I think if I WERE to start torturing people, I’d have to start with those people who thought it was OK to torture people.
As for expecting lies from people you’re torturing….DUH. You expect lies no matter HOW you interrogate someone. That accusation makes me think you didn’t bother to read the article I linked to. This is not a problem of a “very bad interrogator”...it’s a problem in that most people are no better at spotting lies than they would be if they just guessed yes or no, and police and interrogators often fare worse than laypeople in this respect. From the article:
For about 40 years, psychologists have been testing police officers as well as normal people to see whether they can spot lies, and the results aren’t encouraging. Ordinary folk have an accuracy rate of about 57 percent, which is pretty poor considering that 50 percent is the flip of a coin. Likewise, the cops’ accuracy rates fall between 45 percent and 65 percent—that is, sometimes less accurate than a coin toss.
Why does this matter? Because even if torturers break a person, they have to recognize it, and most of the time they can’t. Torturers assume too much and reject what doesn’t fit their assumptions. For instance, Sheila Cassidy, a British physician, cracked under electric-shock torture by the Chilean secret service in the 1970s and identified priests who had helped the country’s socialist opposition. But her devout interrogators couldn’t believe that priests would ever help the socialists, so they tortured her for another week until they finally became convinced. By that time, she was so damaged that she couldn’t remember the location of the safe house.
In fact, most torturers are nowhere near as well trained for interrogation as police are. Torturers are usually chosen because they’ve endured hardship and pain, fought with courage, kept secrets, held the right beliefs and earned a reputation as trustworthy and loyal. They often rely on folklore about what lying behavior looks like—shifty eyes, sweaty palms and so on. And, not surprisingly, they make a lot of mistakes.
The problem is this. Look at Gitmo. Out of 775 prisoners, 420 were released without charge and another 80 will probably be let go. That means 500 out of 775 were people who were not of any value, didn’t do anything wrong, were essentially gathered up incorrectly. Of the remaining 275 who have been or will be charged with crimes, certainly not all of them had a great deal of useful information about high value targets In other words, if you tortured all of these prisoners, at least 2 out of 3, and probably more like 9 out of 10 would have no valuable information for you. But 100% of them would tell you something, anything, to get you to stop fucking torturing them. That means 90% of your information would be shit.
Now I can hear your mental gymnastics from here, “But they DIDN’T torture EVERYBODY, just the HIGH VALUE suspects.” OK, but if we’re so great that we can determine who’s guilty BEFORE we even interrogate them, why are we rounding up 2 innocents to every one guilty suspect? Hell, not even 2 innocents to every one guilty person, 2 people who were released without charge to every person who stands trial! Surely we won’t get a 100% conviction rate! Face it, knowing who has the information is guesswork. You are BOUND to get some people who have nothing of value to tell you, and yet, we’re starting from an assumption that it’s OK to torture the few people we are going to torture because they WILL have valid information. You’ve already prejudged that what they tell you will NOT be a lie if you torture them. It’s a recipe for BAD intelligence.
Now yes, they’re not stupid enough to believe in all the lies, but they’re going to have to take time investigating each piece of information they get. Therefore, they’d be wasting 90% of the time they could spent on actually protecting us if they tortured everyone! The actual amount of time wasted is certainly less, but still logic dictates that doing this actually makes us LESS safe. Add to it that if the interrogator does not know when to stop, does not know when the lies stop and the truth begins, the person could be too damaged to be of ANY use. Consider that if they didn’t torture, yes, they’d still get lies, but most of that crap from those who were tortured who had nothing to offer would be gone, the lies would be much easier and faster to sort through, and we’d be able to take action on the good information all the more quickly, and we’d have people who were still of value to us, rather than humans who were completely ruined, used up and no longer of any value to us.
And again, look at the article as to how effective torture is as an information gathering tool After describing in detail how even the Nazi Gestapo had little success with torture compared to other methods of intelligence gathering it points out this historical perspective:
…between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals. Torture was legal back then, and the records document such practices as the bone-crushing use of splints, pumping stomachs with water until they swelled and pouring boiling oil on the feet. But the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse (an exceptional high). Most of the time, the torturers were unable to get any statement whatsoever.
And such examples could be multiplied. The Japanese fascists, no strangers to torture, said it best in their field manual, which was found in Burma during World War II: They described torture as the clumsiest possible method of gathering intelligence. Like most sensible torturers, they preferred to use torture for intimidation, not information.
As one of the pro-torture voices on this thread pointed out, waterboarding is a “mild” form of torture, and though I consider no torture to be mild, I have to agree that it’s at least less damaging in terms of permanence than the methods used by the French in the 18th century, and yet even methods FAR more severe than what we’re arguing about here produced almost no actionable intelligence. It would seem that the only “VERY BAD interrogators” are the ones who rely on strong-arm tactics which have been proven ineffective throughout history, which are brutal and inhumane, which leave people stripped of every defense they’ve built over their entire lives, every social construct, every self protection mechanism, leaving them mentally no more than a frightened animal cowering in the corner, rather than relying on psychological tactics which are much harder to master, but which produce better results 100% of the time, at a fraction of the cost to one’s humanity.
And don’t lose the perspective of why many of our enemies are our enemies in the first place. They believe that Americans are a bunch of fucking hypocrites who do what they want wherever they want in the world without regard to how it impacts others. The whole fucking reason Al Quaeda came after us in the first place is that we went into Afghanistan in the late 80s to push back the Russian invasion when it suited our purposes, but when we got what WE wanted, we showed that we didn’t give fuck all for the people there, it was all about how it affected US, so we dropped the ball and left the rebuilding to guys like Bin Laden…who then saw us become all interested in the sovereignty of Kuwait in ‘91 when our gas prices started to go up, but ignore the genocide in Rwanda. They see pictures of our top guys shaking hands with Saddam in the 80s, selling him weapons, then when he threatens our oil supply, he becomes our enemy. So, guys like that who think (not necessarily incorrectly I might add), that the American government is full of fucking hypocrites who say one thing but do another, and think we are therefore evil and should be destroyed….you REALLY think it’s going to make us any less of a target for the fucks when we say that America takes the moral high road and believes in the concept of innocent until proven guilty, and writes into its Constitution that cruel and inhuman treatment is a no-no, then decides that we’re just not going to apply those same standards to the rest of the world?
That is antithetical to what America has always stood for, it’s NOT OK, and any justifications you can make for it are nothing more than your overinflated sense of self worth telling you that you’re better than the other people on this planet. FUCK THAT. You have NOT proven that torturing people makes us any safer than not torturing people, there is NO WAY to make that OK, no matter how much you want to believe that you’re just doing it all out of self defense and the noblest of intentions…it’s a lie, you’re lying to yourself if you believe that…it doesn’t work any better than other methods we have, it never has, it never will, it’s a primitive tool that needs to be relegated to the trash heap of history, it’s a lazy shortcut taken by those who believe in brawn over brains, and it is incontrovertibly wrong by any reasonable standard, PERIOD.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
