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Comment by dror | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

Usually you ask for verifyable information. CIA officers do not need to be reminded what a lie is.

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".

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