People are tortured in the US all the time. All the time.
Ordinary prisons are well-known example, where one can be subject to solitary confinement, denial of medical care, subjection to temperature extremes, beatings, and rape so common that it's the subject of the most common prison-related jokes.
Military recruits are often tortured to "toughen them up", as punishment, or ostensibly to prepare them for possible torture at the hands of "The Enemy".
Hazings at colleges and universities are often effectively torture.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. It use to be that drill instructors/MTI can hit you. Not anymore. The worse they can do to you is yell in your face and give you a spit shower. They're even required to give you 8 hours of sleep except in special cases. There are many other rules as well and these rules are a big deal these days.
One of my passengers got 'ordinarily-renditioned' [0] to the county jail. They let her go after a few hours, when the city cops found someone else who actually matched the description of the petty beer thief they were looking for.
[0] http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-se...
Last month I learned (via facebook) that another of my passengers got arrested (outstanding warrant - he'd missed a court date 2.5 years ago), and is suffering in jail. He's a diabetic, and has to submit to the time-release insulin injection they think he needs or they send him to solitary... I think time-release insulin is probably quite harmful when combined with the jail's starvation diet.
It seems to only take a handful of people to start a government-racket. Thereafter they seem to basically keep themselves going, and it takes acts of heroism to shut them down.
This did not go well in Nurenberg.
No one has been convicted for fire bombing dresden, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki - or the fire bombing campaigns in Japan. No one has been convicted over nan king. No one (afaik) have been convicted of us support for the coup in Chile.
There's atrocities to go around, only the weak at the international levek gets prosecuted.
And while it didn't "go well" in neurnberg - it certainly helped nazi Germany meet many milestones.
You'd be surprised how many people condone and support it. Even people who on the surface would be opposed to it, they'd vote against if presented in elections. If it happened in the next town over, they might call the politicians. But if they have a way of denying that it is happening at all, they'd be happy to not ask questions and turn the other way.
Also, if you have enough statistical data on torture methods, you can have a probability that a person doesn’t know something based on how long they’ve been actively tortured.
You don't even have to go into physical torture: recent history is filled with cases where people confessed to crimes under police interrogation, only to have iron-clad evidence show up that they couldn't possibly be responsible.
The most effective technique is befriending the suspect, doing nice things for them, then allowing the natural human tendency to reciprocate (and a desire for positive social interactions) work for you. It takes time but gets you much more reliable information - and much more extensive information.
I, actually, have nothing I can say to that.
Are you listening to yourself?
Let's be clear, torture is an unpleasant technique and should only be an absolute last resort when everything else has failed, but it's far better to be tortured by people who know what they're doing and are only trying to get information out of you, than by people whose goal is simply to hurt you (often for no reason and with no stopping point).
Is it OK to go for 10+ nines, as long as our goal isn't to inflict pain -- and despite the fact that we are indeed inflicting pain, mentally and/or physically?
Just for the sake of argument, let's say that 99.99% can be accomplished in 24 hours of pain infliction (torture) -- and let's say you'll get to 6 nines in 168 hours (7 days).
Oh come on, who am I kidding -- as much as I appreciate the discourse, I can't even fathom or given consideration to it actually being something that can be realistically reasoned about in this way. =\
What's a myth, that torture doesn't work? Imma need a citation on that one, because I've got stacks of 'em to the contrary.
Some won't, but saying "torture doesn't work" as a blanket statement implies that they all have infinite pain tolerance.
A more believable amoral/utilitarian argument against torture is that there will always be a more effective method than torture available. That's probably also wrong, but at least it's not so obviously wrong on its face.
The problem with the argument is that if a would-be torturer finds evidence that torture is the most effective method in some circumstance, they will feel vindicated in using it. I think a better argument is "regardless of effectiveness, anyone crossing this line is a dangerous and despicable person, and shall be prosecuted."
How many people that get tortured actually know anything?
If you're getting "verifiable" facts, you didn't need to torture him/her in the first place... you were just being lazy in your reconnaissance.
That almost seems worse - torturing someone to make sure they don't know anything is akin to punishing someone to make sure they are innocent.
For example, suppose you're heading an FBI group, and you've got a suicidal terrorist in custody who is part of a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA. You have excellent evidence this guy is involved, and that the terrorists probably have a nuclear bomb in the country, and, if they realize their coconspirator has been captured, they are likely to detonate immediately.
The terrorist demands to see his lawyer. Your specialists say you should deny that request, because his lawyer may signal, intentionally or otherwise, the other terrorists. Should you allow the terrorist to meet with his lawyer?
Our society's laws say he should be able to see his lawyer. We value that kind of thing. And yet, if you would risk millions of lives to protect this right... Well, that seems perverse to me.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists a real life example along the lines of my hypothetical one. In this example, a child is stuck in a hot car that is parked in a spot known only to the in custody car thief who is refusing to talk. The police proceed to beat the thief until he talks and save the child's life. This is straightforward example of when pragmatism must overrule idealism.
The purpose of my example was to create a situation where it should be obvious the right move is to go against idealism. The reason is, if your starting point is something like "We must never deny people their rights" I'd like to show you an extreme example where, actually, we must. If you can agree on the extreme example, then the discussion becomes a matter of degree - i.e. when is it okay to deny people their rights versus when it is not. This is actually the more nuanced and realistic discussion that has applicability to the real world.
(edit: now I notice it was written by an Australian)
Before you know it you're torturing people, gassing them or doing other unspeakable things to them because you've worked out some kind of equation where your predicted outcome justifies your horrible actions.
Values only matter when there is a price attached to them, it is very easy to have high standards for morality when they are essentially free.