, cynicism about his stated destruction of them and circumstantial evidence that certain facilities might have still contained them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Shaykh_al-Libi
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/iraq.torture/index.ht...
Now if you go torture route, you might get some information that is quickly getting dated. But you also validate the terrorist cause. And terrorists in hostage situations don't want to surrender, because they know they will be tortured.
If you would treat captured terrorists incredibly nicely, that would cause huge moral decay and risk of snitching to the terrorists who are still free. This is in line with Sun Tzu from few thousand years back "always reward a traitor, never trust him". Also U.S. domestic terrorism called "mafia" was best fought with witness protection program.
CIA isn't stupid. They do torture for some reason.
If we look at the other possible reasons, some things make sense. One thing to keep in mind is that torture is rare. The majority who end up at places like Gitmo don't get tortured (treated badly, yes, but rarely tortured). The real people who get tortured are much more likely to be at a blacksite no one knows about.
There is an interesting pattern though, I have noticed, which is the turning of targets into double agents and releasing them back in the wild.
Now, another thing to remember is The Company started MKUltra a long time ago. They have surely highly improved the mental breakdown/buildup process since then. If you stop assuming the purpose of torture is to gather information, things will make much more sense.
Also, like you said: "you validate the terrorist cause". What a useful side effect for those who seem to be invested in destabilizing certain areas of the world...
I think their priorities are: existence of CIA, genuine concern for safety of U.S., geopolitical power of U.S.
Maybe they we're really clueless. And decided to waterboard people so they would be "doing something" so they could try to justify existence of CIA. Or maybe they wanted to show to Mossad that they get to do shit too. As an intelligence saber rattling. We really don't know.
Every of those 4 hours, the experience of lying on my stomach, and having a pizza-cutter running through my back here & there. The most sensitive parts are around the spine (understandable) and on the sides of back (not really sure why). The goal is not to twitch or move much, so some sort of mental self-control is necessary. First +-2 hours were cca OK, but after that, even lower amount of pain, presented with high spikes and almost constantly ate away my willpower.
After each session, I felt like a small baby, able to navigate back home and perform simple mental tasks, but severely worn off, and mentally weak. I understand this is just a glimpse from a distance to real torture, uncontrolled, when you know you can die from it, or end up disabled in most horrible weays for human being.
But it works, to some degree, on some levels. If you want to break somebody, it is one of the ways. The question is, how usable will the individual be after breaking, and your goal (get info, instill fear, or just destroy human being).
The "should" question boils down to, "How much harm can we morally inflict on some individual(s) in order to benefit others?"
Torture is the extreme end of the "harm" spectrum, but when we vote in favor of government benefits or taxes, we vote to harm some in order to benefit others.
Individuals and societies differ in how much harm is allowable and in how much benefit justifies a given amount or type of harm.
Or exclusive monopolies in the form of "property rights", for that matter. A big part of the some moral theories of benefits and taxation is that they should be aligned, so far as possible, to, taken into consideration with property rights, be a mitigator of the harms due to property rights, while reducing the benefits of those who benefit the most from those rights (without making a net harm for any, and leaving the whole system as net gain for everyone, because its not zero sum.)
The "problem" that I believe is also tried to be addressed with torture is the view that the society that "supports torture" (via their government, even if against the opinion of most people) can't let leniency get in the way of righteous retribution against their enemies.
Imagine if someone invents a pill that is literally the "truth serum", and that the subject taking it can't lie for say an hour or so.
Would that end torture? If torture's only objective is to get information then it should.
But what if torture is really filling another role? one that is not satisfiable by information but by inflicting pain on your enemy?
I'm not defending torture by any means, and I do think it should be something that we as humanity should strive to end. But it seems like more often than not you can find people that would not defend torture, "except in cases of extreme need", i.e. when they need retribution.
It would be interesting to do some research on what victims of crime and violence, and their families, think about what it would be "fair" to do to their offenders. Maybe it turns out most won't be willing to inflict pain in others, or maybe it turns out most people are vengeful and would like to see their enemies suffer.
If the case is the latter, then I think the main problem with torture would be not as a tool to obtain information, but as a tool to inflict retribution.
What if a society that is mainly governed by people of the second kind get a hold of the ability to torture? e.g. CIA interrogators, people that sign torture orders, etc? then in their minds it would be justifiable, even if the activity doesn't yield any useful information.
If it does, then they get the information AND retribution. If they don't get truthful information then they still get retribution.
That's why I think torture is a subject so hard for officials to understand the damage it can cause. As long as they think retribution in this form is OK, then it will be very hard to end this practice.