Does torture work well as an interrogation technique?
skeptics.stackexchange.com
skeptics.stackexchange.com
Ethical reasons about basic human rights and cruelty should really be enough of a reason to never allow torture. It is also a completely stupid tactic, for reasons you would expect the military and and intelligence communities to understand: using torture escalates the conflict. You don't do it for the same reason chemical weapons are a bad idea: it invites the enemy to do the same in return.
Are you sure about that? Torture is ineffective: the intelligence you get is very likely to either confirm (incorrect) biases you already have, and failing that to lead you to new and incorrect wrong conclusions. Even if the fate of the world depended on it, resorting to torture is - at best - a gamble with very long odds. Aside from the ethical concerns, the main issue with torture from an intelligence perspective is that it usually makes the problem worse. It makes you stupider, not smarter (assuming you are actually doing torture to obtain real, actionable intelligence).
But what if it were effective? What if doing torture on a single individual was provably likely to make you 10% more effective at your job, and your job at the moment happens to involve trying to save a million lives? Don't get me wrong, I fucking hated 24 for the way it glamorized torture - it would be disgusting for doing that even if torture were effective. But if torture were effective it seems like you could build some utilitarian calculus around when to use it, and that sometimes it would be a good idea to do it.
So why don't we use them? Why are certain types of bio/chem/nuclear weaponry considered to be generally banned internationally? Why are they seen in such a poor light the use of e.g. sarin gas by a country can create a multi-national scandal with sanctions, UN observers, and even military threats?
My point, which you seem to have missed, is that that effectiveness for intelligence is not the question that should be asked, as it ignores the rest of the effects that happen when you torture (or use nuclear weapons, or VX, ...). Reputation matters. PR matters. In a conflict, these concepts are especially important because escalation matters. Bringing out a gun in a knife fight might win you the current battle, but it practically guarantees that the next battle will be fought with guns from the start.
You should probably look up the history of what we did to the Japanese when they tortured Allied soldiers in WW2. A major goal about not torturing people is that we don't want our current soldiers to have to face similar treatment. Torturing (or otherwise escalating conflicts) increases risk to our soldiers.
Not asking that question, and mentioning the answer, is just going to make your argument weaker either way: if it is effective you'll be ignoring a strength in your opponent's position, and if it isn't effective you'll be ignoring one of your own strengths.
Given the objective evidence that this is not reliable as an interrogation technique, why was it done?
I find it difficult to believe that US military brass are ignorant or stupid. These people spend their lives studying strategy, intelligence, etc. When educated and intelligent experts suggest or do incredibly irrational things, I often wonder if there isn't some other reason that is not being publicly stated or discussed. In other words, do these irrational things become rational when viewed from a different perspective?
A somewhat cynical answer I've encountered is: it was done to deliberately foment anti-American sentiment based on a "fight them over there, not here" and/or "shake the tree" theory of operation.
A significantly more cynical answer I've encountered: the US defense establishment is an enormous make-work program and requires a constant supply of enemies to justify its budgets. By this reasoning ISIS would be an example of a successful result of this program -- a long-term enemy against which we can fight a low-grade war for a decade or more.
Of course I suppose I may be wrong. My assumption here is that educated and intelligent experts will behave rationally. This assumption actually underlies quite a bit of so-called "conspiracy theory" -- the reasoning process goes "elite leaders of business and government act like idiots, but they're not idiots, so therefore there must be a big nefarious conspiracy or hidden agenda!"
But maybe they are idiots -- or at least are behaving very irrationally due to emotional or ideological drives or bad information. As the saying goes: conspiracy theory is actually optimistic. It assumes that human beings are rational, resourceful, organized, and in control of the situation. The other possibility is significantly more pessimistic: the world is run by delusional ideologues and "peter principle" apparatchiks who really are that foolish.
I think there is a simpler answer: basic human nature, in the form of "alpha male"-style dominance displays, tribalism and the instincts/"folk wisdom" associated with it, and even - in some cases - plain sadism. The movie "Dr. Strangelove" was basically an exploration of these behaviors.
On top of that, add in the well-known source of bias and limited thinking "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". (Or for the HN crowd, "When all you know is SQL, every problem looks like it needs a database.") We should not be surprised when the people we train to use violence as a means to an end end up suggesting violence as a solution to other problems.
the US defense establishment is an enormous make-work program and requires a constant supply of enemies to justify its budgets.
The Communists where mostly gone by 2001 - the few left were either laughingstocks or Chinese. The Peace Dividend was a disaster for US "deep state" people and corporations. They latched on to the first easy boogeyman they could, Osama bin Laden. Notice that since Al Queada has effectively been droned out of existence, the emphasis has shifted to ISIS/ISIL, with Iran in the batter's box.
Terrorism has been immensely good for the US Deep State and defense contractors. I don't expect it to go away easily or quickly, cause, heck, it's more profitable than Communism.
We know that terrorist attacks on US soil stopped, but it might not be due to torture getting information, it may be due to the fact that terrorists use social networks and our military was able to obtain the info in the Middle-East when raiding terrorist buildings and recovering computer equipment. They could have just data mined social network accounts used by terrorists and gotten the data off hard drives with lists of bank accounts and people who are being paid to do terrorist attacks.
I think when the Obama administration killed Osama bin Laden they raided his hard drives from his servers and computers and got a lot of information off of them. More than one could get from torture. So there are other methods of getting information that are more effective than torture.
We also have the NSA Metadata program and Prism system of collecting information. While many consider it a violation of rights and privacy, it might have collected a lot of information used to prevent terrorist attacks.
Still these methods are unpopular with the people, torture, domestic spying, etc.
Except they didn't. At most, they shifted from organized plots (like that of 9/11) to less-organized events (like that of the Boston Marathon bombing).
They weren't organized by terrorist networks but they were terrorism.