Comment by QAPereo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by QAPereo | Hacker News Reader

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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/13/the-scientists-...

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674743908

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/science-shows-torture-doe...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/scientists-trump-tort...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jip.1412/abstract

That is just a smattering of evidence for torture not working, and alternatives working. Can you similarly support your claim that, “...It [torture] probably does work” in the meantime? AFAIK no evidence of the success of torture exists, in the advertised contexts. Now, if you want to put on some show trials and can afford to lose half or more of your potential subjects at random, and you want to break them... sure. The USSR proved that much, but that is not how modern democracies use torture. Torture for the sake of interrogation does not work; the evidence to support that claim does exist.

I’d recommmend Torture and Democracy for the bibliography, never mind the excellent book.

I think you're arguing at cross-purposes, slightly.

RcouF1uZ4gsC said torture works in cases where you want to extract information that you can immediately verify, like a password. This seems... plausible, insofar as you can know whether you have obtained true information.

Your arguments seem more focused on complex intelligence. If you want to know things like "what's a list of people involved in terrorist-organization-X?" then that's a lot harder to verify immediately, so lying to make the torture stop becomes far more viable as a counter-tactic.

I would imagine that the latter case represents far more actual interrogation scenarios. The contrived "I want to know X and immediately verify it" is a very unlikely 24-ish scenario... but it's also the one where the moral argument against it is the better one.

I understand what you’re saying, however the only justification that is used for torture in modern Weatern states, is the procurement of time sensitive information. The prime example which comes up over and over is the Gestapo interrogating French resistance. The Gestapo realized that they had 24 to 48 hours to get information worth acting on. After that the organization would restructure to accommodate the loss of the member and their information.

It does not work. Over and over again people were willing to hold out for as long as it took, or they gave bad information, or they broke but had been given bad information themselves just in case. The result is that the Nazis had to continually treat every break in intelligence as suspect, run down every suspect, and of course that took too much time. You also can’t torture people in some kind of magical and unlimited way, torture takes time too.

The result is the torture just doesn’t work as well as the alternatives, some of which can work very quickly. Worst torture makes people lazy and unprofessional that laziness and unprofessional conduct spreads to the organization. The kind of people who could be skilled and practiced torturers make poor policemen, intelligence officers, and soldiers.

This argument is much more fully and cogently made in the book Torture and Democracy, and there has the benefit of being fully cited. The bottom line however is that for whatever use you could think to put torture to, they would be another tool with a better success rate. Torture is not a science, and the results are predictably poor compared to scientific approaches to interrogation.

My example is Batman

And he uses fear, not torture

Seriously?

Nope

There's a practical/moral argument: having the moral high ground gives you soft power to wield. And that's probably worth more than any benefit torture would give. (As an example, in WWII the Brits managed to turn every single last spy the Germans sent. Torture was not necessary, and would have even had the opposite effect.)

(Of course, you could try to only torture in secret to protect your reputation. But that's a very fragile state of affairs, and even more damaging when uncovered.)

Simulated phone interviews with volunteer participants? British police being aggressive short of torture?

These all assume we can learn something about torture by studying interviewers that are a bit standoffish. Some might not find that compelling, despite the editorialized headlines.

Regardless, effectiveness still seems like a red herring to me. Why not just focus on morality?

Morality is complicated and relative across cultures, efficacy is not. Efficacy can be demonstrated, or not, in an empirical manner.

Fair point.

I found Brennan's memo fascinating. He says there were clear intel gains from EIT, but...

I was initially tempted to dismiss him as protecting his agency or preserving some authority, but the memo subtly trashes the agency, and more explicitly argues it should never use these techniques again due to ethical considerations.

Congress counters there were other ways to learn the info, but doesn't dispute there was actionable intel gained. (And, sure, there's always another way to learn anything in hindsight.)

As a compromise on efficacy, I could be convinced that, despite rare successes, almost no one knows how to do this effectively, so no one should.

Not quite as satisfyingly general, but a start.

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