I’ve argued many, many times that torture can work. (not that it always does, or even usually does) but that lots of people will spill the beans at some point when torture begins (if the person actually knows somthing.)
There are documented cases of resistance fighters toturing algerian bombmaker- and saving civilians because of it. Allegedly soldiers watched their officers or whatever, torture people and get information. John Mccain was tortured and gave information (non critical twice).
Whether torture is okay or not is another matter. Does anyone seriously think that if a person has information that they still won’t give it consistantly? (i’ll support my statements that it works or at least can work very well if theres anyone who questions that).
A lot of people I know in person seem to think it can enver work except in the movies.
Vietcong have given up information on vietnamese, which could have probably lead to the death of civilians and maybe even family members. The point is the torturer might be able to convince you that they’re not going to harm them or whatever, after days and days of torture and without food, people can become delerious and give information they don’t even know they’re babbling about.
Its easy to say “I wouldn’t give X name” its not so easy to not give X name, when you’re being beaten so badly its hard to even remember who those people are.
(I’m not saying no man can resist torture) but its probably that most men are willing to give up some information of use if they know it.
Not to mention injecting you with shit that fucks you’re mind up.
The problem with torture isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it isn’t reliable. If you are torturing a person correctly, they will say anything to get the torture to stop. If they have the information, they will spill it. But if they don’t, they will spill it to and make something up. The problem is that when you get them to the point where they will spill the real information they are also at the point where they will spill false information, so what you get is a mish-mash of reality and fabrications and separating them is neigh on impossible.
That makes torture both an unreliable and inefficient process. Since the argument for torture is by-and-large an argument from expediency, I think it fails on its own merits. After all, one would hope an expedient measure would at least be inefficient and hopefully it would be accurate. Torture is neither. That doesn’t mean it can’t work, just that it doesn’t work very well.
It’s not quite praying for rain on a cloudy day, but it is close.
It can work well enough that in practice in can save lives (algerian bomb-maker) I see your point, but, theres people who can obviously sort out to some degree, truth/fiction. When someone lays a blade on someone else and only decides to stop cutting when he’s given information that leads him to a bomb meant for civilians, theres a very very good chance that he ignored a lot of talk to do it.
Some people are good at what they do. Some can sort b etween truth/falsehoods.
I don’t know, its probably true as theres monks that can raise their body temperatures so high that they can literally evaporate soaked wet towels placed over their backs in freezi ng conditions which would kill a normal human. This isn’t supernatural or any shit either, its an issue of blood-flow that they somehow control.
Theres a good chance that n ot all people can do it. Infact theres a very good chance its a pretty freakish/rare ability.
Theres also a person who claims they can block out pain. Hooking them up to machine and crushing them between two beds of spikes seems to confirm the result. He only started panicing when he was smothering to death, when he should have been panicking from pain a lot sooner. But no, his heart-beat was as steady as you or I taking a stroll.
Once again i doubt this is some shit that we can just ‘tap’ into, infact i’m sure, beecause many people train to resist pain for years and years and years and still don’t. These people are probably genetic freaks to some degree.
You’re right Cyrene. Torture works. I don’t know why people keep trying to change the nature of war. It’s one of the few things that either has to be done a certain way, or is destined to fail. If you don’t kill the women and children, and bomb the churches, and kill the professors and torture the ones who know what you need to know, then you really can’t win. Americans are way too soft.
Torture does not work. Interrogation works. Sometimes turning up the heat in interrogation works. Most of the time when people are tortured, what you and I think of when we talk about torture, is not to get information. It’s just brutality. Most torture throughout the ages pretty much destroyed the human body and was meant to get you to cede a point before they killed you (I’m a witch, The King is my sovereign, Less Filling etc etc) What we debate about now (Waterboarding, Sleep Deprivation, humiliation) is more psychological and intended to extract information. The fact that we use these same techniques to train our own pilots (1 million dollar training tab invested in these guys and gals) leads one to believe that they are not intended to destroy someone.
Still it isn’t the waterboarding that does the job, its the interrogator. There is a science to that stuff and simply brutalizing someone does not produce intel.
Torture is an excellent political tool and is justified only in maintaining communist rule. No other political ends can be justified in using torture.
When Mao’s peasant revolution was in progress in China, landlords were given the opportunity to submit to authority and relinquish their property to the state. When they did not do so, Mao would stage horrible displays of torture in front of the public. This worked wonderfully in deterring other landlords from resisting authority.
Torturing Iraqi soldiers for information is not justified, because such torture is to the advantage of the capitalist institutions, which in themselves are inadvertent forms of economic torture.
Alot of the time torture these days is used for confessions. To be honest, most innocent people would confess to stop the torture. So its not very usefull there. In relation to getting specific information it might work, but again if the person is innocent they would say something anyway, just to get the torture to stop for a while. In doing so you would waste alot of reasources going off on wild goose chases
The problem with torture is that the torturer will walk away from the torture with the information they wanted to hear, regardless of the matter of fact. Unless…at some point in the torture, the torturer tortures the torturee into revealing whether they were just telling the torturer what they wanted to hear. But even this tact will run into the same problem, unless…ad infinitum
