Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

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Because most people believe torture works. They believe we shouldn't do it because it's "bad", rather then the reality which is that it's ineffective at information extraction.

Same problem with WMDs: people tend to think there's just tons of chemical and biological weapons which would definitely immediately win wars, and we don't use them because for some reason dying by a bullet is "better" then dying nearly instantly from nerve gas - like that makes a difference.

The reality, again, is that they don't actually work (specifically: they are ineffective against military forces in achieving military objectives, but very effective against civilians who are unlikely to have counter-measures on hand and/or too uncontrollable to be create a useful strategic advantage).

EDIT: Like to drive the point home, in Zero Dark Thirty - which the CIA got to consult on - the line is that a prisoner broke under enhanced interrogation...and while it's true Bin Laden was located by intelligence from a prisoner who was tortured...they didn't get the intelligence from the torture. All the information which was useful was found by regular interrogation before they tortured them.

> Because most people believe torture works. They believe we shouldn't do it because it's "bad", rather then the reality which is that it's ineffective at information extraction.

I think most of those people believe torture works AND is also justified to prevent "greater evil", because that's how it is being presented repeatedly in media.

It's still a quite popular trope in TV series that the protagonists "were forced to take drastic actions" to prevent "the bad people" from executing their plan.

They sometimes feel torn about doing it, but in the end it is portrayed as necessary and effective in stopping whatever threat...

There's only a few media depictions subverting this, like Unthinkable (2010).

taken (2008) liam neeson's character tortures and kills the man who had abducted his daughter.

I see this "torture doesn't work" claim around sometimes and personally I have a hard time accepting it. If you ask me something I don't want to tell you, I won't tell you. But you start tearing out nails (or even threaten to do so) I'll spill all the damn beans I can to make you stop.

The argument being made is that once people are tearing out nails you’d tell them you’re the Easter bunny if you believe that that’ll make them stop.

You’d tell them that you’re guilty even though you are innocent because you’d want the pain to stop.

That’s why people say that confessions gained via torture are not reliable.

"Come on. We already know you're the Easter Bunny, your friend next door already confirmed it. All this can stop immediately, we just need you to admit it and tell us how you did it"

Confessions, sure. But what about location of military bases? Obviously torturing people to make them admit to crimes is just horrible, and sure torture in general is pretty horrible.

But if you capture a soldier and want to know where his friends are, what their plans are etc it's probably worth a shot. You can often verify information and ask followup questions etc. I'm not saying it's the moral thing to do, I'm just saying I think it'd have a non-zero success rate. Maybe even a pretty high success rate. And honestly if I was Ukrainian I'm not sure I'd have any moral obligations to torturing some Russians either. As far as I'm concerned when a nation attacks another they forfeit any kind of human rights. If they wanted to stay safe they could have stayed home.

If you torture the soldier, at best he is providing you the information you can verify and nothing else. At worst he is providing you incomplete/wrong verifiable information. There are only limited studies on this, but consensus of intelligence experts is that it is an ineffective method

In contrast, if you convince the subject to give up information voluntarily, it may provide you not only the location of the military base, but also much more valuable information about the base and its content, and information you didn't know to ask for.

Now imagine you have no beans to spill, I don't believe you and you still want to make me stop...

Sure, you have to verify information.

There are better means to retrieve verifiable information.

Both the interrogator and the subject know which information is verifiable and which is not, torture doesn't create a reliable source of information.

> The reality, again, is that they don't actually work (specifically: they are ineffective against military forces in achieving military objectives, but very effective against civilians who are unlikely to have counter-measures on hand and/or too uncontrollable to be create a useful strategic advantage).

Chemical weapons absolutely work - if you are the first mover, that is. In France, even a century after WW1, many of the notorious battle fields that saw immense use of chemical weapons and hundreds of thousands of deaths are "zone rouge" [1], completely unsuitable for human activity, to this very day. And there's enough stuff that can't be filtered even by the best gas masks... irritants that are so strong they force enemy soldiers to take off their masks, even while knowing that they'll die from the other toxins in the air.

They only got banned because no one wanted to see a repeat of WW1... but human memory is short and now, as there's barely anyone alive from that time any more, we're seeing an erosion of the standards. Something like Assad using chemical weapons against his population should have warranted an immediate and complete invasion of the country and a prosecution of everyone involved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge

But you just explained exactly the problem: they work as a first strike. They work as a "surprise we're doing it". But they don't create a tactical military advantage...however they will absolutely massacre nearby civilian populations and non-combatants.

Zone Rouge isn't full of chemical shells, it's full of everything - just general unexploded ordnance. Chemical shells in WW1 also did not cause "hundreds of thousands of deaths" - the highest estimate is about 90,000 deaths and 1.3 million casualties[1]

Same story with the use of chemical irritants: while they worked on the gas masks of the time, they don't work today and they weren't particular efficacious. And you've identified again, the obvious problem: clouds of chemical gas in the air will affect your own troops just as much as the enemy.

Which loops around to the basic problem: two military's can have a fun chemical weapon exchange on the battlefield, and accomplish basically nothing when properly equipped: with appropriate counter-measures the shells don't do anything, they leave people, equipment and fortifications intact.

But the wounded? Nearby civilians? Anyone downwind who wasn't properly informed friendly forces are deploying chemical weapons? The weather changing unexpectedly? They're all going to be wounded or die from that. They are tactically ineffective compared to conventional weapons versus any force prepared to face them, and they are sufficiently easily produced that they do not represent a substantial advantage. Not to mention other basic problems - like your own munitions stores now not just exploding, but exploding and releasing a fast moving, possibly persistent toxin - or worse, being damaged and slowly leaking your VX nerve gas into a cloud which takes out your logistics base and the frontline guys rotating back, and then leaves all your stores intact for the enemy to retrieve when they turn up later and it's dissipated.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2376985/

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