Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation
nature.com
nature.com
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
A rationale for psychotherapy! (Not that there are no other benefits, of course)
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
:).
> 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.
> 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.